book reviews - cognitive science

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science This Month's Reviews Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness) compiled by Piero Scaruffi | Check my essays | Cognitive Science news (Copyright © 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions ) Stenning, Keith : SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press, 2002) Dudai, Yadin: MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press, 2002) Damasio, Antonio: LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt, 2003) Gregersen, Niels: FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press, 2003) O'Shaughnessy, Brian: CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press, 2002) Forthcoming reviews To receive periodic news and updates on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, neurobiology, artificial intelligence, etc, ask to be added to my mailing list. Previous months: Armstrong, David Malet: THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (Westview, 1999) Baker, Mark: : THE ATOMS OF LANGUAGE: THE MIND'S HIDDEN RULES OF GRAMMAR (Basic Books, 2001) Baars Bernard: A COGNITIVE THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Cambridge Univ Press, 1993) Barbour Julian: THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press, 2000) Barnet Ann: THE YOUNGEST MINDS (SImon & Schuster, 1998) Blackmore, Susan: THE MEME MACHINE (Oxford University Press, 1998) Bohm David: WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge, 1980) Bohm David: THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge, 1993) Breitenberg Valentino: VEHICLES: EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (MIT Press, 1984) Burnham, Terry & Phelan, Jay: MEAN GENES (Basic, 2000) http://www.thymos.com/mind/index.html (1 of 5)25/07/2003 22:48:00

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Page 1: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book reviews - Cognitive Science

This Months Reviews Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness)

compiled by Piero Scaruffi | Check my essays | Cognitive Science news

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions )

Stenning Keith SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002) Dudai Yadin MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002) Damasio Antonio LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt 2003) Gregersen Niels FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003) OShaughnessy Brian CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

Forthcoming reviews

To receive periodic news and updates on cognitive science philosophy of mind neurobiology artificial intelligence etc ask to be added to my mailing list

Previous months

Armstrong David Malet THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (Westview 1999) Baker Mark THE ATOMS OF LANGUAGE THE MINDS HIDDEN RULES OF GRAMMAR (Basic Books 2001) Baars Bernard A COGNITIVE THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Cambridge Univ Press 1993) Barbour Julian THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Barnet Ann THE YOUNGEST MINDS (SImon amp Schuster 1998) Blackmore Susan THE MEME MACHINE (Oxford University Press 1998) Bohm David WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge 1980) Bohm David THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (MIT Press 1984) Burnham Terry amp Phelan Jay MEAN GENES (Basic 2000)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Butler Samuel EVOLUTION ( 1879) Cairns-Smith Graham EVOLVING THE MIND (Cambridge University Press 1995) Calvin William HOW BRAINS THINK (Basic 1996) Calvin William amp Bickerton Derek LINGUA EX MACHINA (MIT Press 2000) Campbell Joseph PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY THE MASKS OF GOD (Viking 1959) Capra Fritjof THE WEB OF LIFE (Anchor Books 1996) Carlson Richard EXPERIENCED COGNITION (Lawrence Erlbaum 1997) Cavalli-Sforza Luigi GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996) Churchland Paul amp Churchland Patricia ON THE CONTRARY (MIT Press 1998) Clark Andy MINDWARE (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Clark Andy ASSOCIATIVE ENGINES (MIT Press 1993) Cohen Jonathan amp Schooler Jonathan SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO CONSCIOUSNESS (Erlbaum 1997) Cowie Fiona WHATS WITHIN (Oxford Univ Press 1998) Culbertson James SENSATIONS MEMORIES AND THE FLOW OF TIME (Cromwell Press 1976) Cziko Gary THE THINGS WE DO (MIT Press 2000) Damasio Antonio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995) Dawkins Richard CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE (Norton 1996) Dawkins Richard Dawkins Richard THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (Norton 1987) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (OUP 1982) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998) DeDuve Christian VITAL DUST (Basic 1995) de Waal Frans GOOD NATURED (Harvard Univ Press 1996) Dennett Daniel KINDS OF MINDS (Basic 1998) Dennett Daniel DARWINS DANGEROUS IDEA (Simon amp Schuster 1995) Deutsch David THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997) Devlin Keith J GOODBYE DESCARTES (Wiley 1998) DeWaal Frans BONOBO THE FORGOTTEN APE (University of California Press 1997) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (Harvard Univ Press 1991) Douglas Mary NATURAL SYMBOLS (Random House 1970) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (Harper amp Row 1979) Dyson Freeman ORIGINS OF LIFE (Cambridge Univ Press 1999) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (Basic 1987) Edelman Gerald TOPOBIOLOGY (Basic 1988) Edelman Gerald THE REMEMBERED PRESENT (Basic 1989) Edelman Gerald BRIGHT AIR BRILLIANT FIRE (Basic 1992) Eichenbaum Howard COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ Press 2002) Eigen Manfred STEPS TOWARDS LIFE (Oxford University Press 1992)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Flanagan Owen DREAMING SOULS (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Fodor Jerry THE MIND DOESNT WORK THAT WAY (MIT Press 2000) Fox Ronald ENERGY AND THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE (Freeman 1988) Freeman Dyson ORIGINS OF LIFE (Cambridge Univ Press 1999) Freeman Walter SOCIETIES OF BRAINS (Erlbaum 1995) Ganti Tibor THE PRINCIPLE OF LIFE (Omikk 1971) Gazzaniga Michael amp LeDoux Joseph INTEGRATED MIND (Plenum Press 1978) Gazzaniga Michael NATUREs MIND (Basic 1992) Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) Goldberg Elkhonon THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001) Goldstein Kurt THE ORGANISM A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO BIOLOGY (American Book 1939) Gould Stephen Jay FULL HOUSE (Random House 1996) Greenfield Susan THE HUMAN MIND EXPLAINED (Henry Holt amp Co 1996) Greenfield Susan THE HUMAN BRAIN (Basic 1999) Gregory Richard MIND IN SCIENCE (Cambridge Univ Press 1981) Hameroff Stuart ULTIMATE COMPUTING BIOMOLECULAR CONSCIOUSNESS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY (Elsevier Science 1987) Heidegger Martin BEING AND TIME (1962) Herbert Nick ELEMENTAL MIND (Dutton 1993) Herbert Nick FASTER THAN LIGHT SUPERLUMINAL LOOPHOLES IN PHYSICS (Dutton 1988) Herbert Nick QUANTUM REALITY BEYOND THE NEW PHYSICS (Doubleday 1985) Hobson Allan THE CHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUS STATES (Little amp Brown 1994) Ingebo-Barth Denise THE CONSCIOUS STREAM (Universal Publisher 2000) Ivry Richard amp Robertson Lynn THE TWO SIDES OF PERCEPTION (MIT Press 1998) Jibu Mari amp Yasue Kunio QUANTUM BRAIN DYNAMICS AND CONSCIOUSNESS (John Benjamins 1995) Jones Steven LANGUAGE OF GENES (Harper Collins 1993) Jouvet Michel THE PARADOX OF sLEEP THE STORY OF DREAMING (MIT Press 1999) Karmiloff-Smith Annette BEYOND MODULARITY (MIT Press 1992) Kim Jaegwon MIND IN A PHYSICAL WORLD (MIT Press 1998) Lakoff George PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH (Basic 1998) Lakoff George WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of Chicago Press 1987) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (Chicago Univ Press 1980) Lane Richard amp Nadel Lynn COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMOTION (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Layzer David COSMOGENESIS (Oxford University Press 1990) Levine Joseph PURPLE HAZE (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Lotitz Donald HOW THE BRAIN EVOLVED LANGUAGE (Oxford Univ Press 1999) Lynch Michael THE NATURE OF TRUTH (MIT Press 2001) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990) MacPhail Euan THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford University Press 1998)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Margulis Lynn WHAT IS LIFE (MIT Press 1995) Marshall IN amp Zohar Danah QUANTUM SOCIETY (William Morrow 1994) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (Reidel 1980) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE ORIGINS OF LIFE (Oxford University Press 1999) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE MAJOR TRANSITIONS IN EVOLUTION (W H Freeman 1995) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press 1991) McGinn Colin THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME (Basic 1999) Mead George Herbert THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT (Univ of Chicago Press 1938) Milner Peter THE AUTONOMOUS BRAIN (Lawrence Erlbaum 1999) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson 1996) Monod Jacques CHANCE AND NECESSITY (Knopf 1971) Morowitz Harold BEGINNINGS OF CELLULAR LIFE (Yale University Press 1992) Murchie Guy SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (Houghton Mifflin 1978) Norretranders Tor THE USER ILLUSION (Viking 1998) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (Houghton Mifflin 1986) Penrose Roger SHADOWS OF THE MIND (Oxford University Press 1994) Pinker Steven HOW THE MIND WORKS (Norton 1997) Pinker Steven WORDS AND RULES (Basic 1999) Plotkin Henry EVOLUTION IN MIND (Allen Lane 1997) Putnam Hilary THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD (Columbia Univ 1999) Reiser Morton MEMORY IN MIND AND BRAIN (Basic 1990) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) Ridley Mark THE COOPERATIVE GENE (Free Press 2001) Rolls Edmund THE BRAIN AND EMOTION (Oxford Univ Press 1999) Rucker Rudy INFINITY AND THE MIND (Birkhauser 1982) Searle John MIND LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY (Basic 1998) Sedlmeier Peter FREQUENCY PROCESSING AND COGNITION (Oxford 2002) Sheldrake Rupert A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE (JP Tarcher 1981) Sheldrake Rupert PRESENCE OF THE PAST (Grimes 1988) Shettleworth Sara COGNITION EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOR (Oxford Univ Press 1998) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-Verlag 1993) Thompson DArcy ON GROWTH AND FORM (Cambridge University Press 1917) Tipler Frank THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY (Doubleday 1995) Todes Samuel BODY AND WORLD (MIT Press 2001) Tulving Endel amp Craik Fergus THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Turner Scott THE EXTENDED ORGANISM (Harvard Univ Press 2000) Tye Michael TEN PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press 1995) Wills Christopher amp Bada Jeffrey THE SPARK OF LIFE (Perseus 2000) Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (Belknap 1975)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (Anchor Press 1985) Wolf Fred Alan MIND INTO MATTER (Moment Point 2001) Wolf Fred Alan STAR WAVE MIND CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS (Macmillan 1984) Wright Robert THE MORAL ANIMAL (Vintage Books 1995) Young John THE MEMORY SYSTEM OF THE BRAIN (University of California Press 1966) Zohar Danah QUANTUM SELF (William Morrow 1990)

Cognitive Ethology A reader

The whole bibliography

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book concludes Damasios trilogy on emotions

