[sciborg2]

From Neuroscientist Raymond Tallis - would be interesting to see him debate Bakker though I suspect Tallis likely gets challenges through Twitter from people who all have their own little pet theories.

What Neuroscience cannot tell Us about Ourselves

...Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but not how it results in a gaze that looks out. The inward causal path does not deliver your awareness of the glass as an item explicitly separate from you — as over there with respect to yourself, who is over here. This aspect of consciousness is known as intentionality (which is not to be confused with intentions). Intentionality designates the way that we are conscious of something, and that the contents of our consciousness are thus about something; and, in the case of human consciousness, that we are conscious of it as something other than ourselves. But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see. In other words, in intentionality we have something fundamental about consciousness that is left unexplained by the neurological account.

This claim refers to fully developed intentionality and not the kind of putative proto-intentionality that may be ascribed to non-human sentient creatures. Intentionality is utterly mysterious from a material standpoint. This is apparent first because intentionality points in the direction opposite to that of causality: the causal chain has a directionality in space-time pointing from the light wave bouncing off the object to the light wave hitting your visual cortex, whereas your perception of the object refers or points from you back to the object. The referential “pointing back” or “bounce back” is not “feedback” or reverse causation, since the causal arrow is located in physical space and time, whereas the intentional arrow is located in a field of concepts and awareness, a field which is not independent of but stands aside from physical space and time.

Ironically, by locating consciousness in particular parts of the material of the brain, neuroscientism actually underlines this mystery of intentionality, opening up a literal, physical space between conscious experiences and that which they are about...

[sciborg2]

Conscious Entities has a post suggesting free will might be found within the question of Intentionality.

Tallis takes a similar tact and expands this intuition into an essay:

How Can I Possibly Be Free?

Given our past discussions on the topic of free will and meaning I figured it might be of interest.

[Bolivar]

Thanks for the material sciborg. I really only read about this stuff on TPB so it's interesting to get another take on it.

[sciborg2]

Thanks for the material sciborg. I really only read about this stuff on TPB so it's interesting to get another take on it.

No problem -  It's interesting that Tallis is a philosopher and a neuroscientist, among other accomplishments that make him such a celebrated intellect, yet his views seem to buck the pessimistic trend.

Even more, he's an avowed atheist which makes his immaterialism all the more interesting in light of his two aforementioned professions.

In any case, here's another one of his articles on New Atlantis:

What Consciousness Is Not

'...The mystery of consciousness is a network of mysteries, touching on the mystery of ourselves, the mystery of the intrinsic nature (if any) of the non-conscious world, and the mystery of our knowledge of ourselves, the natural world, and the human world atop it. If there is such a thing as a First Philosophy, the philosophy of the conscious mind is it. It is the ground in which every other branch of philosophy takes root.

Considering the profound importance of these questions, Chalmers’s latest book, The Character of Consciousness, ultimately turns out to be a disappointing sequel, especially given his track record of taking on the conventional wisdom that the answers to these questions are likely to defy. But it is worth considering this book at some length; for given David Chalmers’s distinctive sobriety and thoughtfulness among a field of philosophers committed to reducing its chosen subject nearly out of existence, it is striking how much his work still falls prey to the same fundamental errors. The book will thus serve as an instructive case study not only in how befuddling are questions about the mind, but in how stuck is the philosophical rudder of the prominent thinkers who study it, and how adrift they have floated...'

That Chalmers has to work at rescuing the contents of consciousness from the physical world is the consequence of what we noted at the outset: his allocating too much to the easy problems, ceding to physicalism territory that belongs to irreducible phenomenal consciousness. This is illustrated by his assertion that “many mathematical or philosophical concepts have no obvious tie to phenomenal concepts,” which may be true, but does not mean that those concepts are not ultimately derived from an irreducibly phenomenal consciousness. Imagining that they could be generated by the physical world is the result of misplacing explicitness, so that our concepts are embedded in the material world.

This tendency can go far into madness: Chalmers explores the idea that microphysical processes are constituted by computational processes — in other words, that reality is actually just one giant computation. (This is sometimes called the “it-from-bit” doctrine.) This should not be surprising, since we have already seen how he believes that “information” can be found in electrons and rocks. Even so, it is interesting to note the mirror tendencies: Chalmers has great difficulty acknowledging the phenomenal consciousness of features of the mind that clearly exhibit it, but sees it with great ease in the entire material world, including the parts of it that are not even alive. If one tries to show how things that could not occur without consciousness (things like perception and cognition) actually can be explained as purely part of the material world, then one will have to see the physical world as infused with things like “information” — which in normal, non-technical parlance, requires consciousness and first-person awareness. While narrowing conscious awareness to encompass only qualia may seem like an opposite move from expanding the presence of consciousness to the entire material world, they are actually both consequences of doing away with the gap between the way we talk about physical events and the way we talk about experience. This failure to maintain the ordinary, intuitive distinctions between the physical and the mental undermines Chalmers’s project at its very heart.

