Answering your third question: "How can the brain scan tell us something That is independent of a third person (the interpreter) ?". I believe this is impossible for human being, from my point of view dear Martin,  as constructionist, understanding perceptions as  interaction acts,  entangled in beliefs and interpretations of the people. Seeing purity of form or color ? What a difficult question. I hope cognitivists and philosophers will take a part in the discussion.

Dear Beata,

“Independent of a third person”: I think you are right. It is not possible without any interpretation. What I had in mind was that one day we might speak that “crazy color-language”. In that (irrealistic) case we would throw the interpreter out of the game – after a long period of practicing the language. - Would you agree? I can think of a counter argument....

Dear Martin,

I'm not so sure if partners of interactions would be satisfied with the reductions of the meanings in "crazy color-language".  For example  blue has different meaning  to both.  Besides there are many  blue colors (ex. dark marine blue, cobalt, azure, turquoise blue, aquamarine blue) recognized by people and associated  with different meanings.   However, teoretically speaking,  practicing such communication game of colors, would possibly lead to deeper understanding of both partners of interaction. (I have in mind pictograms of colors as communication media with some persons with emotional-behavioral  or multiple disabilities).

Dear Beata,

1. Exactly! That’s what I mean. The partners in that CCL (“crazy color-language”) would not be satisfied. They couldn’t be! – But would they realize their situation from the beginning?

2. You suggest a possibly deeper understanding of interaction in communication: that could be interesting for special traits in communication. I haven’t thought about that before. Sounds interesting.

3. Third person/interpreter: The counter argument that I mentioned above could be that in this case, as speakers of the color code-language we ourselves would become the interpreters of ourselves. This could make it that we become unsure where Laos is located or what monkeys really are…

Dear Martin,

My conclusion to the 3rd. point is, that healthy social world need living social mirror and partners as interpreters. I have imagined your conclusion on the paranoid schizophrenia ground (I write casy study, about person with delusions, since a few days).  I agree with you, being one and only one interpreter for self, can lead for years to many doubts of Laos or monkeys' nature.

Quite interesting question. Through brain scanning, only physical and chemical characteristics can be interpreted but certainly not the thoughts in the brain.

Dear Beata,

I’ll write a few words about diseases below. My question was not about them; I will explain later. – But we might say that we all as “healthy” people would get these problems…

Dear Cecilia,

You are saying that we are not too sure, that the objects exist. That goes in direction of Kant. I agree. Please give me a bit more time.Our CCL- problem would only worsen this already existing problem. 

Color-code:

There is a detail that can make the problem become even more complicated. As far as I remember there are two words in Russian for Blue and Dark-blue that are not familiar to each other. No hint that the one is a “variety” of the other. I don’t want to start a “Whorf-discussion” here. What is interesting is the different grouping of shades. Not a trivial problem. 

But this problem exists already. It is not new for our CCL.

Dear Martin,

I know, that your logical puzzle was interesting question and  theoretical game. I tried to ground it the "living" contexts of my current professional reality. Your last conclusion of self-interpreters loosing understanding of Laos and monkeys, make sense in such contexts.

Dear Asmat,

I agree that physical and chemical characteristics are the only things that can be detected in a brain scan. But they are sometimes interpreted in a way that suggests that researchers can kind of read thoughts. This is not contested here in principle. What is contested is, that this will lead to a better understanding.

Dear Beata,

I am defending a view that our body and our conscious and unconscious experiences are what counts. They are the base. So we’re on the same page.

Why my question is not about diseases:

Diseases that are made visible in the brain scan are detected in deviating structures of the hardware. In contrast to that my question is about the semantics “running” on that hardware. It is not a problem to interpret a diverging structure as correlated to a disease as long as the disease is not defined through that divergence.

But in our case of thought-encoded-by-color in a system of colors in the scan, the meanings would have to be defined by the colors and not by other symptoms such as, say, spasms.

In the end we’ll be left alone with the colors.