First of all one has to become familiar with Damasios terminology Damasio distinguishes feelings and emotions a feeling is a mental representation of the state of the organisms body the perception of body state whereas an emotion is the reaction to a stimulus and the associated behavior (eg a facial expression) So the feeling is the recognition that an event is taking place whereas the emotion is the visible effect of it Emotions are bodily things while feelings are mental things Emotions are an automatic response They dont require any thinking They are the fundamental mechanism for the regulation of life Emotions precede feelings and are the foundations for feelings

Evolution has prepared us with a repertory of emotions that we apply to the circumstances (somehow we pick an emotion to react to a circumstance the same way we pick an antibody to fight a virus) The effect of the emotion is both some bodily behavior and the creation of a neural map That neural map leads to the feeling and the relationship between maps and feelings is that feelings reflect how well the body is doing according to the map Neural maps of body states are useful to manage the body Feelings allow us to reason about the cause of the emotion Feelings allow us to see the big picture not just to react mechanically to a situation

Basically neither Damasios feeling nor Damasios emotion are what we call feeling and emotion They are only two physical components (possibly side-effects) of what we normally refer to as a feeling or an emotion But Damasio states that his feelings enter the mental realm whereas his emotions dont So his emotions are more physical that his feelings (emotions are neural processes that recognize and react to a situation feelings are maps in the brain that represent the body state)

An emotion is registered by the brain when a stimulus is recognized as useful for survival or for well-being or damaging for survival and well-being This appraisal results in bodily changes such as quickening heart-beat tensing muscles etc These bodily changes also imply that a map changes in the brain and this change is the physical implementation of the feeling

The best part of Damasios theory is probably that he finds an analogy between the emotional system and the immune system The immune system produces antibodies to fight invading viruses or better the invading virus selects the appropriate antibody An emotional response is basically the antibody that reacts to an invading stimulus that is selected by that stimulus

Damasio also sketches the brain regions that account for emotions the amygdala is at the center of the triggering event and the hypothalamus is at the center of the execution

Damasio claims that feelings help us solve complex problems This may seem absurd as my feeling of

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

fear helps me solve very simple problems (eg do not cross a freeway on foot during rush hour) but you have to remember that Damasios feeling is not a feeling it is a lasting memory of an emotion Then you understand why he claims that feelings help manage life in the long-term And you understand why he claims like Spinoza that the mind is simply an idea of the body So for example joy is the idea of equilibrium optimal physical coordination

First came the machinery for emotions (reacting to a stimulus) and then the machinery for feelings (the brain map) Feelings prolong the effect of an emotion because they affect memory

According to this theory all living organisms have proto-selves However only organisms with a complex nervous system capable of seeing their proto-self interacting with the world also have real consciousness These organisms are capable of registering the feeling of what happens Human consciousness is one further step beyond enabled by the fact that we have a large memory that allows autobiographical memory

Damasio does not even try to explain where feelings (my feelings) and consciousness come from He is merely a neurologist analyzing the way the emotional system works

If the mind is an idea of the body the self is an idea of ideas The self groups all the ideas of the body and generates a sense of unity

The problem is that Damasios theory does not explain well the most common emotionsfeelings of our ordinary lives Our state of happiness or sadness is often due to factors external to our body I can easily recover from the momentary pain caused by hurting my finger or my biting my tongue but it takes months to recover from a divorce or a monetary loss Lets say that tomorrow they announce you won a million dollars at the lottery there has not been a significant change in the state of your body but you suddenly become very very happy That happiness is not due to a change in the state of your body but to a change to your circumstances If your mother is gravely ill you are sad that too has no direct impact on the organs and limbs of your body and therefore on the bodys representation in the brain But you can be very sad for many many months It is hard to think of any physical change that has the same long-lasting impact that circumstances can have on an individuals emotional life

There is something fundamental that is missing in Damasios theory that I represent the world (the world not my body) and become sad or happy based on that representation It is the representation of the world (eg the horrors of Rwanda) that make me sad not the representation of the state of my body So emotions are not due (only) to representations of the body So the mind is not the same substance as the body Damasio concludes that the mind is the body If one followed Damasios reasoning one would rather reach the intriguing conclusion that the mind is the world because the mind comes from a representation of what is going on in the world

Damasio extends his discussion to the spiritual realm a rarity in neuroscience But alas his conclusions are scary to say the least A spiritual feeling is for him quite simply a state of maximum harmony the feeling that everything is under control in the organism Since I have never experienced a spiritual feeling I guess that means that my organism is completely screwed up On the other hand the many

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 2: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Butler Samuel EVOLUTION ( 1879) Cairns-Smith Graham EVOLVING THE MIND (Cambridge University Press 1995) Calvin William HOW BRAINS THINK (Basic 1996) Calvin William amp Bickerton Derek LINGUA EX MACHINA (MIT Press 2000) Campbell Joseph PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY THE MASKS OF GOD (Viking 1959) Capra Fritjof THE WEB OF LIFE (Anchor Books 1996) Carlson Richard EXPERIENCED COGNITION (Lawrence Erlbaum 1997) Cavalli-Sforza Luigi GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996) Churchland Paul amp Churchland Patricia ON THE CONTRARY (MIT Press 1998) Clark Andy MINDWARE (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Clark Andy ASSOCIATIVE ENGINES (MIT Press 1993) Cohen Jonathan amp Schooler Jonathan SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO CONSCIOUSNESS (Erlbaum 1997) Cowie Fiona WHATS WITHIN (Oxford Univ Press 1998) Culbertson James SENSATIONS MEMORIES AND THE FLOW OF TIME (Cromwell Press 1976) Cziko Gary THE THINGS WE DO (MIT Press 2000) Damasio Antonio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995) Dawkins Richard CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE (Norton 1996) Dawkins Richard Dawkins Richard THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (Norton 1987) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (OUP 1982) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998) DeDuve Christian VITAL DUST (Basic 1995) de Waal Frans GOOD NATURED (Harvard Univ Press 1996) Dennett Daniel KINDS OF MINDS (Basic 1998) Dennett Daniel DARWINS DANGEROUS IDEA (Simon amp Schuster 1995) Deutsch David THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997) Devlin Keith J GOODBYE DESCARTES (Wiley 1998) DeWaal Frans BONOBO THE FORGOTTEN APE (University of California Press 1997) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (Harvard Univ Press 1991) Douglas Mary NATURAL SYMBOLS (Random House 1970) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (Harper amp Row 1979) Dyson Freeman ORIGINS OF LIFE (Cambridge Univ Press 1999) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (Basic 1987) Edelman Gerald TOPOBIOLOGY (Basic 1988) Edelman Gerald THE REMEMBERED PRESENT (Basic 1989) Edelman Gerald BRIGHT AIR BRILLIANT FIRE (Basic 1992) Eichenbaum Howard COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ Press 2002) Eigen Manfred STEPS TOWARDS LIFE (Oxford University Press 1992)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Flanagan Owen DREAMING SOULS (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Fodor Jerry THE MIND DOESNT WORK THAT WAY (MIT Press 2000) Fox Ronald ENERGY AND THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE (Freeman 1988) Freeman Dyson ORIGINS OF LIFE (Cambridge Univ Press 1999) Freeman Walter SOCIETIES OF BRAINS (Erlbaum 1995) Ganti Tibor THE PRINCIPLE OF LIFE (Omikk 1971) Gazzaniga Michael amp LeDoux Joseph INTEGRATED MIND (Plenum Press 1978) Gazzaniga Michael NATUREs MIND (Basic 1992) Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) Goldberg Elkhonon THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001) Goldstein Kurt THE ORGANISM A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO BIOLOGY (American Book 1939) Gould Stephen Jay FULL HOUSE (Random House 1996) Greenfield Susan THE HUMAN MIND EXPLAINED (Henry Holt amp Co 1996) Greenfield Susan THE HUMAN BRAIN (Basic 1999) Gregory Richard MIND IN SCIENCE (Cambridge Univ Press 1981) Hameroff Stuart ULTIMATE COMPUTING BIOMOLECULAR CONSCIOUSNESS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY (Elsevier Science 1987) Heidegger Martin BEING AND TIME (1962) Herbert Nick ELEMENTAL MIND (Dutton 1993) Herbert Nick FASTER THAN LIGHT SUPERLUMINAL LOOPHOLES IN PHYSICS (Dutton 1988) Herbert Nick QUANTUM REALITY BEYOND THE NEW PHYSICS (Doubleday 1985) Hobson Allan THE CHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUS STATES (Little amp Brown 1994) Ingebo-Barth Denise THE CONSCIOUS STREAM (Universal Publisher 2000) Ivry Richard amp Robertson Lynn THE TWO SIDES OF PERCEPTION (MIT Press 1998) Jibu Mari amp Yasue Kunio QUANTUM BRAIN DYNAMICS AND CONSCIOUSNESS (John Benjamins 1995) Jones Steven LANGUAGE OF GENES (Harper Collins 1993) Jouvet Michel THE PARADOX OF sLEEP THE STORY OF DREAMING (MIT Press 1999) Karmiloff-Smith Annette BEYOND MODULARITY (MIT Press 1992) Kim Jaegwon MIND IN A PHYSICAL WORLD (MIT Press 1998) Lakoff George PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH (Basic 1998) Lakoff George WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of Chicago Press 1987) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (Chicago Univ Press 1980) Lane Richard amp Nadel Lynn COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMOTION (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Layzer David COSMOGENESIS (Oxford University Press 1990) Levine Joseph PURPLE HAZE (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Lotitz Donald HOW THE BRAIN EVOLVED LANGUAGE (Oxford Univ Press 1999) Lynch Michael THE NATURE OF TRUTH (MIT Press 2001) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990) MacPhail Euan THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford University Press 1998)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Margulis Lynn WHAT IS LIFE (MIT Press 1995) Marshall IN amp Zohar Danah QUANTUM SOCIETY (William Morrow 1994) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (Reidel 1980) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE ORIGINS OF LIFE (Oxford University Press 1999) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE MAJOR TRANSITIONS IN EVOLUTION (W H Freeman 1995) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press 1991) McGinn Colin THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME (Basic 1999) Mead George Herbert THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT (Univ of Chicago Press 1938) Milner Peter THE AUTONOMOUS BRAIN (Lawrence Erlbaum 1999) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson 1996) Monod Jacques CHANCE AND NECESSITY (Knopf 1971) Morowitz Harold BEGINNINGS OF CELLULAR LIFE (Yale University Press 1992) Murchie Guy SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (Houghton Mifflin 1978) Norretranders Tor THE USER ILLUSION (Viking 1998) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (Houghton Mifflin 1986) Penrose Roger SHADOWS OF THE MIND (Oxford University Press 1994) Pinker Steven HOW THE MIND WORKS (Norton 1997) Pinker Steven WORDS AND RULES (Basic 1999) Plotkin Henry EVOLUTION IN MIND (Allen Lane 1997) Putnam Hilary THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD (Columbia Univ 1999) Reiser Morton MEMORY IN MIND AND BRAIN (Basic 1990) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) Ridley Mark THE COOPERATIVE GENE (Free Press 2001) Rolls Edmund THE BRAIN AND EMOTION (Oxford Univ Press 1999) Rucker Rudy INFINITY AND THE MIND (Birkhauser 1982) Searle John MIND LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY (Basic 1998) Sedlmeier Peter FREQUENCY PROCESSING AND COGNITION (Oxford 2002) Sheldrake Rupert A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE (JP Tarcher 1981) Sheldrake Rupert PRESENCE OF THE PAST (Grimes 1988) Shettleworth Sara COGNITION EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOR (Oxford Univ Press 1998) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-Verlag 1993) Thompson DArcy ON GROWTH AND FORM (Cambridge University Press 1917) Tipler Frank THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY (Doubleday 1995) Todes Samuel BODY AND WORLD (MIT Press 2001) Tulving Endel amp Craik Fergus THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Turner Scott THE EXTENDED ORGANISM (Harvard Univ Press 2000) Tye Michael TEN PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press 1995) Wills Christopher amp Bada Jeffrey THE SPARK OF LIFE (Perseus 2000) Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (Belknap 1975)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (Anchor Press 1985) Wolf Fred Alan MIND INTO MATTER (Moment Point 2001) Wolf Fred Alan STAR WAVE MIND CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS (Macmillan 1984) Wright Robert THE MORAL ANIMAL (Vintage Books 1995) Young John THE MEMORY SYSTEM OF THE BRAIN (University of California Press 1966) Zohar Danah QUANTUM SELF (William Morrow 1990)