For the seemingly inescapable failure of neural or materialist accounts of consciousness opens up a world of intellectual possibility. As Jerry Fodor has suggested about our attempts to understand consciousness, “The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling.... There is hardly anything we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us.” Indeed, this seems almost certain, given how inadequate we already know our scientific orthodoxies to be at accounting for the truths of consciousness. Just as rethinking the nature of light transformed our understanding of the physical world, shattering seemingly secure theories of physics to give rise to relativity theory and quantum mechanics, when we are finally able to account for the unfathomable depths of our own minds, it is sure to have profound and transformative consequences for our understanding of what kind of world we live in, and what manner of being we are.

[sciborg2]

Bringing Mind to Matter - Tallis' review of Nagel's Mind & Cosmos

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel has been responsible for two of the most important contributions to the philosophy of mind in the twentieth century. Both have made understanding how minds fit into an overwhelmingly mindless universe more difficult.

The first was in a famous 1974 paper that asked the question, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel pointed out that most philosophers of mind had somehow, unaccountably, overlooked the defining features of minds: namely, that they are conscious, living in a world of felt sensations. Nagel’s paper helped bring into the mainstream the idea that an organism is conscious only if “there is something it is like to be that organism” — that is to say, if the creature has its own experience of the world. Whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a pebble, it is perfectly obvious that being a human — at least, a particular human being at a particular time — is like something, indeed like many things.

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system. When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Some philosophers have accepted this conclusion, but have argued that Mary would not have additional knowledge. But this is really Nagel’s point: the new experiences Mary has are fundamentally different from objective knowledge. And this conclusion is closely connected with Nagel’s other key contribution to the philosophy of mind: the observation that the first-person view of the perceiving subject is incommensurate with the third-person, objective view of physical science. The one is a “view from here” — whatever here is for an experiencing subject — while the other aspires to be so free from the biases of subjectivity that it becomes a “view from nowhere.”

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, or by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

Because these gaps are found in the very starting principles of physical science, Nagel argues that the traditional mind-body problem “is not just a local problem, having to do with the relation between mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but ... it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” It is not, in other words, a problem simply of how to account for the presence of minds within bodies, but of minds within the fabric of inert physical existence itself: the mind-body problem must be recast as the mind-universe problem.

It is hardly surprising that the mind seems to elude physical explanation because, as Nagel points out, “the great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world.” Anyone who still imagines that there is life to the theory that the mind can be understood in purely physical terms will be cured of this delusion by reading the philosophical literature. While there are some who stick stubbornly to the assumption that consciousness is identical with neural events in certain parts of the brain, their views do not withstand close examination by even the most open-minded philosophers, like Australian professor David Chalmers.

[sciborg2]

Tallis on what he calls "Neuromania":

Increasingly, it is assumed that human beings are best understood in biological terms; that, notwithstanding the apparent differences between humans and their nearest animal kin, people are, at bottom, organisms; that individual persons are their brains, and that societies are best understood as collections of brains ("Neuromania"); and that we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now ("Darwinitis"); that our biological 'roots' explain our cultural 'leaves'. I will argue that we are not just our brains; rather we belong to a community of minds that has grown up over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from the other primates. The gap between our nearest animal kin and ourselves is too wide to read across from the one to the other.

RAYMOND TALLIS is Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford 1988-2006. He has 200 research publications in the neurology of old age (epilepsy and stroke) and neurological rehabilitation and is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He has also published fiction, three volumes of poetry, and 22 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism. He was awarded a DLitt, University of Hull, 1997; and LittD, University of Manchester 2002. He is an Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool. His most recent books include Aping Mankind. Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (2011 Acumen) and In Defence of Wonder (2012 Acumen). His forthcoming books include The Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur (2013 Acumen) and The Great Betrayal (OneWorld). He is also Chair of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying. In 2009, The Economist listed him as one of the world's leading polymaths.

[sciborg2]

"...If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, expect for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental. That such a purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic..."
-Nagel, Mind and Cosmos

[sciborg2]

Mind Change: Susan Greenfield has a big idea, but what is it?

A poorly researched diatribe on the ‘youth of today’, Susan Greenfield’s exploration of Mind Change reads like a Littlejohn column wrapped in the trappings of science

So at the end of the third chapter, she attempts an extraordinary gambit. “Mind Change”, she insists, is not a hypothesis but a whole new paradigm. As a consequence, it cannot be tested like a conventional theory; those calling for her to produce evidence are missing the point. Greenfield’s idea is beyond the realms of “proof”.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” she observes, “Thus it is impossible to demonstrate definitively that screen-based activities have no effect at all on the brain or behaviour, any more than I or anyone could prove definitively, to use an age-old example,” here it comes, “that there is not a teapot in orbit around Mars.”

So you can’t disprove the existence of Go… sorry, Mind Change, but surely you can provide some sort of evidence that it exists? “It is impossible to demonstrate just as conclusively that screen-based activities are having an unequivocal effect on the brain.” Why? “A flock of swallows rarely make a summer, and few single peer-reviewed papers … are viewed unanimously by all scientists as conclusive.”