Dear Cecilia,

I hope our little game can show some features of our living and functioning language that the “color-language” doesn’t have and will not be able to develop in use.

That’s an interesting thought of yours, that we are aware of some things only by their dynamic. Accordingly we find in our language expressions that are specifically designed for changes. The question would then be if we could repair our CCL by bolstering it with a vocabulary for changes?

Dear Beata, Dear all,

This question is not only a logical puzzle. – it is about a field of research with an extraordinary financial input.

Thank you for taking part in this discussion. 

Dear Cecilia,

your 2007 paper –is it “Evocation of the Head and Brain in Old Vaulted Buildings“?

Your proposal opens a new dimension for our discussion not only in the direction of tracking dynamic development in structures that become visible only in movement – but also in the direction of – simply said – more data. I would not rule out the possibility that my “pessimistic view” can be comforted by more data.

Dear Cecilia,

You shall never feel bad for answering a question of mine! I am not experienced in brain scans apart from some literature for non-medical purposes. – I hardly can count how often I made a commentary on items that were not quite “under my control”.

I agree that the world of art is an unforeseeable source of possible new insights for us.

Dear Martin,

So this is ground for serious research not just puzzle. Seems so strange to me, but refreshing. Good luck with the project.

I do not understand how you can develop a CCL because the agents that will participate in this game need to form a generally accepted semantics for this. Unless there exists already one such language this is impossible. May be we can conjecture an impossibility criteria  for this problem.

Dear Anup,

This is a serious objection. How to develop such an “artificial” language that is good for daily use. Apart from being highly theoretical, it might be done by evolving step by step together with an evolving new behavior.

Let me tell you that I don’t find the idea comfortable. It’s all about refuting the whole thing. But let’s try and examine the possibilities.

Historical remark: there have been attempts to establish naturalized languages. The philosopher Patricia Churchland, among others, wrote about it and believed it to be possible.

I understand your post to mean that we will lose the contact to our world. This is exactly what I mean. So the CCL is impossible? – My concern goes a bit beyond that. But this sounds absurd: a kind of CCL might work one day, and if, we might not realize it.

Criteria for impossibility: interesting. Let me think about it. 

                 Meditation and other "neurally inspired behavioral interventions" can help people tweak their own emotions in search of happier, more productive lives. The brain circuitry that underlies emotion. The empirically based "emotional styles" that define our emotional makeup. The brain plasticity suggests that interventions like meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy can allow people to change their emotional styles by changing the very brain circuits that govern them.

                 The cognitive psychologists who were beginning to hold sway at that time regarded emotion as just something that interrupts cognition. Emotion was very much regarded as a primitive kind of psychological process. I think that regarding it in that way kept it in the "basement of the brain," so to speak. Sticking with resilience again, there is a method of meditation that is very popular called mindfulness meditation.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/brains.aspx

Dear Martin,

I understand your concern. Possibly we can design one such language recursively starting from a  rudimentary kernel. However this kernel needs to be a generally accepted axiom and perhaps this will also justify my claim for impossibility when we don't accept such an axiom. Identification of the required "minimum" axiom and the protocol for getting this accepted by all could be an interesting exercise. Please correct me if I am wrong. 

Regards

Dear Anup,

There have been attempts to establish so-called extensional languages.

I spare us the mathematical details. It is about talking of sets instead of opinions, beliefs, assumptions, memories etc. (this description is not quite correct, but sufficient for our purposes here).

Consider this dialogue:

“How are you?”

“70 % of the people in my position would take an aspirin, 35% would take…. 22% would avoid…. 12% would….”.

Some may find it funny to talk like that, but it is not only a joke. If the speaker is a physician, a colleague will immediately determine his situation.

Something else is no joke: take a look at our RG score! What else is it than trying to establish an extensional code that is supposed to display an objective scenario. Another example is our daily newspaper, full of statistics. Sooner or later we find ourselves trying to find out where our place is among the other members of our society. All this is kind of “extensional” thinking.

Dear Gopinath.

