Yes, yes; and again, yes!

At the moment I'm working on an old (1999), but interesting, paper by Michel Treisman of Oxford - "The Perception of Time: Philosophical Views and Psychological Evidence" - Treisman is arguing from precisely the kind of evidence Peter's evoking here.

Similarly, I think Craig Callender's "The Common Now" provides an excellent illustration of the way evidence from psychological studies can be integrated with philosophical and physical evidence - http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/ccallender/Papers/The%20Common%20Now.pdf

Of course, we shouldn't forget the background debate - should we include "scientific evidence" when doing metaphysics? Katherine Hawley gives an interesting view on the question (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~kjh5/OnlinePapers/ScienceAsAGuideToMetaphysics.pdf); otherwise, the question of scientific naturalism and metaphysics has been under discussion at https://www.researchgate.net/group/9abab896aaab494830f65c58c232e6da/

Good one on Hawley's paper.

She's an extremely charming person, too!

While I can't claim to be a Neuro-Scientist, or a Neuro-psychologist, I am working on a Cognitive Architecture that causes me to question some dearly held philosophical beliefs, and even some psychological pedagogy that was based on the concept of a central processor, or even a Global Workspace.

My work is based on a slightly different approach to constraints, where I assume the chaotic nature of stimuli, within the brain, and Constrain the claims that it can be easily overcome in a single step. This approach, brings out the essential need for more tolerance of uncertainty in philosophy (In the sense of tolerating complexity and chaotic inputs, not necessarily in tolerating poor thinking.) By recognizing the constraints upon neurons, and looking for the mechanisms whereby they overcome uncertainty, I have found a storybook model, that might help explain the nature of the Brain, and why it is built the way it is.

Whether it will stand up to philosophical scrutiny, I kind of doubt, but then, what does?

"Whether it will stand up to philosophical scrutiny, I kind of doubt, but then, what does?"

It does, Graeme - and I think we should seriously consider working together. I posted the following elsewhere - it's a bit long (but I AM a philosopher, so what do you expect?), but the problem of underdetermination is such that we cannot even be certain about the contents of our own experiences - as I remark, I haven't even got any "proof" that I have first-person experiences. This is due to the distinction between "public" and "private" language use, and to the iscrutability of any reference to "this" experience....

"As we're talking about "the problem of mind", we should perhaps clarify what the problem actually is - or rather, what the problems are.

Firstly, there is the problem of first-person experience, awareness, and self-identity. To cut a long story short, the problem here is that the "mind" is a black box which happens to have a beetle in it... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Wittgenstein.27s_beetle, in the unlikely case that you've forgotten)

The "Mary's room" thought experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_Room) shows that however complete our theoretical accounts of the pathways between input and output, we sill can't "display our beetle". Nonetheless, and according to what would seem to be our deepest philosophical intuitions, the evidence for our first-person experience is the most direct evidence we can possibly have: the experience of having an experience is tautologous (and distinct from the experience of ***reflecting on*** having an experience). The tautology of "experiencing experience" is unsurprising, as such experience is supposedly pre-linguistic – if we try and talk about it, we're reduced to saying things like "it's that experience I'm having right now while I'm having the experience of writing this", which reintroduces the problem of "inscrutable token reflexives" we mentioned elsewhere.

Given that our general talk about experience provides a lot of scope for the expression of "individual perspective", and that it is generally held that "there is such a thing as" first-person experience, I can feel justified in accepting the "evidence" of my "experience of having experience" as substantiating my belief that my experience is "first-person experience".

We can see here that the problem is not so much one of "having an experience", but is rather a problem of knowing "which" experience we're having. Even my identification of my first-person experience as being "first-person experience" depends on the evidence I have that the term "first-person experience" can be applied to "this experience". Mary's Room is interesting above all because it holds that there is a non-physical property – a quale or something like that – that can only be "known" in experience. It contrasts what we can know ***about*** some quality with having direct "experience of" that quality – that is, it contrasts "knowledge" with "acquaintance". Before turning to the "pure quale" of the classic Mary's Room, we should perhaps reflect on the difference between "knowing all about" and "being acquainted with" when the expressions are applied to physical objects or persons. We could imagine that Mary could "learn all about", say, Nicolas Sarkozy to such a degree that she could even recognise his odour, the precise feel of his skin etc. : any form of learning requires ostension, and the different sensations could (imaginably) be reconstituted virtually and presented to Mary (and this reminds us that, whatever her experience of colour, Mary is entirely habituated to identifying sensory impressions in general). If Mary possessed "all the information" about Nicolas Sarkozy, including acquaintance with his odour, the feel of his skin etc. , we could say that her experience of actually meeting Nicolas Sarkozy would be an "integration" of this information – and we would imagine that the information received "in the flesh" would be compared to memory in such a way as to suggest that to Mary that she was most probably in the presence of Nicolas Sarkozy. The "so this is what Nicolas Sarkozy 's really like" is not comparable to "so this is what "red" is really like", as we can imagine that there are no "previously unknown sensory impressions" involved – what is "new to Mary" is the experience of the ***integration*** of the various "known" sensory impressions into a single 'perceived state of affairs'. The "contents of experience" is in the integration, rather than in the sensory impressions themselves – and we would seem to be talking about "the experience of having an experience" (that of "meeting Nicolas Sarkozy") rather than "the experience of Nicolas Sarkozy".