Cognitive Ethology A reader

The whole bibliography

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book concludes Damasios trilogy on emotions

First of all one has to become familiar with Damasios terminology Damasio distinguishes feelings and emotions a feeling is a mental representation of the state of the organisms body the perception of body state whereas an emotion is the reaction to a stimulus and the associated behavior (eg a facial expression) So the feeling is the recognition that an event is taking place whereas the emotion is the visible effect of it Emotions are bodily things while feelings are mental things Emotions are an automatic response They dont require any thinking They are the fundamental mechanism for the regulation of life Emotions precede feelings and are the foundations for feelings

Evolution has prepared us with a repertory of emotions that we apply to the circumstances (somehow we pick an emotion to react to a circumstance the same way we pick an antibody to fight a virus) The effect of the emotion is both some bodily behavior and the creation of a neural map That neural map leads to the feeling and the relationship between maps and feelings is that feelings reflect how well the body is doing according to the map Neural maps of body states are useful to manage the body Feelings allow us to reason about the cause of the emotion Feelings allow us to see the big picture not just to react mechanically to a situation

Basically neither Damasios feeling nor Damasios emotion are what we call feeling and emotion They are only two physical components (possibly side-effects) of what we normally refer to as a feeling or an emotion But Damasio states that his feelings enter the mental realm whereas his emotions dont So his emotions are more physical that his feelings (emotions are neural processes that recognize and react to a situation feelings are maps in the brain that represent the body state)

An emotion is registered by the brain when a stimulus is recognized as useful for survival or for well-being or damaging for survival and well-being This appraisal results in bodily changes such as quickening heart-beat tensing muscles etc These bodily changes also imply that a map changes in the brain and this change is the physical implementation of the feeling

The best part of Damasios theory is probably that he finds an analogy between the emotional system and the immune system The immune system produces antibodies to fight invading viruses or better the invading virus selects the appropriate antibody An emotional response is basically the antibody that reacts to an invading stimulus that is selected by that stimulus

Damasio also sketches the brain regions that account for emotions the amygdala is at the center of the triggering event and the hypothalamus is at the center of the execution

Damasio claims that feelings help us solve complex problems This may seem absurd as my feeling of

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

fear helps me solve very simple problems (eg do not cross a freeway on foot during rush hour) but you have to remember that Damasios feeling is not a feeling it is a lasting memory of an emotion Then you understand why he claims that feelings help manage life in the long-term And you understand why he claims like Spinoza that the mind is simply an idea of the body So for example joy is the idea of equilibrium optimal physical coordination

First came the machinery for emotions (reacting to a stimulus) and then the machinery for feelings (the brain map) Feelings prolong the effect of an emotion because they affect memory

According to this theory all living organisms have proto-selves However only organisms with a complex nervous system capable of seeing their proto-self interacting with the world also have real consciousness These organisms are capable of registering the feeling of what happens Human consciousness is one further step beyond enabled by the fact that we have a large memory that allows autobiographical memory

Damasio does not even try to explain where feelings (my feelings) and consciousness come from He is merely a neurologist analyzing the way the emotional system works

If the mind is an idea of the body the self is an idea of ideas The self groups all the ideas of the body and generates a sense of unity

The problem is that Damasios theory does not explain well the most common emotionsfeelings of our ordinary lives Our state of happiness or sadness is often due to factors external to our body I can easily recover from the momentary pain caused by hurting my finger or my biting my tongue but it takes months to recover from a divorce or a monetary loss Lets say that tomorrow they announce you won a million dollars at the lottery there has not been a significant change in the state of your body but you suddenly become very very happy That happiness is not due to a change in the state of your body but to a change to your circumstances If your mother is gravely ill you are sad that too has no direct impact on the organs and limbs of your body and therefore on the bodys representation in the brain But you can be very sad for many many months It is hard to think of any physical change that has the same long-lasting impact that circumstances can have on an individuals emotional life

There is something fundamental that is missing in Damasios theory that I represent the world (the world not my body) and become sad or happy based on that representation It is the representation of the world (eg the horrors of Rwanda) that make me sad not the representation of the state of my body So emotions are not due (only) to representations of the body So the mind is not the same substance as the body Damasio concludes that the mind is the body If one followed Damasios reasoning one would rather reach the intriguing conclusion that the mind is the world because the mind comes from a representation of what is going on in the world

Damasio extends his discussion to the spiritual realm a rarity in neuroscience But alas his conclusions are scary to say the least A spiritual feeling is for him quite simply a state of maximum harmony the feeling that everything is under control in the organism Since I have never experienced a spiritual feeling I guess that means that my organism is completely screwed up On the other hand the many

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 3: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Flanagan Owen DREAMING SOULS (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Fodor Jerry THE MIND DOESNT WORK THAT WAY (MIT Press 2000) Fox Ronald ENERGY AND THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE (Freeman 1988) Freeman Dyson ORIGINS OF LIFE (Cambridge Univ Press 1999) Freeman Walter SOCIETIES OF BRAINS (Erlbaum 1995) Ganti Tibor THE PRINCIPLE OF LIFE (Omikk 1971) Gazzaniga Michael amp LeDoux Joseph INTEGRATED MIND (Plenum Press 1978) Gazzaniga Michael NATUREs MIND (Basic 1992) Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) Goldberg Elkhonon THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001) Goldstein Kurt THE ORGANISM A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO BIOLOGY (American Book 1939) Gould Stephen Jay FULL HOUSE (Random House 1996) Greenfield Susan THE HUMAN MIND EXPLAINED (Henry Holt amp Co 1996) Greenfield Susan THE HUMAN BRAIN (Basic 1999) Gregory Richard MIND IN SCIENCE (Cambridge Univ Press 1981) Hameroff Stuart ULTIMATE COMPUTING BIOMOLECULAR CONSCIOUSNESS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY (Elsevier Science 1987) Heidegger Martin BEING AND TIME (1962) Herbert Nick ELEMENTAL MIND (Dutton 1993) Herbert Nick FASTER THAN LIGHT SUPERLUMINAL LOOPHOLES IN PHYSICS (Dutton 1988) Herbert Nick QUANTUM REALITY BEYOND THE NEW PHYSICS (Doubleday 1985) Hobson Allan THE CHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUS STATES (Little amp Brown 1994) Ingebo-Barth Denise THE CONSCIOUS STREAM (Universal Publisher 2000) Ivry Richard amp Robertson Lynn THE TWO SIDES OF PERCEPTION (MIT Press 1998) Jibu Mari amp Yasue Kunio QUANTUM BRAIN DYNAMICS AND CONSCIOUSNESS (John Benjamins 1995) Jones Steven LANGUAGE OF GENES (Harper Collins 1993) Jouvet Michel THE PARADOX OF sLEEP THE STORY OF DREAMING (MIT Press 1999) Karmiloff-Smith Annette BEYOND MODULARITY (MIT Press 1992) Kim Jaegwon MIND IN A PHYSICAL WORLD (MIT Press 1998) Lakoff George PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH (Basic 1998) Lakoff George WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of Chicago Press 1987) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (Chicago Univ Press 1980) Lane Richard amp Nadel Lynn COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMOTION (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Layzer David COSMOGENESIS (Oxford University Press 1990) Levine Joseph PURPLE HAZE (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Lotitz Donald HOW THE BRAIN EVOLVED LANGUAGE (Oxford Univ Press 1999) Lynch Michael THE NATURE OF TRUTH (MIT Press 2001) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990) MacPhail Euan THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford University Press 1998)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Margulis Lynn WHAT IS LIFE (MIT Press 1995) Marshall IN amp Zohar Danah QUANTUM SOCIETY (William Morrow 1994) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (Reidel 1980) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE ORIGINS OF LIFE (Oxford University Press 1999) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE MAJOR TRANSITIONS IN EVOLUTION (W H Freeman 1995) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press 1991) McGinn Colin THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME (Basic 1999) Mead George Herbert THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT (Univ of Chicago Press 1938) Milner Peter THE AUTONOMOUS BRAIN (Lawrence Erlbaum 1999) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson 1996) Monod Jacques CHANCE AND NECESSITY (Knopf 1971) Morowitz Harold BEGINNINGS OF CELLULAR LIFE (Yale University Press 1992) Murchie Guy SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (Houghton Mifflin 1978) Norretranders Tor THE USER ILLUSION (Viking 1998) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (Houghton Mifflin 1986) Penrose Roger SHADOWS OF THE MIND (Oxford University Press 1994) Pinker Steven HOW THE MIND WORKS (Norton 1997) Pinker Steven WORDS AND RULES (Basic 1999) Plotkin Henry EVOLUTION IN MIND (Allen Lane 1997) Putnam Hilary THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD (Columbia Univ 1999) Reiser Morton MEMORY IN MIND AND BRAIN (Basic 1990) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) Ridley Mark THE COOPERATIVE GENE (Free Press 2001) Rolls Edmund THE BRAIN AND EMOTION (Oxford Univ Press 1999) Rucker Rudy INFINITY AND THE MIND (Birkhauser 1982) Searle John MIND LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY (Basic 1998) Sedlmeier Peter FREQUENCY PROCESSING AND COGNITION (Oxford 2002) Sheldrake Rupert A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE (JP Tarcher 1981) Sheldrake Rupert PRESENCE OF THE PAST (Grimes 1988) Shettleworth Sara COGNITION EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOR (Oxford Univ Press 1998) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-Verlag 1993) Thompson DArcy ON GROWTH AND FORM (Cambridge University Press 1917) Tipler Frank THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY (Doubleday 1995) Todes Samuel BODY AND WORLD (MIT Press 2001) Tulving Endel amp Craik Fergus THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Turner Scott THE EXTENDED ORGANISM (Harvard Univ Press 2000) Tye Michael TEN PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press 1995) Wills Christopher amp Bada Jeffrey THE SPARK OF LIFE (Perseus 2000) Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (Belknap 1975)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (Anchor Press 1985) Wolf Fred Alan MIND INTO MATTER (Moment Point 2001) Wolf Fred Alan STAR WAVE MIND CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS (Macmillan 1984) Wright Robert THE MORAL ANIMAL (Vintage Books 1995) Young John THE MEMORY SYSTEM OF THE BRAIN (University of California Press 1966) Zohar Danah QUANTUM SELF (William Morrow 1990)