A very interesting link. And a remarkable new aspect that we can influence our brains by meditation and perhaps also by a kind of “re-input”. It don’t know much about it, but I think it could be a mighty tool. It takes much responsibility to use it.

Dear Friends,

I realized that someone edited my question. It is better English now, as far as I see. Thank you. Anyway I was astonished that someone else can change something in the texts of others.

It is a difficult question. Maybe an appropriate scan could reveal too much, maybe could be another piece of noise. It depends on the way that brain works (unknown or partially known) and to the traces which are left behind such a work. Personally I doubt a lot that we really know our brain.

Actually there was one wrong premise in the original question, that we would not be able to tell if a statement is a lie or not. It is easier to tell when a statement is a lie using MRI than to tell if a fact is true, the difference is that lies are using a different part of the brain than facts. There is still no way to check the consistency of facts but outright lies, will be detectable because they involve other areas of the brain.

It is going to be much more difficult to segregate out a fact like it "Rains in Laos" than to tell if the person personally believes the fact.

Dear Martin Schulz,

Nothing to worry. It is the editor team. They usually check and edit the questions if necessary to improve the language of the questions.

Dear Martin,

It happens that RG staff corrects topics or suggests changes. RG as digital community is constantly monitored  and even censored. Some of authors who asked thorny questions,  were punished by exclusion  from RG and their accounts were closed  This is the reality.  RG usually send e-mails about editorial corrections. Corrections rather improve the quality.

Dear friends,

It’s good to see that nobody has been excluded. :).

Dear Graeme,

I hoped for criticisms like yours. This may give the question a new twist. But before, let’s consider the consequences of what you said. Actually my words were

“it won’t tell us whether the sentence is true”. (see above)

– Not what the person believes, because I guess e.g. a lie detector will not be wrong in more than 50% of the cases. So it wouldn’t be spectacular that we can tell whether the person believes it. (Temperature, brain region, etc. ) - What I had in mind was the truth of the sentence, i.e. a real relation to the outer world. A person may believe what s/he wants.

I think we both agree on this point.

To make it short, without the dimension of truth as a relation to the outer world the whole story might become circular. If my conjecture is right, it must become circular, the longer a “color language” CCL is used.

That’s bad for the reference first – we can’t be sure anymore that “tree” refers to trees. But it might turn out sometimes and misunderstandings can be repaired. Then, later on the story gets worse:

After a while the meanings of our words will change (because of changed habits of use). Then nothing can be detected anymore.

Dear Demetris,

Sometimes what seems to be noise at the beginning can later be decoded. So it may be only at first sight that it “shows too much” (?). Anyway the images provided by the scan seem a bit “simplistic” to me.

Martin, yes we agree that we can't tell the ultimate truth of a fact, just if the person is intentionally lying.

But this is nothing new, an MRI is overkill for a lie detector anyway.

What is important is that you can detect the willingness to mislead.

Other techniques of lie detection can be developed from that simple fact.

Besides there are still all the legal hassles of getting the right to use lie detection equipment in court.

Graeme,

The willingness to mislead is indeed a new aspect that was not considered in my question. But does it make a difference in relation to the problem? I think it will only delay the problem:

1. You realize that the person is willing to tell you a lie about Laos.

2. You won’t be sure that s/he is thinking of Laos – the same Laos you are having in mind in that moment.

I guess in most cases there will be an interview with the test person before the test in order to exclude misunderstandings like that. But when the interviewer has experiences with brain scans, he might be “infected” with shifted meanings as well. That’s where the devil comes into play.

We don’t have lie detectors in criminal proceedings in Germany and as far as I see it, they are not to come.

Yes Martin, as you say just knowing that someone is willing to mislead speaks against their verification but doesn't say what they are misleading about. It could be something that is innocuous or something critical and there is no way to tell.

The situation becomes more complicated if the misleading information is "Byzantine" in nature that is that is the intention is not consistent.

Reference:

Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, And Marshall Pease, “The Byzantine Generals Problem”, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1982, Pages 382-401.