Turning to the problem of sense impressions themselves, I'd say that when Mary sees the colour red for the first time, her experience IS a source of "new physical information" - it gives Mary information concerning the stimulation of Mary's sensory apparatus. In many ways, the encyclopaedic information Mary possesses concerning "colour" is entirely theoretical. Firstly, the optical, physiological and psychological descriptions would be given as universally-quantified conditionals, as would much of the "connotative content" ("red is usually associated with danger" etc.). Secondly, her knowledge of literary and vernacular uses of the term would develop her knowledge of the criteria of justification for believing that some sensation corresponds to "red". I'd hold that Mary's "knowledge" concerns the use and general sense of the TERM "red", and can generally be expressed by universally quantified conditionals having the form "if any thing is red, then that thing X" (where "X" can be replaced by any predicate expressing some correlate or connotation of some thing's being red).

It would be begging the question to say that, despite her exhaustive knowledge, Mary has no acquaintance with the "referent" of the term red, but we can perhaps hold that she has no acquaintance with any physical instantiation of the property of "being red". If – and this is a big if – she could actually "recognise" red on first seeing some red thing, then she would know a lot about the "contents of her sensory impression". But the real question is whether her pre-experiential "knowledge" would actually allow her to decide whether some perceived thing is red. We can accept that she would be reasonably competent in terms of "object recognition" – if her knowledge is exhaustive, we would expect that she has full acquaintance with monochrome representations of "red objects", including three-dimensional representations; so the question is not whether she would recognise some object, but whether she would recognise some object as "being red'".

For my own part, I feel that however exhaustive her (largely linguistic) knowledge of "red" might be, Mary would know ABOUT "red", but would not "know red" – she could at best make inferences about the phenomena she perceives, along the lines of "that thing looks like the black-and-white representations of fire engines that I have see, and fire engines are red; therefore, the "colour" of that object is probably red". From such an initial inferences, she could compare the sensory impression with impressions of other objects having a similar "chromatic intensity" (post-boxes, boiled lobsters, the necks of fundamentalists…) and verify that these, too, are generally held to be "red".

This is, of course, a model of the process, rather than a description of "what's going on" – as I said before, however we turn the problem, the "mind" is a black box. As far as *awareness* is concerned, the problem of mind is the problem of "private experience" - it comes down to the problem of the inscrutability of the reference of the token-reflexive when I say to myself "I'm having THIS experience". Whatever the status of the contents of some experience – whether "there are" or "there are not" qualia – we can only identify the experience as "being of some red thing" by recourse to a series of beliefs that substantiate such an identification.. I need not point out that such beliefs are generally determined by our language – by "our way of talking about the world", even when such "talk" is internal and reflexive. Once again, and over and above the insurmountable problem of what one could call "autophenomenological private use of public language", there would seem to be a certain possibility of indetermination, even in our "internal discourse" about our phenomenal experience.

Time and again in our discussions we return to a seemingly irreducible dichotomy: we know that we inhabit THIS world, but we can't be certain WHICH world "this world" is. Of course, our language integrates the "problem of indetermination" by *redundancy* (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_%28linguistics%29) - the majority of our constructions give more information than is strictly (logically) required by the "deep sense" of the expression. Thus, in an utterance such as "I'm going to London tomorrow" where the speaker's intention is to give information about his future activity, the "am going" is not strictly necessary to position the activity in the future – "I go to London tomorrow" would provide more or less the same declarative content.

Of course, the pragmatics of utterance is far more complex than that – the precise choice of form is largely determined by the speaker's particular perspective, and the grammatical distinctions made by a competent speaker between use of the simple and the progressive forms of "go" would be taken by a competent auditor to reflect this perspective. The more we share assumptions about the world, the more finely we can determine the "best-candidate" state of affairs to which our interlocutor is alluding – and this is where the "second problem of mind" comes in: what evidence do we have for "other minds"? Determining what state of affairs our interlocutor is alluding to is not a matter of "accessing that particular state of affairs" – it is rather a matter of deciding whether the state of affairs to which he is alluding corresponds to some state of affairs which IS accessible to us.

***

The other "problem of mind" concerns the apparent non-physical cause of physical action; this "problem" is best dealt with by a more general criticism of the notion of "causation".

Well to put my foot in it, We should separate the concept of Attribution of Agency from Cause.

When we say "I did this" we are first attributing agency to ourselves, then linking that agency to an event.

When we say "I Caused this" we are first creating a Cause-effect linkage, and mapping it between the Agent and the event.

They are not the same thing. I maintain that both are meta-cognitive signals created by the brain, but that they are not the same signal, because Cause does not always have the connotation of Agency.