Cognitive Ethology A reader

The whole bibliography

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book concludes Damasios trilogy on emotions

First of all one has to become familiar with Damasios terminology Damasio distinguishes feelings and emotions a feeling is a mental representation of the state of the organisms body the perception of body state whereas an emotion is the reaction to a stimulus and the associated behavior (eg a facial expression) So the feeling is the recognition that an event is taking place whereas the emotion is the visible effect of it Emotions are bodily things while feelings are mental things Emotions are an automatic response They dont require any thinking They are the fundamental mechanism for the regulation of life Emotions precede feelings and are the foundations for feelings

Evolution has prepared us with a repertory of emotions that we apply to the circumstances (somehow we pick an emotion to react to a circumstance the same way we pick an antibody to fight a virus) The effect of the emotion is both some bodily behavior and the creation of a neural map That neural map leads to the feeling and the relationship between maps and feelings is that feelings reflect how well the body is doing according to the map Neural maps of body states are useful to manage the body Feelings allow us to reason about the cause of the emotion Feelings allow us to see the big picture not just to react mechanically to a situation

Basically neither Damasios feeling nor Damasios emotion are what we call feeling and emotion They are only two physical components (possibly side-effects) of what we normally refer to as a feeling or an emotion But Damasio states that his feelings enter the mental realm whereas his emotions dont So his emotions are more physical that his feelings (emotions are neural processes that recognize and react to a situation feelings are maps in the brain that represent the body state)

An emotion is registered by the brain when a stimulus is recognized as useful for survival or for well-being or damaging for survival and well-being This appraisal results in bodily changes such as quickening heart-beat tensing muscles etc These bodily changes also imply that a map changes in the brain and this change is the physical implementation of the feeling

The best part of Damasios theory is probably that he finds an analogy between the emotional system and the immune system The immune system produces antibodies to fight invading viruses or better the invading virus selects the appropriate antibody An emotional response is basically the antibody that reacts to an invading stimulus that is selected by that stimulus

Damasio also sketches the brain regions that account for emotions the amygdala is at the center of the triggering event and the hypothalamus is at the center of the execution

Damasio claims that feelings help us solve complex problems This may seem absurd as my feeling of

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

fear helps me solve very simple problems (eg do not cross a freeway on foot during rush hour) but you have to remember that Damasios feeling is not a feeling it is a lasting memory of an emotion Then you understand why he claims that feelings help manage life in the long-term And you understand why he claims like Spinoza that the mind is simply an idea of the body So for example joy is the idea of equilibrium optimal physical coordination

First came the machinery for emotions (reacting to a stimulus) and then the machinery for feelings (the brain map) Feelings prolong the effect of an emotion because they affect memory

According to this theory all living organisms have proto-selves However only organisms with a complex nervous system capable of seeing their proto-self interacting with the world also have real consciousness These organisms are capable of registering the feeling of what happens Human consciousness is one further step beyond enabled by the fact that we have a large memory that allows autobiographical memory

Damasio does not even try to explain where feelings (my feelings) and consciousness come from He is merely a neurologist analyzing the way the emotional system works

If the mind is an idea of the body the self is an idea of ideas The self groups all the ideas of the body and generates a sense of unity

The problem is that Damasios theory does not explain well the most common emotionsfeelings of our ordinary lives Our state of happiness or sadness is often due to factors external to our body I can easily recover from the momentary pain caused by hurting my finger or my biting my tongue but it takes months to recover from a divorce or a monetary loss Lets say that tomorrow they announce you won a million dollars at the lottery there has not been a significant change in the state of your body but you suddenly become very very happy That happiness is not due to a change in the state of your body but to a change to your circumstances If your mother is gravely ill you are sad that too has no direct impact on the organs and limbs of your body and therefore on the bodys representation in the brain But you can be very sad for many many months It is hard to think of any physical change that has the same long-lasting impact that circumstances can have on an individuals emotional life

There is something fundamental that is missing in Damasios theory that I represent the world (the world not my body) and become sad or happy based on that representation It is the representation of the world (eg the horrors of Rwanda) that make me sad not the representation of the state of my body So emotions are not due (only) to representations of the body So the mind is not the same substance as the body Damasio concludes that the mind is the body If one followed Damasios reasoning one would rather reach the intriguing conclusion that the mind is the world because the mind comes from a representation of what is going on in the world

Damasio extends his discussion to the spiritual realm a rarity in neuroscience But alas his conclusions are scary to say the least A spiritual feeling is for him quite simply a state of maximum harmony the feeling that everything is under control in the organism Since I have never experienced a spiritual feeling I guess that means that my organism is completely screwed up On the other hand the many

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 4: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Margulis Lynn WHAT IS LIFE (MIT Press 1995) Marshall IN amp Zohar Danah QUANTUM SOCIETY (William Morrow 1994) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (Reidel 1980) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE ORIGINS OF LIFE (Oxford University Press 1999) Maynard Smith John amp Szathmary Eors THE MAJOR TRANSITIONS IN EVOLUTION (W H Freeman 1995) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press 1991) McGinn Colin THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME (Basic 1999) Mead George Herbert THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT (Univ of Chicago Press 1938) Milner Peter THE AUTONOMOUS BRAIN (Lawrence Erlbaum 1999) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson 1996) Monod Jacques CHANCE AND NECESSITY (Knopf 1971) Morowitz Harold BEGINNINGS OF CELLULAR LIFE (Yale University Press 1992) Murchie Guy SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (Houghton Mifflin 1978) Norretranders Tor THE USER ILLUSION (Viking 1998) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (Houghton Mifflin 1986) Penrose Roger SHADOWS OF THE MIND (Oxford University Press 1994) Pinker Steven HOW THE MIND WORKS (Norton 1997) Pinker Steven WORDS AND RULES (Basic 1999) Plotkin Henry EVOLUTION IN MIND (Allen Lane 1997) Putnam Hilary THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD (Columbia Univ 1999) Reiser Morton MEMORY IN MIND AND BRAIN (Basic 1990) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) Ridley Mark THE COOPERATIVE GENE (Free Press 2001) Rolls Edmund THE BRAIN AND EMOTION (Oxford Univ Press 1999) Rucker Rudy INFINITY AND THE MIND (Birkhauser 1982) Searle John MIND LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY (Basic 1998) Sedlmeier Peter FREQUENCY PROCESSING AND COGNITION (Oxford 2002) Sheldrake Rupert A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE (JP Tarcher 1981) Sheldrake Rupert PRESENCE OF THE PAST (Grimes 1988) Shettleworth Sara COGNITION EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOR (Oxford Univ Press 1998) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-Verlag 1993) Thompson DArcy ON GROWTH AND FORM (Cambridge University Press 1917) Tipler Frank THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY (Doubleday 1995) Todes Samuel BODY AND WORLD (MIT Press 2001) Tulving Endel amp Craik Fergus THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ Press 2000) Turner Scott THE EXTENDED ORGANISM (Harvard Univ Press 2000) Tye Michael TEN PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press 1995) Wills Christopher amp Bada Jeffrey THE SPARK OF LIFE (Perseus 2000) Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (Belknap 1975)

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Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (Anchor Press 1985) Wolf Fred Alan MIND INTO MATTER (Moment Point 2001) Wolf Fred Alan STAR WAVE MIND CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS (Macmillan 1984) Wright Robert THE MORAL ANIMAL (Vintage Books 1995) Young John THE MEMORY SYSTEM OF THE BRAIN (University of California Press 1966) Zohar Danah QUANTUM SELF (William Morrow 1990)

Cognitive Ethology A reader

The whole bibliography

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book concludes Damasios trilogy on emotions

First of all one has to become familiar with Damasios terminology Damasio distinguishes feelings and emotions a feeling is a mental representation of the state of the organisms body the perception of body state whereas an emotion is the reaction to a stimulus and the associated behavior (eg a facial expression) So the feeling is the recognition that an event is taking place whereas the emotion is the visible effect of it Emotions are bodily things while feelings are mental things Emotions are an automatic response They dont require any thinking They are the fundamental mechanism for the regulation of life Emotions precede feelings and are the foundations for feelings

Evolution has prepared us with a repertory of emotions that we apply to the circumstances (somehow we pick an emotion to react to a circumstance the same way we pick an antibody to fight a virus) The effect of the emotion is both some bodily behavior and the creation of a neural map That neural map leads to the feeling and the relationship between maps and feelings is that feelings reflect how well the body is doing according to the map Neural maps of body states are useful to manage the body Feelings allow us to reason about the cause of the emotion Feelings allow us to see the big picture not just to react mechanically to a situation

Basically neither Damasios feeling nor Damasios emotion are what we call feeling and emotion They are only two physical components (possibly side-effects) of what we normally refer to as a feeling or an emotion But Damasio states that his feelings enter the mental realm whereas his emotions dont So his emotions are more physical that his feelings (emotions are neural processes that recognize and react to a situation feelings are maps in the brain that represent the body state)

An emotion is registered by the brain when a stimulus is recognized as useful for survival or for well-being or damaging for survival and well-being This appraisal results in bodily changes such as quickening heart-beat tensing muscles etc These bodily changes also imply that a map changes in the brain and this change is the physical implementation of the feeling

The best part of Damasios theory is probably that he finds an analogy between the emotional system and the immune system The immune system produces antibodies to fight invading viruses or better the invading virus selects the appropriate antibody An emotional response is basically the antibody that reacts to an invading stimulus that is selected by that stimulus