Dear Martin,

"Let’s assume a “crazy” solution: that the problem might be avoided by establishing a “color code - language” (a kind of naturalized language) one day. Instead of saying “He’s angry” we might then say “He really got some blue regions.” - Why not switch to such kind of color code-language (CCL)?" Here we are assuming that the extensional semantics would facilitate decoding blue region as angry.  How can we get such association. What will be the procedure for this. So my question is is it the language design or the semantic uniqueness is the real problem.

Dear Martin:

Thank you for bringing this question to my attention.  Your initial statement points out to an important information provided by a brain scan whether or not the scanned person believes the statement to be true or if this person believe statement to be false and attempts to lie.

The interpreter must assess not only the accuracy of the statement but also interpret the sincerity of the statement.  For example, a colour deficient person may sincerely believe that a green object (say a tomato) is red.  

So, I agree with Martin.  A scan can detect sincerity as well the stress resulting from deceit, but it cannot establish the accuracy of a statement. 

Dear Martin,

Far as I know, brain scan techniques consist in measuring brain response (activities of brain regions) to stimuli (e.g. questions submitted to a subject).

Treated as a language, it is not far from the body language, which can be used by an experienced interpetator to assess feelings, sentiments or whether the observed subject is telling the truth during an interrogation (according to a book by ex FBI agent that I read a year ago).

Hence, brain scans can be interpreted according to a developed statistical model (resulting from experience) to assess what the subjects believes in or how they feel. However, the assessment can be compromised by non-standard response (behavior) caused by illness or training. On the other hand, salient non-standard brain response can indicate illenss condition.

Dear friends,

you contributed some new interesting points. I will respond to the individual posts.

Dear Anup,

1. Your indication of Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, And Marshall Pease, “The Byzantine Generals Problem” seems to hit the nail on the head. I will take some time to read it. I found it here:

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/resilience/lamport82.pdf

2. Your question of language design and uniqueness is decisive here. I am not sure whether a stable relation between “angry” and “blue region” could be established. If it were, it is my concern that our internal life would be impoverished and depleted. But this may be a problem even if the relation is not stable.

New language/old language:

Cecilia Lewis Kausel indicated the problem of dynamics. - “Some relationships are of course invisible and we don't notice them unless we study their dynamics”. – e.g. planets…

Our existing language has words for that e.g. being older. The interpretation of the brain scan will come to that point if it is not already there. There might be rules for the interpretation like “blue region in the neighborhood of yellow, followed by…” .

There is a related problem with so-called extrinsic properties e.g. being famous –  properties an object can only have because there are other objects. These aspects are traits of a functioning language. But these other objects do not attend in a situation, they are part of the learning history. What was learned is experiences (life history), reference and meaning. Mistakes will be corrected in shared situations by the language use of others (triangulation).

So we might reduce our question to the simple question if triangulation is possible for interpretations of the brain scan. I wonder if this reduction covers the whole problem. Actually it was already part of my concern, that the triangulation is what worsens the situation.

Why worsen? The interpreter may try to correct the test person by introducing a color code instead of shared experiences.The triangulation would not be between, say, mother, child and an apple but between machine, interpreter and test person.

Dear Francine,

It became clearer to me in the discussion with Graeme that we have to take sincerity into account. Anyway the willingness to mislead will not jeopardize the interpretation of the brain scan.

As to color blindness the brain scan might be a test that makes the examination of behavior become needless. If so, this is one more step away from our shared life as the base for our interior life. A reason to be alarmed.

Dear Piotr,

A very interesting aspect is statistics. I am inclined to believe that it is not impossible that we will have a color code langue (CCL) by the time. The path in this direction will be statistics. Even your example “the assessment can be compromised by non-standard response (behavior) caused by illness or training” could be solved by collecting more and more data. It is then exactly as you say: “On the other hand, salient non-standard brain response can indicate illenss condition.”

Dear Martin,

Could you please elaborate the last part of your answer that is triangulation. Though it may not be my cup of tea but I find the problem very interesting

Dear Anup,

Triangulation:

I had to laugh because it seems to play a central role in just the text you indicated to me.