The Ball bounced and knocked the marble off the table, attributes cause to the Ball, and effect (knocking the marble off the table) to the marble. But it doesn't denote agency, in that there is no mention of the cause of the ball bouncing.

I knocked the marble of the table, attributes agency but said nothing about the cause, (Bouncing the ball) that caused the effect (knocking the marble off the table).

The brain has the ability to link two events that are close in time, and to relink it's memories so that the two events form cause-effect tuples, even if evidence exists that the effect happened before the cause. This is necessary because of delays in the stimuli and its ability to reach the brain to be part of our experience. We link the experience of the reflexive "Knee Jerk Reaction" to being hit upon the knee by the reflex hammer, even though the reflex caused the knee jerk to happen before the signal reaches our brain that our knee has been tapped with the hammer. In our "Experience" there is a causal effect between the hammer and the knee jerk, even though the signals arrived at different times, and in a scrambled order. The only way that the brain can keep this straight, is if it confabulates the log of the events so that the experience came before the knee jerk, thus explaining the Cause and effect relationship, and to do this it must rearrange the sequence of events in memory.

It can probably do this because it knows the relative signal propagation times for each internal signal from a particular location, and maps those propagation delays into its memory of the event.

The problem with causation is that it appears to be as "real" as the luminiferous ether - "cause and effect" is a matter of narrative space rather than of spacetime.

Agency is a matter of interpreting physical events in the light of "intention" - and intentions are ascribed (that is, they are "interpretations" or "theories of" certain kinds of physical event.

In a classical analysis of agency, we use a dyadic predication such that, for any action y, there is some agent x such that xRy (or R). However, if we base the analysis on events, we have an event y such that x is a F and such that x is by y (the agent becomes a quality of the action, just like any other form of adverbial modification). The event is real, but the agent becomes a "property" of the event.

The quantification over events I'm using here is basically due to Davidson, but can certainly be given a fuller analysis than Davidson's model provides.

Well we could define the experience of causation as anything that triggers the "Cause" signal in relation to an effect. However this presupposes that we could detect the cause signal and predict what elements will trigger the "Cause" signal.

This is just like saying the experience of time, is anything that triggers the "time is passing" signal, or saying that the experience of self is anything that triggers the "Self" signal. Until we cn detect the actual signals, we can't test to see which elements trigger them, so the result, is more a matter of narrative, than a matter of definition.

The meta-cognitive "Self" signal is not part of your diadic relationship, but it is part of self-knowledge because it links the feeling of self, to actions.

Graeme and David,

I was under the distinct impression that this site concerned "scientific concepts" and therefore explanatory paradigms of "mind" which are corrigible to empirical research. Hypotheses about the mental, including the unconscious processes referred to in psychoanalytic theory and cognitive neuroscience, need to be both testable and subject to Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. I have already dealt with the vacuousness of radical behaviourism and eliminative materialism.

Some postings which address the published contributions in such research fields as neuropsychoanalysis and psychoneuroimmunology might be a useful counterpoint to so much purely philosophical rambling which is more worthy of mediaeval scholastics than contemporary scientists and philosophers. Where is Occam's razor with such lengthy dissertations about the nature of "mind" and apparently anaphylactic reactions to empiricism?

The neural substrate of both conscious and unconscious mental processes is being explored in neuropsychoanalysis with the Pfister Prize being awarded for the discovery of "mirror neurons". While robust predictions derived from psychoanalytic theory have been confirmed in empirical research into the role of unconscious mental factors in morbidity and outcome in such diseases as cancer and HIV/AIDS. Such research, published in peer-reviewed journals has become part of a multifactorial and biopsychosocial model of disease which extends beyond merely correlational studies and exhibits a sophisticated grasp of causality.

Many speculative philosophical contributions still seem to be stuck in the Cartesian split with respect to the conceptualization of the psychophysical or mind/brain/body relationship. The notions of complementarity and dual aspect theories of mind are frequently not considered in spite of multiple publications, for instance, by such neuroscientists as Pribram on "Consciousness Re-Assessed" (2004) and physicist/philosophers including Patrick Heelan (2004)and Basil Hiley (2005). Hiley addresses the issue of how mind construed as active information might act upon matter without violating the conservation of energy law.

There is an enormous difference between the philosophy of science and philosophy without science which remains "mindless"!

Yes I have noticed a distinct re-emergence of the Dualist fallacy, only couched in the terms of Dark Matter, Phonemes, or Biophotons. My own work suggests that the brain is a recursive structure, feeding back into itself instead of linking to a metaphysical Theater of the mind. The twin networks that pass along the center-line parallel to the Medial surface of the two hemispheres, link to the ACC, which is known for selection, not for projection. I take this to mean that Attention suppresses the signals from the neurons, in order to control access between epochs of attention and that the rich feedback to Laminae I is the route by which connections between cerebral areas are achieved. If I am right about the nature of implicit memory, we don't even really access memory as much as access information about memory.

"Where is Occam's razor with such lengthy dissertations about the nature of "mind" and apparently anaphylactic reactions to empiricism?"

To which dissertations are you referring, Peter?