Damasio also sketches the brain regions that account for emotions the amygdala is at the center of the triggering event and the hypothalamus is at the center of the execution

Damasio claims that feelings help us solve complex problems This may seem absurd as my feeling of

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

fear helps me solve very simple problems (eg do not cross a freeway on foot during rush hour) but you have to remember that Damasios feeling is not a feeling it is a lasting memory of an emotion Then you understand why he claims that feelings help manage life in the long-term And you understand why he claims like Spinoza that the mind is simply an idea of the body So for example joy is the idea of equilibrium optimal physical coordination

First came the machinery for emotions (reacting to a stimulus) and then the machinery for feelings (the brain map) Feelings prolong the effect of an emotion because they affect memory

According to this theory all living organisms have proto-selves However only organisms with a complex nervous system capable of seeing their proto-self interacting with the world also have real consciousness These organisms are capable of registering the feeling of what happens Human consciousness is one further step beyond enabled by the fact that we have a large memory that allows autobiographical memory

Damasio does not even try to explain where feelings (my feelings) and consciousness come from He is merely a neurologist analyzing the way the emotional system works

If the mind is an idea of the body the self is an idea of ideas The self groups all the ideas of the body and generates a sense of unity

The problem is that Damasios theory does not explain well the most common emotionsfeelings of our ordinary lives Our state of happiness or sadness is often due to factors external to our body I can easily recover from the momentary pain caused by hurting my finger or my biting my tongue but it takes months to recover from a divorce or a monetary loss Lets say that tomorrow they announce you won a million dollars at the lottery there has not been a significant change in the state of your body but you suddenly become very very happy That happiness is not due to a change in the state of your body but to a change to your circumstances If your mother is gravely ill you are sad that too has no direct impact on the organs and limbs of your body and therefore on the bodys representation in the brain But you can be very sad for many many months It is hard to think of any physical change that has the same long-lasting impact that circumstances can have on an individuals emotional life

There is something fundamental that is missing in Damasios theory that I represent the world (the world not my body) and become sad or happy based on that representation It is the representation of the world (eg the horrors of Rwanda) that make me sad not the representation of the state of my body So emotions are not due (only) to representations of the body So the mind is not the same substance as the body Damasio concludes that the mind is the body If one followed Damasios reasoning one would rather reach the intriguing conclusion that the mind is the world because the mind comes from a representation of what is going on in the world

Damasio extends his discussion to the spiritual realm a rarity in neuroscience But alas his conclusions are scary to say the least A spiritual feeling is for him quite simply a state of maximum harmony the feeling that everything is under control in the organism Since I have never experienced a spiritual feeling I guess that means that my organism is completely screwed up On the other hand the many

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 5: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book reviews - Cognitive Science

Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (Anchor Press 1985) Wolf Fred Alan MIND INTO MATTER (Moment Point 2001) Wolf Fred Alan STAR WAVE MIND CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS (Macmillan 1984) Wright Robert THE MORAL ANIMAL (Vintage Books 1995) Young John THE MEMORY SYSTEM OF THE BRAIN (University of California Press 1966) Zohar Danah QUANTUM SELF (William Morrow 1990)

Cognitive Ethology A reader

The whole bibliography

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book concludes Damasios trilogy on emotions

First of all one has to become familiar with Damasios terminology Damasio distinguishes feelings and emotions a feeling is a mental representation of the state of the organisms body the perception of body state whereas an emotion is the reaction to a stimulus and the associated behavior (eg a facial expression) So the feeling is the recognition that an event is taking place whereas the emotion is the visible effect of it Emotions are bodily things while feelings are mental things Emotions are an automatic response They dont require any thinking They are the fundamental mechanism for the regulation of life Emotions precede feelings and are the foundations for feelings

Evolution has prepared us with a repertory of emotions that we apply to the circumstances (somehow we pick an emotion to react to a circumstance the same way we pick an antibody to fight a virus) The effect of the emotion is both some bodily behavior and the creation of a neural map That neural map leads to the feeling and the relationship between maps and feelings is that feelings reflect how well the body is doing according to the map Neural maps of body states are useful to manage the body Feelings allow us to reason about the cause of the emotion Feelings allow us to see the big picture not just to react mechanically to a situation

Basically neither Damasios feeling nor Damasios emotion are what we call feeling and emotion They are only two physical components (possibly side-effects) of what we normally refer to as a feeling or an emotion But Damasio states that his feelings enter the mental realm whereas his emotions dont So his emotions are more physical that his feelings (emotions are neural processes that recognize and react to a situation feelings are maps in the brain that represent the body state)

An emotion is registered by the brain when a stimulus is recognized as useful for survival or for well-being or damaging for survival and well-being This appraisal results in bodily changes such as quickening heart-beat tensing muscles etc These bodily changes also imply that a map changes in the brain and this change is the physical implementation of the feeling

The best part of Damasios theory is probably that he finds an analogy between the emotional system and the immune system The immune system produces antibodies to fight invading viruses or better the invading virus selects the appropriate antibody An emotional response is basically the antibody that reacts to an invading stimulus that is selected by that stimulus

Damasio also sketches the brain regions that account for emotions the amygdala is at the center of the triggering event and the hypothalamus is at the center of the execution

Damasio claims that feelings help us solve complex problems This may seem absurd as my feeling of

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

fear helps me solve very simple problems (eg do not cross a freeway on foot during rush hour) but you have to remember that Damasios feeling is not a feeling it is a lasting memory of an emotion Then you understand why he claims that feelings help manage life in the long-term And you understand why he claims like Spinoza that the mind is simply an idea of the body So for example joy is the idea of equilibrium optimal physical coordination

First came the machinery for emotions (reacting to a stimulus) and then the machinery for feelings (the brain map) Feelings prolong the effect of an emotion because they affect memory

According to this theory all living organisms have proto-selves However only organisms with a complex nervous system capable of seeing their proto-self interacting with the world also have real consciousness These organisms are capable of registering the feeling of what happens Human consciousness is one further step beyond enabled by the fact that we have a large memory that allows autobiographical memory

Damasio does not even try to explain where feelings (my feelings) and consciousness come from He is merely a neurologist analyzing the way the emotional system works

If the mind is an idea of the body the self is an idea of ideas The self groups all the ideas of the body and generates a sense of unity

The problem is that Damasios theory does not explain well the most common emotionsfeelings of our ordinary lives Our state of happiness or sadness is often due to factors external to our body I can easily recover from the momentary pain caused by hurting my finger or my biting my tongue but it takes months to recover from a divorce or a monetary loss Lets say that tomorrow they announce you won a million dollars at the lottery there has not been a significant change in the state of your body but you suddenly become very very happy That happiness is not due to a change in the state of your body but to a change to your circumstances If your mother is gravely ill you are sad that too has no direct impact on the organs and limbs of your body and therefore on the bodys representation in the brain But you can be very sad for many many months It is hard to think of any physical change that has the same long-lasting impact that circumstances can have on an individuals emotional life

There is something fundamental that is missing in Damasios theory that I represent the world (the world not my body) and become sad or happy based on that representation It is the representation of the world (eg the horrors of Rwanda) that make me sad not the representation of the state of my body So emotions are not due (only) to representations of the body So the mind is not the same substance as the body Damasio concludes that the mind is the body If one followed Damasios reasoning one would rather reach the intriguing conclusion that the mind is the world because the mind comes from a representation of what is going on in the world

Damasio extends his discussion to the spiritual realm a rarity in neuroscience But alas his conclusions are scary to say the least A spiritual feeling is for him quite simply a state of maximum harmony the feeling that everything is under control in the organism Since I have never experienced a spiritual feeling I guess that means that my organism is completely screwed up On the other hand the many

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Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 6: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio LOOKING FOR SPINOZA (Harcourt 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book concludes Damasios trilogy on emotions

First of all one has to become familiar with Damasios terminology Damasio distinguishes feelings and emotions a feeling is a mental representation of the state of the organisms body the perception of body state whereas an emotion is the reaction to a stimulus and the associated behavior (eg a facial expression) So the feeling is the recognition that an event is taking place whereas the emotion is the visible effect of it Emotions are bodily things while feelings are mental things Emotions are an automatic response They dont require any thinking They are the fundamental mechanism for the regulation of life Emotions precede feelings and are the foundations for feelings

Evolution has prepared us with a repertory of emotions that we apply to the circumstances (somehow we pick an emotion to react to a circumstance the same way we pick an antibody to fight a virus) The effect of the emotion is both some bodily behavior and the creation of a neural map That neural map leads to the feeling and the relationship between maps and feelings is that feelings reflect how well the body is doing according to the map Neural maps of body states are useful to manage the body Feelings allow us to reason about the cause of the emotion Feelings allow us to see the big picture not just to react mechanically to a situation

Basically neither Damasios feeling nor Damasios emotion are what we call feeling and emotion They are only two physical components (possibly side-effects) of what we normally refer to as a feeling or an emotion But Damasio states that his feelings enter the mental realm whereas his emotions dont So his emotions are more physical that his feelings (emotions are neural processes that recognize and react to a situation feelings are maps in the brain that represent the body state)

An emotion is registered by the brain when a stimulus is recognized as useful for survival or for well-being or damaging for survival and well-being This appraisal results in bodily changes such as quickening heart-beat tensing muscles etc These bodily changes also imply that a map changes in the brain and this change is the physical implementation of the feeling

The best part of Damasios theory is probably that he finds an analogy between the emotional system and the immune system The immune system produces antibodies to fight invading viruses or better the invading virus selects the appropriate antibody An emotional response is basically the antibody that reacts to an invading stimulus that is selected by that stimulus

Damasio also sketches the brain regions that account for emotions the amygdala is at the center of the triggering event and the hypothalamus is at the center of the execution

Damasio claims that feelings help us solve complex problems This may seem absurd as my feeling of

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

fear helps me solve very simple problems (eg do not cross a freeway on foot during rush hour) but you have to remember that Damasios feeling is not a feeling it is a lasting memory of an emotion Then you understand why he claims that feelings help manage life in the long-term And you understand why he claims like Spinoza that the mind is simply an idea of the body So for example joy is the idea of equilibrium optimal physical coordination

First came the machinery for emotions (reacting to a stimulus) and then the machinery for feelings (the brain map) Feelings prolong the effect of an emotion because they affect memory

According to this theory all living organisms have proto-selves However only organisms with a complex nervous system capable of seeing their proto-self interacting with the world also have real consciousness These organisms are capable of registering the feeling of what happens Human consciousness is one further step beyond enabled by the fact that we have a large memory that allows autobiographical memory

Damasio does not even try to explain where feelings (my feelings) and consciousness come from He is merely a neurologist analyzing the way the emotional system works

If the mind is an idea of the body the self is an idea of ideas The self groups all the ideas of the body and generates a sense of unity