As far as I see, triangulation is a central concept for psychologists and I am not competent to explain all the facets of the meaning in this field. I stumbled on the concept in the context of learning language behavior discussed by Donald Davidson and other philosophers who are no psychologists. I’ll try and give a short excerpt:

Meanings are no “tags” on the objects, they are learned in shared situations. The child sees an apple; the mother watches the child watching the apple. Then she starts to explain. The child then watches the mother, whether she is really referring to the apple and not to other things. This last point is crucial. Triangulation is interrupted when the brain scan comes into play. But there is the interpreter who learned with his mother, what an apple is, of course. - hopefully.

Martin, triangulation is why autism is such a curse, without triangulation the autism sufferer is confused by definitions having to do with indirect statements. Triangulation suffers in autism because the child does not make eye contact, and so can't tell whether or not the mother is referring to a specific thing.

Dear All, conscious episodes are instantiated in two cell networks, neuronal and glial. Bold fMRI captures the activity of both (see my papers in the links below). On the one hand, kinds of cognitive content correlate with activation of specific brain regions, as shown by Bold fMRI. Therefore, it is possible to know what kind of thought a person is thinking by looking at the fMRI register. On the other hand, according to my hypotheses the feeling associated to the cognitive content is instantiated in amplitude-modulated brain waves that do not appear in the fMRI register. Therefore, it is not possible to know what a person is feeling by looking at the fMRI. EEG affords a better temporal resolution and in principle would allow 3rd person perspective detection of what a person is feeling. However, there are technical and theoretical limitations in the analysis of the EEG register that prevent us from doing so at this moment.

Article Conceptual Spaces and Consciousness: Integrating cognitive a...

Article Astrocytes and Human Cognition: Modeling information integra...

Article On the role of Synchrony for neuron-astrocyte interactions a...

Triangulation is not sufficient to verify the veracity of a statement. Both the interpreter and the scanned person may believe a statement to be true, based on their senses, when in fact it is false. The geocentric universe is an example of a falacy that perdured for hundreds if not thousands of years. (Even nowadays, falacies are perpetuated on the Internet.  As I remind my students, because it says so on Wikipedia doesn't make it so.)

The limitations of human knowledge as well as the capacities of technology as described by Alfredo means that the outer world must always be considered when regarding the truth of a sentence and sincerity of communication.

Dear Francine, I actually think that truth of a sentence cannot be verified by a completely objective procedure, because the researcher herself is involved in a communication network and the possibility of being objective depends on inter-subjective agreement. We think that geocentrism is false because our current intersubjective agreement is for heliocentrism, but the latter can be false from the perspective of conscious agents living in other galaxies. 

Dear Alfredo,

Thank you for the interesting papers of yours. I will take more time to read everything. My first reaction is that our question might be reformulated in the sense of the distinction phenomenology/ heterophenomenology.

The concept of a conceptual space may be helpful for the question whether a naturalized language can be developed in the future. - I was trying to avoid to go into details of emotions and affects. I wanted to remain on a more general level of reference and meaning. Do you think it is necessary to take emotions into account? Our discussion had come to the point that truthfulness is not relevant to determine the content. Of course I do not mean that we can think of anything without a certain kind of “what it’s like” to be thinking of it.

There is an interesting aspect in your post: “conscious episodes are instantiated in two cell networks, neuronal and glial.” – remaining on a very general level, I would like to ask if my assumption is right, that to have “two systems running” is a help to get an objective basis. This is only a tentative thought.

I have heard about many waves that a human brain radiates. Probably in the future we will have the Physics that is needed in order to reveal more areas of it. But I still believe that till now the only improvement I have seen was the google eye glasses where you can take a photo by winking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass

Dear Martin,

In response to your personal query, I will try to respond. The first thing I would say is that this is a remarkably subtle and difficult question.