This carries on over several pages that wouldn’t look out of place in a creationist pamphlet. She paints a picture of science filled with dogmatic old sods who refuse to accept new ideas. She invokes stories of brave mavericks like Nobel prizewinner Dr Barry Marshall, who gamely swallowed bacteria to prove they caused stomach ulcers, in defiance of conventional medical opinion at the time. Wisely, she steers clear of Galileo.

It’s clear how Greenfield sees herself and her place in science, but her examples are self-defeating. Marshall and his colleague, Dr J Robin Warren, made a clear prediction. They tested it, they presented the evidence, and minds were changed.

Why can’t Greenfield do the same?

What about Greenfield’s own research? The “About the Author” blurb at the front of Mind Change informs us that, “She specialises in applying neuroscience to fundamental issues such as the impact of 21st-century technologies on the mind.” This is a whole book about that subject, so you would expect to see some of that work making an appearance.

This is something the Baroness has been challenged on in the past. Ben Goldacre has publicly questioned her unwillingness to publish on numerous occasions over the last four or five years, with no response

[Kellais]

...she insists, is not a hypothesis but a whole new paradigm. As a consequence, it cannot be tested like a conventional theory; those calling for her to produce evidence are missing the point. Greenfield’s idea is beyond the realms of “proof”

Lol...awesome. This right here is the proof that it's bullshit. All pseudo-scientists use that as an excuse for not producing evidence/proof of their "theories".
Always a good thing if your adversaries discredit themselves 

I especially like the "...are missing the point..." line of reasoning. It reminds me of Terry Goodkind fans that tell you that you just didn't get the books if you dare to be sceptical/critical about them 

[sciborg2]

...she insists, is not a hypothesis but a whole new paradigm. As a consequence, it cannot be tested like a conventional theory; those calling for her to produce evidence are missing the point. Greenfield’s idea is beyond the realms of “proof”

Lol...awesome. This right here is the proof that it's bullshit. All pseudo-scientists use that as an excuse for not producing evidence/proof of their "theories".
Always a good thing if your adversaries discredit themselves 

I especially like the "...are missing the point..." line of reasoning. It reminds me of Terry Goodkind fans that tell you that you just didn't get the books if you dare to be sceptical/critical about them 

Yeah, it's funny how a book that bad got published just because the author was educated in the field of neuroscience. Then again, exactly what neuroscience as a field has to say is faced with a small sample size problem:

Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience

A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect, but it is less well appreciated that low power also reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects a true effect. Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences of this include overestimates of effect size and low reproducibility of results. There are also ethical dimensions to this problem, as unreliable research is inefficient and wasteful. Improving reproducibility in neuroscience is a key priority and requires attention to well-established but often ignored
methodological principles.

[sciborg2]

Andrew Ferguson - The End of Nuerononsense

"The great quantum physicist (turned Anglican priest) John Polkinghorne once noted that very few physicists, a century ago, doubted that the mechanical model of Newtonian physics was the whole truth about how the world works. Yet today, after a hundred years of relativity and quantum mechanics, not to mention Dark Matter and quarks and Higgs bosons, comprehensive certainty in physics is impossible. Nowadays, Polkinghorne said, evolutionary biology is in the position of physics a hundred years ago: a young discipline full of certainties—dogmas, really—that are soon to crumble in the face of greater understanding.

Some of us will consider this wonderful news, even if it takes a whole series of workshops to spread it."

[Kellais]

Nice one, sci. That's what i was saying all along as well ^^ It's such a young discipline and much of it will have to be revised and rewritten as a lot of it right now is not much more than "first steps".
And count me in to those that consider this wonderful news ... much of what has been proclaimed so far is highly depressing, imo.

[sciborg2]

Nice one, sci. That's what i was saying all along as well ^^ It's such a young discipline and much of it will have to be revised and rewritten as a lot of it right now is not much more than "first steps".
And count me in to those that consider this wonderful news ... much of what has been proclaimed so far is highly depressing, imo.

I think a lot of this is political, not to mention hinges of Chalmers' conception of the Hard Problem which divorces intentionality and subjectivity from actual behavior. Even the reporting of mental states, according to Chalmers, has an essentially functionalist explanation.

Beyond that, in addition to the need for better statistical power in neuroscience there's also the question of bias is a lot of psychological studies that support the conclusions of how we deceive ourselves, have little control, etc:

The Weirdest People in the World

Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western societies are regularly published. Are such species‐generalizing claims justified?

This review suggests not only substantial variability in experimental results across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are unusual compared with the rest of the species—outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, spatial reasoning, moral reasoning, thinking‐styles, and self‐concepts.

This suggests (1)caution in addressing questions of human nature from this slice of humanity, and (2) that
understanding human psychology will require broader subject pools.

We close by proposing ways to address these challenges.

[sciborg2]

Learning How Little We Know About the Brain

Scientists have puzzled out profoundly important insights about how the brain works, like the way the mammalian brain navigates and remembers places, work that won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a British-American and two Norwegians.

Yet the growing body of data — maps, atlases and so-called connectomes that show linkages between cells and regions of the brain — represents a paradox of progress, with the advances also highlighting great gaps in understanding.