The problem is that Damasios theory does not explain well the most common emotionsfeelings of our ordinary lives Our state of happiness or sadness is often due to factors external to our body I can easily recover from the momentary pain caused by hurting my finger or my biting my tongue but it takes months to recover from a divorce or a monetary loss Lets say that tomorrow they announce you won a million dollars at the lottery there has not been a significant change in the state of your body but you suddenly become very very happy That happiness is not due to a change in the state of your body but to a change to your circumstances If your mother is gravely ill you are sad that too has no direct impact on the organs and limbs of your body and therefore on the bodys representation in the brain But you can be very sad for many many months It is hard to think of any physical change that has the same long-lasting impact that circumstances can have on an individuals emotional life

There is something fundamental that is missing in Damasios theory that I represent the world (the world not my body) and become sad or happy based on that representation It is the representation of the world (eg the horrors of Rwanda) that make me sad not the representation of the state of my body So emotions are not due (only) to representations of the body So the mind is not the same substance as the body Damasio concludes that the mind is the body If one followed Damasios reasoning one would rather reach the intriguing conclusion that the mind is the world because the mind comes from a representation of what is going on in the world

Damasio extends his discussion to the spiritual realm a rarity in neuroscience But alas his conclusions are scary to say the least A spiritual feeling is for him quite simply a state of maximum harmony the feeling that everything is under control in the organism Since I have never experienced a spiritual feeling I guess that means that my organism is completely screwed up On the other hand the many

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 7: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Antonio Damasio

fear helps me solve very simple problems (eg do not cross a freeway on foot during rush hour) but you have to remember that Damasios feeling is not a feeling it is a lasting memory of an emotion Then you understand why he claims that feelings help manage life in the long-term And you understand why he claims like Spinoza that the mind is simply an idea of the body So for example joy is the idea of equilibrium optimal physical coordination

First came the machinery for emotions (reacting to a stimulus) and then the machinery for feelings (the brain map) Feelings prolong the effect of an emotion because they affect memory

According to this theory all living organisms have proto-selves However only organisms with a complex nervous system capable of seeing their proto-self interacting with the world also have real consciousness These organisms are capable of registering the feeling of what happens Human consciousness is one further step beyond enabled by the fact that we have a large memory that allows autobiographical memory

Damasio does not even try to explain where feelings (my feelings) and consciousness come from He is merely a neurologist analyzing the way the emotional system works

If the mind is an idea of the body the self is an idea of ideas The self groups all the ideas of the body and generates a sense of unity

The problem is that Damasios theory does not explain well the most common emotionsfeelings of our ordinary lives Our state of happiness or sadness is often due to factors external to our body I can easily recover from the momentary pain caused by hurting my finger or my biting my tongue but it takes months to recover from a divorce or a monetary loss Lets say that tomorrow they announce you won a million dollars at the lottery there has not been a significant change in the state of your body but you suddenly become very very happy That happiness is not due to a change in the state of your body but to a change to your circumstances If your mother is gravely ill you are sad that too has no direct impact on the organs and limbs of your body and therefore on the bodys representation in the brain But you can be very sad for many many months It is hard to think of any physical change that has the same long-lasting impact that circumstances can have on an individuals emotional life

There is something fundamental that is missing in Damasios theory that I represent the world (the world not my body) and become sad or happy based on that representation It is the representation of the world (eg the horrors of Rwanda) that make me sad not the representation of the state of my body So emotions are not due (only) to representations of the body So the mind is not the same substance as the body Damasio concludes that the mind is the body If one followed Damasios reasoning one would rather reach the intriguing conclusion that the mind is the world because the mind comes from a representation of what is going on in the world

Damasio extends his discussion to the spiritual realm a rarity in neuroscience But alas his conclusions are scary to say the least A spiritual feeling is for him quite simply a state of maximum harmony the feeling that everything is under control in the organism Since I have never experienced a spiritual feeling I guess that means that my organism is completely screwed up On the other hand the many

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 8: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Antonio Damasio

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists who became mass killers and claimed to have strong spiritual feelings were blessed according to Damasios definition with a brain that was working perfectly well

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Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 9: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Keith Stenning

Keith Stenning SEEING REASON (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In my view Stennings book makes two important claims 1 that emotion and cognition cooperate (not interfere) and 2 that emotions are the foundation of our mental life (not just an accident of nature of an evolutionary leftover)

This is a book about representation about how the brain deals with representations The study of mind has largely taken language as its main reference point Semantics for example is derived from studies on language and semantic theories often reflect the way language works But language is not the only way we can communicate some meaning Even if one wants to discount the fact that images are pervasive in nature today we live in the age of multimedia presentation where a picture is often preferred to a story Cognitive Science is good at answering the question how does the brain process the meaning of a sentence but not so good at explaining how the brain processes the meaning of a diagram Diagrams are routinely used to teach Logic so we know that diagrams can be as effective as sentences Some psychologists believe that diagrams are better for teaching Logic but people like me are living exceptions I always found diagrams very confusing to explain logic despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics In general the power of diagrams is often overstated Ultimately there are cases in which a diagram is no more than a sentence presented in a different (but not necessarily easier) way The real difference is that diagrams are often a direct representation whereas sentences are indirect in that syntax (a representation itself) acts as an intermediary between representation and interpretation Needless to say people who prefer one system over the other turn out to employ different strategies to solve problems

Humans have a choice of representations They tend to choose the one that works best the one that greatly simplifies the problem for their brain Basically representation is about reformulating the problem in a way that makes it very easy to solve So human reasoning is meta-reasoning about representation systems

One interesting topic of the book is what is it that students learn when they study Logic If Logic is the foundation of human thought why do we need to learn it again in school And why do we make mistakes when we apply it Shouldnt it come as natural as breathing As Johnson-Laird first noticed our brains do not have a function to produce mistakes then why do we make mistakes Johnson-Laird answered that brains do not use Logic they use mental models and mistakes are by-products of a very efficient way to represent and reason about the world Stenning shows instead that Johnson-Laird failed to prove that Logic is not what human reasoning is all about Stenning provides a different answer its the discourse that causes all the difficulties Students have to figure out the pragmatics (as per Grices maxims) of the circumstances and they have (quite simply) to unpack the terms of the problem from the bundle of natural-language sentences that express it Therein lies the uncertainty that eventually leads to mistakes in reasoning If we remove the ambiguity of natural-language sentences our brains use Logic to solve the problem and do so in a very efficient way

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Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 10: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Keith Stenning

The book turns even more interesting once it starts dealing with the way a representation system is implemented in the mind

Analogical reasoning (which is about finding form in content) sheds some light analogies are directly interpreted representations Reasoning is about discovering and creating representations Analogies are easier to make with narratives that are about human experience because we easily relate the emotional content of one story to the emotional content of the other one (or the emotional content of one social behavior to the emotional content of another social behavior) and that is the form (the analogy) that we are looking for Analogies are often difficult to make in the scientific domain because we cannot relate the scientific theory to our emotions to our human experience In other words the analogies that we solve quickly are the ones that we are biologically programmed to solve quickly thanks to our repertory of emotions and to our understanding of social behavior The same applies to metaphors Lakoffs emphasis on bodily features is replaced by Stenning with an emphasis on emotions we understand a metaphor because the emotions involved are fundamentally the same

It turns out thus that emotions are a way to abstract situations Similar emotions are used to classify situations and objects into concepts and categories In a sense concepts predate our encounter with particular stories Semantically speaking emotions are the ultimate meaning

Stenning can then easily solve Wittgensteins famous riddle we all know what a game is but there is no simple definition of what a game is Stenning thinks that we know what a game is because we know what the emotion related to a game is Anything that elicits the same kind of emotion is a game We dont need to find a definition for the word game

By the same token communication is but the articulation of emotions through the development of adequate representations

By the same token the reason it is so easy for us to learn something so difficult as language (with all its idiosyncrasies) is that language is structured according to our emotional systems It reflects the way our emotions work

Stenning rediscovers an obvious truth we are not only weird systems that build representations but also weird systems that have emotions about them His explanation for this oddity is simple emotions are the implementations of those representations in our minds

Damasio has been reaching similar conclusions about the importance of emotions in guiding reason Emotional reaction is not an interferece with the logical calculation it is the calculation Emotional reactions are implementations of reasoning processes Emotion implements cognition

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Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 11: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Yadin Dudai

Yadin Dudai MEMORY FROM A TO Z (Oxford Univ Press 2002)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Professor Dudai had an excellent idea a dictionaryencyclopedia of terms used in Cognitive Science Each entry (one-two pages long) defines and explains a term the history and the current state of research They are written in plain English with relatively little technicalities involved One wishes he had also devoted entries to more common terms such as (gosh) cognition brain life in order to make it truly a beginners introduction to the science of mind The alphabetical list of entries is followed by 66 pages of references The book is an ideal tool for both students and novices

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Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 12: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Niels Gregersen

Niels Gregersen FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE (Oxford Univ Press 2003)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects articles by a number of distinguished scholars in the fields of self-organizing systems biology physics information science and religion The articles are surprisingly easy to read despite the complexity of the topics that they deal with randomness entropy emergence evolution time and god itself In many ways this is an ideal introduction to the themes that have been emerging as the core themes of research beyond Physics as we know it

Stuart Kauffman discusses the birth of autonomous agents As a strong believer that life was not only possible and probable but almost inevitable Kauffman looks for a universal law that would explain life as an emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks Nothing but a consequence of the fact that autocatalytic reactions do happen in our universe and such reactions can feed themselves recursively forever thus generating higher and higher complexity

Paul Davies discusses the arrow of time and the various interpretations

Ian Stewart analyzes the relationship between Thermodynamics and Gravitation The universe after all is both thermodynamic and gravitational This is an apparent contradiction because thermodynamics mandates that a system gets more and more disordered while gravitation tends to create order Stewart shows that both descriptions of the universe are approximations based on coarse-graining and the different coarse-graining accounts for the different conclusions about the creation of order

Morowitz thinks that the neuron changed dramatically the way things work in this universe Neurons (which convert chemical signals and convert it into an electrical signal) allowed cells to exchange signals very quickly (the speed of electricity is much higher than the speed of chemical reactions) This created new opportunities for life as it made larger organisms possible

A discussion on the anthropic principle leads Gregersen to conclude that life in this universe must necessarily arise given the way it is construed ie this universe has been designed for life to arise

So the breadth of the book is impressive There is hardly a popular topic of our days that is not examined from a scientific point of view

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 13: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

Brian OShaughnessy CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD (Oxford Univ Press