Then perhaps one could add that certain sorts of brain monitoring will do what you need. If a monkey looks at a square you can read off a square from its visual cortex activation pattern just because the cells retain a similar arrangement to the retinal cells that feed them. If you calibrate the monkeys brain with previous runs you just have a measuring instrument. But this is rather trivial and will not get us to being able to tell from a brain scan that there really are monkey s in Laos, or that Joyce Didonato did actually sing the top E flat sharp (uncharacteristically) when the man in the scan thought so. So the answer would seem to be that you can bypass the interpreter if you can calibrate well enough but that is going to be a matter of luck.

But I would be interested in deeper issues, as I think you are. This gets seriously complicated. The nearest thing I have written to something relevant is on my UCL webpage entitled 'Response to Poeppel and Embick'. The nub of the matter is that we have more or less no idea of the 'neural correlates of truth'. You can tell if someone is thinking about playing tennis but as far as I know you cannot tell if someone is thinking about something they believe to be the case (Graeme's comments noted and agreed with).

The next point I come to, which is in the Poeppel and Embick essay, is that I do not think that our thoughts are 'propositional'. We do not think about the senstence 'there are monkeys in Laos' unless we are on a creative writing or linguistics course. We experience a 'scenario' of monkeys in Laos in  a believing ( or nn-believing) way perhaps. I am fairly sure that all individual signals in the brain (essentially action potentials or cell firings) are propositional but that when these are integrated to form a thought the result is not propositional, yet it will form the basis for a further signal that IS propositional. The reasoning behind this takes about twenty pages so not for here. But suffice to say that I am wondering if the way you have set up the question may involve some false premises about where propositionality comes in to thinking (just my view). On the other hand it goes to the heart of an issue completely ignored by neuroscience - the biological basis of truth. I take Leibniz's view of truth - it is a comparison of a predicate with a subject that entails that predicate, so it is always a relation of congruence. Where that occurs in brains as far as I know nobody has bothered to ask.

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your very interesting answer. I started to read your "Response to Poeppel and Embick" and I will take more time for that. Thanks again!

Best,

-Martin.

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for joining the thread and for your detailed answer that leads to new considerations. I spent a couple of fascinating hours reading your interesting text “Response to Poeppel and Embick” twice and making some annotations.

Let me first try to name some aspects of our discussion that can also be found in your text:

A. The possibility to bypass the interpreter by calibrating

B. The detection of dissent or assent on the part of the test person

C. Going away from the model of propositional thoughts.

D. Leibniz’s view of truth as (I quote from your post) ” comparison of a predicate with a subject that entails that predicate, so it is always a relation of congruence.”

I know almost nothing about the neurobiological backgrounds of the functioning brain so I cannot take part in the discussion about it. – As far as I understand your paper “Response to Poeppel and Embick” a decisive trait of a signal that is to carry propositional content or an equivalent of it is a predicative component that will not only speak of Jennifer Aniston but of “JA plays role x” against the background of “JA plays role y”

I try to give here some very interesting points of yours in “depeche mode” – (not always in your wording, but in the sequence they appear in the text, my annotations in brackets): - co-arriving input instead of “symbols in the brain” – no signals that refer to objects without a predicative component (Strawson would say “no bare particulars”) – synchronizing:( there seems to be something like that in the assumption of Arnold Trehubs “Evolutions Gift”, p 2. when it is about to explain the processing of forms, shapes, motion and other aspects as temporarily independent elements A. Trehub calls “sensory features”).

To go on with some quotes from your paper: “the only computational units in brains are cells” – (no groups of cells) – no inferences from premises in different places (separated machines) – no “distributed representation” – no “smeared out meaning” – “meaning can only be considered in terms of individual neuronal events” –

I would like to stress here the following quotes:

“…meaning-to should be to cells, rather than a ‘person’.” - ~ co-arrival of predicative signals is not itself propositional (not your wording) - “….calibrating the inference machine in the first place in infancy..”

I think this is already very much for our fellows here in the thread. When you find some important details missing, please tell us.

