Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: The Mind's Boundaries

Hey Richard,Nice! I like this post. It's very simi...

2006-05-16T23:16:08.356-04:00

Hey Richard,

Nice! I like this post. It's very similar to a thought experiment you can play around with in response to Searle's (crap) 'Chinese room argument': We ask Searle if he's conscious. He replies yes. We snip out one of his neurons, and I start following the instructions in my 'neuron simulation manual', taking the various inputs, running calculations and feeding the outputs back into the downstream neurons. etc, etc as with your thought experiment, until there's only one (or no) original neuron left. (In order to give me a chance to keep up with his neural processes, he'd have to start out on a pretty powerful sedative or something!)

Since I'm not directly conscious of his thoughts (or so Searle's original argument seems to imply), his mind must no longer be associated with this system. I just have this sneaky suspicion that the simulated Searle wouldn't be willing to agree with this conclusion! I kind of suspect that if we asked him what he thought, he'd say: ''DON'T STOP SIMULATING!'' (I assume that his nervous system has some of the same self-preservation instincts hard-wired into it that mine does!)

I think it's natural to believe (as you apparently do ?) that there's an isomorphism between mind and brain, in the sense that when one thought CAUSES a subsequent thought -- eg. when an initial belief inevitably gives rise to belief in its logical consequence -- then the physical state associated with the first thought equivalently CAUSES the subsequent brain state associated with the second thought). In other words, a structural description of the evolution of our mind matches perfectly with a structural description of the evolution of our brain.

If this is a sensible approach, then perhaps there is some artificiality in drawing a boundary between 'mind' and 'what lies outside', but it starts looking like it might be able to link in with Platonic forms somehow: the mind becomes ''The form in the arrangement of things that necessitates (essentially) THIS subsequent evolution'', and the environment becomes those elements whose exact configuration ideally wouldn't matter.

It's interesting to think about the way our neurological activity is physiologically isolated from its environment (by the skull, by ion pumps on neuron cell membranes, etc) except for certain very narrow channels through which external influence is allowed to flow.

(Note that this way of looking at things would lead us to think (for instance) of thermal fluctuations inside the head as being part of the brain's environment - a part from which we have evolved in such a way as to insulate the activity of our mind from.)

Also, imagine two people talking in a room. We've been conditioned to talk of there being ''two separate minds'' associated with the room. But the ideas bouncing back and forth are a part of the system's NECESSARY evolution: it makes sense to think of the ''room's awareness'' as constituting a SINGLE mind of which either person's mind is just a part... :)

I don't think I'm doing justice to my ideas here - might leave it for another time :) probably better do some work!

Ciao!

I don't know of a good page. The closest I can th...

2005-10-29T22:18:23.493-04:00

I don't know of a good page. The closest I can think of is something I wrote last year comparing Peirce and Davidson's view of mind. Davidson's anamalous monism can be captured in the following three statements:

(1) All mental events are causally related to physical events. For example, beliefs and desires cause agents to act, and actions cause changes in the physical world. Events in the physical world often cause us to alter our beliefs, intentions, and desires.

(2) If two events are related as cause and effect, there is a strict law under which they may be subsumed. This means: cause and effect have descriptions which instantiate a strict law. A 'strict' law is on which makes no use of open-ended escape clauses such as 'other things being equal.' Thus such laws must belong to a closed system: whatever can affect the system must be included in it.

(3) There are no strict psychophysical laws (laws connecting mental events under their mental descriptions with physical events under their physical descriptions.

1) can you reference somthing on process theory re...

2005-10-29T08:40:49.926-04:00

1) can you reference somthing on process theory regarding what you mean? (eg web page or somthing)

2) Not sure I understand you correctly. Reading around Davidson...

I guess you mean the swampman (duplicate of you).

I guess the fundimental difference here would be aserting that the swampman doesn't have a soul and is not you? It sounds like a statement of faith to me..

Genius, that's largely how the process though folk...

2005-10-28T22:10:14.030-04:00

Genius, that's largely how the process though folks do it (although they don't just limit to a process like that. There are some even more expansive notions that make it more powerful.

I'm not a big process thought guy, if only because every time I reread Whitehead I get told that I still have him wrong.

I think that within analytic philosophy externalism is the most useful. I like Davidson's approach using translation and have argued it's largely Peirce's view as well. There are lots of meanings to externalism though in analytic philosophy. It's one of those confusing terms until you narrow down how it is being used.

anyway I put some mroe on this on my blog - guess ...

2005-10-28T18:41:10.240-04:00

anyway I put some mroe on this on my blog - guess it will make a link here?

You could define yourself as a certain chain of ev...

2005-10-28T03:01:37.100-04:00

You could define yourself as a certain chain of events that hapen to flow into a human body and out of it. that would be much harder to define than just "a body" but in a sense potentially even more true if it was defined tightly enough.

Afterall in a few years you will have almost no atoms in common with the origional you.

Heck, go one step further and break the mind away ...

2005-10-28T00:34:47.400-04:00

Heck, go one step further and break the mind away from the body entirely. I don't mean the way dualists do. But the way externalists do. Thus the mind is simply a different sort of thing as is related holistically with your environment. That's the externalist perspective. The brain still is what is most important. But our thoughts about things can't easily be separated from the things themselves. So mind-talk can't be finitely translated into brain-talk (to adopt a more Davidson like language)

hmmm my analysis is"yes"more detailed - I guess yo...

2005-10-27T14:48:48.536-04:00

hmmm my analysis is
"yes"
more detailed - I guess you can define "yourself" as anything you want - a bit like frming a club and defining yourself as "a labourite" or a "nationalist".

Ha, yeah, well spotted. Some would say that it's n...

2005-10-27T07:04:32.046-04:00

Ha, yeah, well spotted. Some would say that it's no longer you any more, but I guess that stage would occur long before the single-neuron version too. This brings up all those crazy questions about personal identity discussed in this old post.

"The brain in a vat is a red herring, for we can r...

2005-10-27T06:54:01.453-04:00

"The brain in a vat is a red herring, for we can replace even more than that; we could have a "frontal cortex in a vat", or even a single neuron in a vat"

Why not take it the final distance? You don't even need the single neuron - all you need is the vat! Of course the vat ends up being a fantastically complicated bit of wiring that functionally duplicates the brain(+external cognition) anyway...