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

British philosopher Brian OShaughnessy has written a 700-pages book that is an old-fashioned philosophical speculation Therein lie both its virtues and its drawbacks The virtue is quickly told it is an inquiry on an impressive scale The drawbacks unfortunately are many First and foremost OShaughnessy seems to be unaware of modern neuroscience He does not mention a single neuroscientist (unless you consider Descartes and Freud as neuroscientists) Nonetheless he proceeds to make extravagant claims about the way the brain works We are treated to lengthy discussions of stream of consciousness self emotions and dreams without ever being told that neuroscientists have found out quite a bit about where when and why those phenomena happen When OShaughnessy writes the obvious enough fact that dream and waking experiential streams are instrinsically dissimilar (page 234) Well they are obvsiouly dissimilar the same way that the Sun obviously turns around the Earth Hobson and Winson have provided evidence to the contrary just like Copernicus provided evidence that maybe it was the Earth to turn around the Sun There are literally hundreds of statements that fly in the face of modern neuroscience Either OShaughnessy has not read any contemporary book on the mind or he doesnt believe neuroscience (but then he should explain why and that would be a much more interesting book) As it stands this is a 700-page book on the fact that the Sun turns around the Earth written after Copernicus proved that this is not a fact at all On page 92 he speculates about the cause of dreams and their contents but seems totally unaware of Jouvets big discoveries we already know what causes dreaming so it is a little silly to speculate At one point OShaughnessy recognizes three mental states consciousness sleep and unconsciousness (page 70) Whatever happened to REM sleep which is significantly different from non-REM sleep and happens to be one of the most studied states of our times And why not just use Hobsons classification and maybe Hobsons analysis of the different chemical systems that implement each state True OShaughnessy examines a few cases (thought experiments) to prove his theories But why should a philosopher imagine an abstract case when neurobiologists can offer a whole library of millions of cases Why not take some real cases and see if his theory works Needless to say even when one tends to agree with OShaughnessys sentences it is difficult to go along with his reasoning precisely because he provides no hard evidence It is just his personal opinion which is as good as any of the six billion opinions on this planet Unless he provides a bit of scientific evidence for it which he doesnt So one advances page after page without ever being fully convinced by the statements on the previous page and eventually one is floating in a tide of unproven statements The second problem with the book is the language I scoured the Internet for reviews of this book and couldnt find any text that would summarize what this books conclusions are Now that I finished reading the 700-pages I know why it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand several key passages Either they are frustratingly vague or they are frustratingly naive or they are frustratingly obscure In my opinion the reason that noone has posted a brief summary of this book is that noone has understood the English (not even the ones who define it an indispensable contribution to the field but then fail to tell us what that contribution would be)

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Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 14: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Brian OShaughnessy

It is also obvious from the tone of the conversation that OShaughnessy is unaware of which of his conjectures are pretty much mainstream today (so maybe you dont need to write dozens of pages to prove them) and which could be highly controversional (and therefore would need to be justified with some hard evidence) Last but not least OShaughnessys theories are just not convincing even if one is willing to deal with pure unscientific speculation He begins by claiming that only mental objects are sensations (page 16) which is not what I feel in my mind (in fact I am rarely aware of my sensations un less they are truly painful or pleasurable) He believes that consciousness is first extensionality and only later intentionality (page 17) Consciousness is directed to the world and perception is our access to the world so perception is key to consciousness So I guess blind people are less conscious than people who see He claims that the function of consciousness is to keep us in touch with the world to get out attention about what is going on in the world It is a claim that one could accept just because it seems reasonably but even for philosophers this is a well-known problem who is the us that consciousness is acting upon If it is not consciousness itself who is consciousness informing about the world After explaining what consciousness does for us he claims that consciousness is without direction without content without significance (page 81) He argues that self-awareness is a precondition for awareness of the world (page 154) so the function of consciousness can be rephrased as keeping us in touch with the world from the vantage point of a mind which knows itself (page 155) Again who is the us that consciousness helps out if it is not consciousness itself He claims that perception is an irreducible mental event (page 338) Of course a neurobiologist can easily reduce perception to a sequence of neural processes He explores the relationship between perception and action but again seems to be unaware of biological research in that field Ditto for the lengthy part on vision In concluding I failed to understand most of the book and what I understood did not interest me much because it either started from premises that conflict with the findings of science or it made claims that may well turn out to be truth but they were not justified by any scientific data Perhaps the most frustrating pages of this frustrating book were the 16 final pages of conclusions Far from being a summary of the book (as they claim to be) they introduce new language and new concepts and new statements thus further confusing the whole issue

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Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 15: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour THE END OF TIME (Oxford Univ Press 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Einstein proved that Time is not absolute and said something about how we experience time in different ways depending on how we are moving But he hardly explained what Time is And nobody else ever has British physicist Julian Barbour has a theory that Time does not exist and that most of Physics troubles arise from assuming that it does exist We have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it We have no evidence of the future other than our belief in it Barbour believes that it is all an illusion there is no motion and no change Instants and periods do not exist What exists is only time capsules which are static containers of records Those records fool us into believing that things change and events happen There exists a configuration space that contains all possible instants all possible nows This is Platonia These instants -- We experience a set of these instants ie a subset of Platonia Barbour is inspired by Leibniz theory that the universe is not a container of objects but a collection of entities that are both space and matter The universe does not contain things it is things Barbour does not answer the best part of the puzzle who is deciding which path we follow in Platonia Who is ordering the instants of Platonia Barbour simply points to quantum mechanics that prescribes we should always be in the instant that is most likely We experience an ordered flow of events because that is what we were designed for to interpret the sequence of most likely instants as an ordered flow of events Barbour also offers a solution to integrating relativity and quantum mechanics remove time from a quantum description of gravity Remove time from the equations In his opinion time is precisely the reason why it has proved so difficult to integrate relativity and quantum theories

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 16: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER (Routledge

1980) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects essays written by the American physicist David Bohm in the 1960s and 1970s that stradle the line between philosophy and cosmology Bohm originally proposed his theory of matter in 1952 and these essays simply refine it Quantum and Relativity theories may be very different but they agree denying the existence of single static particles they agree in describing the world as an undivided whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts of the universe are constantly interacting and that includes the observer the I The universe is characterized by a flow that integrates everything individual forms are the equivalent of the still photograph of an object in motion It turns out that we perceive the flow of reality through those static images but those still images are only a simplification of motion By analogy what goes on in our mind is a stream of consciousness from which we can abstract concepts ideas etc (forms of thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought Thought is a kind of movement and concepts are kinds of objects Bohm believes that there is just one flow in which both matter and mind flow and that this flow can be known only implicitly through the forms (the still photographs) that we can grasp out of this flow Bohm therefore rejects the distinction between what we are thinking and what is going on as well as the notion that one part of reality (my mind) can know another part of reality it is wrong to separate the thinker from the thought The thinker is not separate from the reality that he thinks about the thinker and that reality are parts of the same flow Bohm points to the fragmentation of consciousness that our view of the world has caused as an illness of our times The conviction that thinker and object of his thinking (between thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our mental life This conviction comes from the structure of language itself modern language is based on the pattern subject- verb- object that clearly separates the subject and the object whereas in realty the key actor is the verb not the subject and the verb unites the subject and the object in one undivided action To support his claims Bohm offers a new interpretation of Quantum Theory based on hidden variables He assumes that the wave function does not represent just a set of probabilities it represents an actual field This field exists and acts upon particles the same way a classical potential does The quantum potential associated to this field is function of the wave function This value fluctuates rapidly and what Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newtons physics reads a value for quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles) Quantum Reality deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like Newtons physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities The behavior of the particle as observed by Quantum Mechanics is determined by the particles position and momentum (that are not incompatible in Bohms theory) the wave field and the sub-quantum fluctuations After all the study of elementary particles has shown that even elementary particles can be destroyed and created which means that they are not the ultimate components of the universe that there must be un underlying reality or in Bohms terms an underlying flux Bohm finds that the basic problem is in an obsolete notion of order

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Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 17: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Bohm

Cartesian order (the grid of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects but inadequate for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasie and in particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohm has been focusing on Bohms solution is to contrast the explicate order that we perceive (for example the Cartesian order) and that Physics describess with the implicate order which is an underlying hidden layer of relationships The explicate order is but a manifestation of the implicate order Space and time for example are forms of the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order The implicate order is similar to the order within a hologram the implicate order of a hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image but the implicate order is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image In fact each region of the hologram contains a representation of the entire image The implicate order and the explicate order are fundamentally different The main difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the others In the intricate order the whole universe is enfolded in everything and everything is enfolded in the whole in the extricate order things become (relatively) independent Bohm suggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces and ultimately space and time At the level of the implicate order which is now a sort of higher dimension there is no difference between matter and mind That difference arises within the explicate order As we travel inwards we travel towards that higher dimension the implicate order in which mind and matter are the same As we travel outwards we travel towards the explicate order in which subject and object are separate Mental and physical processes are essentially the same Therefore a mind-like quality is present in every particle and it becomes more mind-like as we travel to lower levels of reality There is an inherent affinity between consciousness and implicate order For example when we listen to music we directly perceive the implicate order not just the explicate order of those sounds

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Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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                                                                                                          • Book review of Howard Eichenbaum
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                                                                                                                  • Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco
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                                                                                                                          • Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg
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                                                                                                                                  • Book review of George Lakoff
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                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Paul MacLean
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                                                                                                                                                  • Book review of Steven Mithen
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                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Hilary Putnam
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                                                                                                                                                                  • Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist
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                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Terrence Deacon
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                                                                                                                                                                                  • Book review of David Chalmers
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                                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Steven Mithen
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                                                                                                                                                                                                  • Book review of Matt Ridley
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                                                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Henry Stapp
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                                                                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Colin McGinn
Page 18: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Bohm

David Bohm THE UNDIVIDED UNIVERSE (Routledge 1993)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

One of Quantum Theorys most direct consequences is indeterminism one cannot know at the same time the value of both the position and the momentum of a particle One only knows a probability for each of the possible values and the whole set of probabilities constitute the wave associated with the particle Only when one does observe the particle does one particular value occur only then does the wave of probabilities collapse to one specific value Bohm reviews other interpretations of this phenomenon and focuses on the mystery of the collapse of the wave function the transition from the quantum world to the classical world This introduces a discontinuity that has puzzled physicists ever since Bohm believes there is a deeper level at which the apparent discontinuity of the collapse disappears Bohm offers instead an interpretation in terms of particles with well-defined position and momentum What he adds to other interpretations is hidden variables in the form of a quantum potential A particle is always accompanied by such a field This field represents the subquantum reality Bohm introduces the notion of active in-formation (as in give form for example to a particles movement) A particle is moved by whatever energy it has but its movement is guided by information in the quantum field The quantum potential reflects whatever is going on in the environment including the measuring apparatus Note that the effect of the quantum potential depends only on its form not on its magnitude Since this quantum field is affected by all particles nonlocality is a feature of reality a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment And viceversa the whole cannot be reduced to its parts The earlier interpretations of Quantum Theory were trying to reconcile the traditional classical concept of measurement (somebody who watches a particle through a microscope) with a quantum concept of system Bohm dispenses with the classical notion of measurement one cannot separate the measuring instrument from the measured quantity as they interact all the time It is misleading to call this act measurement It is an interaction just like any other interaction and as Heisenbergs principle states the consequence of this interaction is not a measurement at all This book offers a more technical treatment of implicate order and its relationship to consciousness than Wholeness and the Implicate order