Let me now focus on

C. Going away from the model of propositional thoughts.

I finish here and open an new post, because this one is getting too long.

Let me focus on

C. Going away from the model of propositional thoughts.

J. Edwards: Quote: “My proposal is that most or all of these features depend, directly or indirectly, on one particular form of differentiation, a differentiation on the basis of pure sequence” Unquote.

Here comes my question: The differentiation on the basis of sequence has to be reconciled with your Leibnizian view- E.g. two scenarios: he is kissing her/he is not kissing her” – there is no reason to assume that one of both images (scenarios) needs more bits for a description – but the linguistic strings differ in length –

Let me ask you a quite provoking question: will your solution and your Leibnizian view make it necessary that the processing of language in the brain is a processing of scenarios? And more provoking: that it is a processing of scenarios that makes it become impossible to understand thinking as a way of linguistic processing? This is so just because we do not want to assume that the venues blow up when more bits enter. – Your ingenious solution was, as far as I understand it: no strings in the brain, no more bits when the predicate is part of the subject. I hope I excerpted you in a fair way.

When we think further in this direction, we might come to the conclusion that there should be nothing that corresponds to particles like “not”, “because” etc. These are not part of scenarios when we assume these scenarios to be something like “scenes”. – I am astonished that towards the end of your paper you are assuming strings (instead of pictures) after having banned them at the beginning of your text.

The more we adopt a Leibnizian view which seems very convincing to me when it is about the way the brain functions – the more we will have to explain a gap between the functioning of our brain and the functioning of our language as it is spoken by us.

Let’s put off a part of our discussion for a later post. E.g. the possibility that a Kant-Frege-view might be a better way to “spare bits” than a Leibnizian view: an object that falls under a concept rather than a subject, where the predicate is a part of this subject. The former might be a more promising way to “save bits”.

One last word: this discussion leads us away from my question about the brain scan because these scans are not so "fine-grained". 

Dear Martin,

I am not quite sure what your difficulty is here. Perhaps I should note that the statement about differentiating on pure sequence is about a putative Homo sapiens specific ability to log sensory inputs by position in a prolonged sequence, rather than just before and after, more or less following Tulving. The idea is that one of the things this allows is for language strings to be parsed. Once parsed the propositional content will be carried forward in the brain in such a way that individual spike signals have a full propositional meaning. It is likely that a language string will not give rise to a single spike with the propositional content of the string verbatim. Maybe 'he is kissing her' in a particular pragmatic context will lead to 3 signals (grossly simplifying) 1. X is Jack, 2. Y is Mary, 3. agency X>Y is kissing. Note that although these have to be laid out as strings in interpersonal communication languages, within the brain each proposition carrier is atomic. The neurobiology underneath this is going to be very complex, just as the  gate structure underlying the implementation of the simplest command in BASIC is, but I am trying to extract simple principles.

The idea then is that a thought is an integration of lots of signals each with a propositional content. It could be 1,2 and 3. It might seem that we are back to our original proposition of he is kissing her as our thought. However, 1,2, and 3 entail more than one proposition. They entail that two people exist. As I understand it once we have laid out the premises of a logical move it is only under very artificial circumstances that only one proposition arises as deductive conclusion. There is an intermediate step between premises and extraction of conclusion. This is the coming together of the premises in a way that makes them co-applicable. You can then extract one of many conclusions using a further operation. And in my model each time a 'scenario' is presented, and at any one time the same scenario will be presented thousands of times in different places in the brain, the presentation to a nerve cell will result in a process that leads to the output of a new propositional signal that is (hopefully) a valid conclusion. None of this involves strings since each presentation and extraction of conclusion is a single event. When we then want to talk about the conclusion to someone else we convert the signal into a pattern of motor activity that does take a sequential string form.

You say that towards the end of my essay I do make use of strings and I am not sure what that refers to. I certainly did not intend any inconsistency.

Dear Jonathan,

It was not my intention to find any inconsistencies in your paper. Instead I am grateful for your contribution that gave us new material for our discussion. Anyway, the spot I stumbled on was this (no page indicated, towards the end of your paper):

“Moreover, to indicate a scenario requires the signing to have significant structural complexity and, if not just a spatial scene, dynamic direction. Pictures might work but strings (my emphasis) of sounds or gestures clearly have major advantages.” - I understood this as a move away from the solution of pictures (what I called “scenes”, without “because”, “not” etc. as elements) back to strings.– Maybe I did not understand you correctly.

I’ll try to get Tulving 2002 but I will take more time to read it. Thank you again!

Regards,

Martin. 

I think the passage you quoted relates to speculation about the way language might have developed once the human brain acquired the ability to transduce sequences into single events and out again (to put it crudely). It may be that the context is not sufficiently well signposted in the essay - I wrote it in order to try to put down some ideas to see if they withstood the task (of being put down in writing) as much as anything.

One of the things that led me in this direction was Ruth Kempson's dynamic syntax. Her approach suggests that the propositions that tend to be the structural units of speech are not primarily truth evaluable units. They are units of informing or updating of knowledge. In a sense if you know they are true then there was no point in the other person saying them. Language is a way of updating each  other's knowledge base on a shared basis. So thoughts are not propositions so much as what you can end up with once you have taken in a proposition. Language structure is the structure needed to pass things around, not the structure needed to do something useful with the information once you have it. This may all be wrongheaded but it is not just me that thinks it. Unfortunately I cannot remember who else has written along these lines. The term scenario came to me but I discovered it has been used before in this context by someone well known. I am afraid I have moved away from that particular topic recently and have lost track.

Prof. Martin, I love your query, first of all. 

Second, I think I am on the way to mathematically prove the existence of the human soul, if you allow me to speak like that. Please read Anima  Est from On Religion (Amazon.com) or from ABC Research.

If I am right, and material proof is not missing, but it is hard to prove what is material, and therefore belongs to our personal world, to others, then there is always at least one unmentioned character in your fantasy of CT scan x description of a human being at a given point in time, and that is the human soul/spiritual world.

In Anima Est you will also see an argument as to why the subconscious of the person, who some claim can be accessed at night time, is not a good description of the person. First of all, a person is all the Freudian instances of its Psyche plus a few instances of the Jungian psyche,plus a few other instances, which is what I have called my own model of the human psyche (paper, perhaps it is here). I am sure that I am me when I am fully awake and in full freedom, without any criminal interference with my psyche/body/person. I am also absolutely sure that what my person is each moment in this world is what I am when fully awake and in that situation, never what a machine described I am in one of my organs at a given point in time. That is part of the chemistry of my body, I reckon, part of its physicality. The machine can see as much as the people who created it can see, more than likely: Whatever they value will be reflected there, and at least that. My being is not whatever they value, however. We seem to have a universal understanding about what a human being is and that does not coincide with the individual interpretation of the others, I reckon. 

These emotions you refer to do not necessarily affect my person or persona in the same way they affect another, I am sure. A psychopath may never feel fear or remorse, for instance. In this way, you may see that on a CT scan, but the feeling does not exist. The image in the CT can be attained, for instance, through introducing some physical or chemical elements in their brain. 

The image of the CT scan can also be adulterated on the way to you, just like any computer image, to make it all worse.

A person who has all those feelings may suffer from some physical problem and not have the normal colors in the CT scan, like in the right places or whatever, and that is not something we can tell these days. 

Besides, I may have defense mechanisms that are really powerful in place and change, for instance, love to hate by the time of the expression of that, this even in physical terms, so say my face. What counts is obviously what I show to others, not what you see inside. 

Dear Marcia

Thank you for your interesting answer. Do you think  a “minimum device” of elements is available to make sure that external and internal influences can be separated? I mean something like a characteristic pattern of three or four covariant elements while the covariance is terminated under certain conditions. The difficulty is that there might be  a scenario where element A is interpreted as an indicator for some X and that the termination of the covariance of A and B at the same time is interpreted as the same X. This is a very, very general question, of course.