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Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 19: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza GENES PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point 2000)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Italian biologist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza who spent most of his adult life at Stanford has written a book that reads more like an autobiography but is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the field of genetics that he helped pioneer In the 1950s Cavalli-Sforza first had the idea that one could use genetic information to trace the genealogical tree of species of human habits and of languages This method now widely employed around the world led to the understanding of how humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world It also helped clarify how farming spread from Europe elsewhere And it helped reconstruct the evolution of languages

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 20: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS (Harcourt Brace 1999)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Portuguese neurologist Damasio thinks that consciousness is an internal narrative The I is not telling the story the I is created by stories told in the mind (You are the music while the music lasts) Damasio breaks the problem of consciousness into two parts the movie in the brain kind of experience (how a number of sensory inputs are trasnformed into the continuous flow of sensations of the mind) and the self (how the sense of owning that movie comes to be) The former is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Neurological research has proven that distinct parts of the brain work in concert to represent reality Brain cells represent events occurring somewhere else in the body Brain cells are intentional if you will They are not only maps of the body besides the topography they also represent what is taking place in that topography Indirectly the brain also represents whatever the organism is interacting with since that interaction is affecting one or more organs (eg retina tips of the fingers ears) whose events are represented in brain cells The brain stem and hypothalamus are the organs that regulate life that control the balance of chemical activity required for living Consequently they also represent the continuity of the same organism Damasio believes that the self originates from these biological processes the brain has a representation of the body and has a representation of the objects the body is interacting with and therefore can discriminate self and non-self and then generate a second order narrative in which the self is interacting with the non-self (the external world) This second-order representation occurs mainly in the thalamus From an evolutionary perspective we can presume that the sense of the self is useful to induce purposeful action based from the movie in the mind The self provides a survival advantage because the movie in the mind acquires a first-person character ie it acquires a meaning for that first person ie it highlights what is good and bad for that first person a first person which happens to be the body of the organism disguised as a self This second-order narrative derives from the first-order narrative constructed from the sensory mappings In other words all of this is happening while the movie is playing The sense of the self is created while the movie is playing by the movie itself The thinker is created by the thought The spectator of the movie is part of the movie

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 21: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio DESCARTES ERROR (GP Putnams Sons 1995)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Damasio is trying to build a neurobiology of rationality In this book he provides a neurophysiological analysis of memory emotions and consciousness The book has three themes 1 Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather than on a single brain centre 2 Feelings are views of the bodys internal organs Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept 3 The mind is about the body the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about the representation of the body in the brain The mental requires the existence of a body for more than mere support the mind is not a phenomenon of the brain alone The mind derives from the entire organism as a whole The mind reflects two types of interaction between the body and the brain and between them and the environment The neural basis for the self resides with the continous reactivation of 1 the individuals past experience (which provides the individuals sense of identity) and 2 a representation of the individuals body (which provides the individuals sense of a whole) The self is continously reconstructed This is a purely non-verbal process language is not a prerequisite for consciousness Nonetheless language is the source of the I a second order narrative capacity Damasios embodied mind is closely related to Edelmans self imbued with value Damasios theory of convergence zones (not presented in this book) is tackling the issue of consciousness When an image enters the brain via the visual cortex it is channelled through convergence zones in the brain until it is identified Each convergence zone handles a category of objects (faces animals trees etc) a convergence zone does not store permanent memories of words and concepts but helps reconstructing them Once the image has been identified an acoustical pattern corresponding to the image is constructed by another area of the brain Finally an articulatory pattern is constructed so that the word that the image represents can be spoken There are about twenty known categories that the brain uses to organize knowledge fruitsvegetables plants animals body parts colors numbers letters nouns verbs proper names faces facial expressions emotions sounds Convergence zones are indexes that draw information from other areas of the brain The memory of something is stored in bits at the back of the brain (near the gateways of the senses) features are recognized and combined and an index of these features is formed and stored When the brain needs to bring back the memory of something it will follow the instructions in that index recover all the features and link them to other associated categories As information is processed moving from station to station through the brain each station creates new connections reaching back to the earlier levels of processing These connections always allows the brain to work in reverse Convergence zones may be common to all individuals or different from individual to individual based on experience Emotions are the brains interpretation of reactions to changes in the world Emotional memories involving fear can never be erased The prefrontal cortex amygdala and right cerebral cortex form a system for reasoning that gives rise to emotions and feelings The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala process a visual stimulus by comparing it with previous experience and generate a response that is transmitted both to the body and to the back of the brain Convergence zones are organized in a hierarchy lower convergence zones pass information to higher convergence zones Lower zones select relevant details from sensorial information and send summaries to higher zones which successively refine and integrate the information In order to be conscious of something a higher convergence zone must retrieve from the lower convergence zones all the sensory fragments that are related to that something Therefore consciousness occurs when the higher convergence zones fire signals back to lower convergence zones

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 22: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Antonio Damasio

In this book Damasio formulated the somatic-marker hypothesis but it was barely sketched It will be refined as follows in following writings Briefly stated the only thing that matters is what goes on in the brain The brain maintains a representation of what is going on in the body A change in the environment may result in a change in the body This is immediately reflected in the brains representation of the body state The brain also creates associations between body states and emotions Finally the brain makes decisions by using these associations whether in conjunction or not with reasoning The brain evolved over millions of years for a purpose it was advantageous to have an organ that could monitor integrate and regulate all the other organs of the organism The brains original purpose was therefore to manage the wealth of signals that represent the state of the body (soma) signals that come mainly from the inner organs and from muscles and skin That function is still there although the brain has evolved many other functions (in particular for reasoning) Damasio has identified a region of the brain (in the right non-dominant hemisphere) that could be the place where the representation of the body state is maintained At least Damasios experiments show that when the region is severely damaged (usually after a stroke) the person loses awareness of the left side of the body The brain links the body changes with the emotion that accompanies it For example the image of a tiger with the emotion of fear By using both inputs the brain constructs new representations that encode perceptual information and the body state that occurred soon afterwards Eventually the image of a tiger and the emotion of fear as they keep occurring together get linked in one brain event The brain stores the association between the body state and the emotional reaction That association is a somatic marker Somatic markers are the repertory of emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we use for our daily decisions The somatic marker records emotional reactions to situations Former emotional reactions to similar past situations is just what the brain uses to reduce the number of possible choices and rapidly select one course of action There is an internal preference system in the brain that is inherently biased to seek pleasure and avoid pain When a similar situation occurs again an automatic reaction is triggered by the associated emotion if the emotion is positive like pleasure then the reaction is to favor the situation if the emotion is negative like pain or fear then the reaction is to avoid the situation The somatic marker works as an alarm bell either steering us away from choices that experience warns us against or steering us towards choices that experience makes us long for When the decision is made we do not necessarily recall the specific experiences that contributed to form the positive or negative feeling In philosophical terms a somatic marker plays the role of both belief and desire In biological terms somatic markers help rank qualitatively a perception In other words the brain is subject to a sort of emotional conditioning Once the brain has learned what the emotion associated to a situation the emotion will influence any decision related to that situation The brain areas that monitor body changes begin to respond automatically whenever a similar situation arises It is a popular belief that emotion must be constrained because it is irrational too much emotion leads to irrational behavior Instead Damasio shows that a number of brain-damage cases in which a reduction in emotionality was the cause for irrational behaviour Somatic markers help make rational decisions and help making them quickly Emotion far from being a biological oddity is actually an integral part of cognition Reasoning and emotions are not separate in fact they cooperate Damasio believes that the brain structures responsible for emotion and the ones responsible for reason partially overlap and this fact lends physical neural evidence to his hypothesis that emotion and reason cooperate Those brain structures also communicate directly with the rest of the body and this suggests the importance of their operations for the organisms survival

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Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 23: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Antonio Damasio

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Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 24: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Deutsch

David Deutsch THE FABRIC OF REALITY (Penguin 1997)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this book the Israeli physicist David Deutsch advances a theory that aims at unifying theory of evolution theory of computation theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of matter (quantum theory) Deutsch starts out by attacking two dominant positions in philosophy of science instrumentalism (that scientific theories do not explain reality they are simply instruments for making predictions and as long as two theories both make valid predictions neither can be considered better than the other a theory simply predicts the outcome of observations does not explain reality the explanation is something that we attach to the theory in order to make it easier to remember) and positivism (only statements about predicting observations are meaninful) Deutsch disagrees scientific knowledge consists of explanations not of facts or of predictions of facts Deutsch believes that the explanation is as important as the predictions experiments are the method that science uses to verify explanations and predictions are what discriminates between theories Predictions have a practical purpose but they are not the reason we do science Proof is that there is an infinite number of possible theories that we will never even test they provide no explanation of reality and therefore we are not interested in testing whether they are true Then he attacks both reductionists (the explanation of a system is in terms of its components) and holists (the only legitimate explanation is in terms of the whole system) Again Deutsch believes in explanations higher-level explanations that can provide adequate answers to why questions why is a specific atom of copper on the nose of the statue of Churchill Not because the dynamic equations of the universe predict this and that and not because of the story of that particle but because Churchill was a famous person and famous people are rewarded with statues and statues are built of bronze and bronze is made of copper The reductionists believe that the rules governing elementary particles (the base of the reductionist hierarchy) explain everything but they do not provide the kind of answer that we would call explanation Reductionists also believe that an explanation must explain how later events are caused from earlier events This is also flowed for example we have theories of time which of course cant possibly be based on earlier events of time Deutsch claims that we need four strands of science to undestand reality quantum theory theory of evolution epistemology (theory of knowledge) and theory of computation The combined theory is a theory of everything Deutsch views the technology of virtual reality as an expression of the most important power of computers to simulate our world He formulates the Turing principle it is possible to build a virtual-reality system that can simulate any environment which can exist in nature Virtual reality is a physical embodiment of theories about an environment So defined virtual reality is an important property of nature it is life itself Genes embody knowledge about their econological niche An organism is merely the immediate environment which copies the replicators (the organisms genes) The genes on the other hand represent the survival of knowledge knowledge about the environment An organism is a virtual-reality rendering of the genes Therefore living processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process Thus virtual reality is not only a property of computers buy a general property of nature the very essence of life itself That said Deutsch proposes a new type of computation Classical computers conform to classical Physics He proposes to build quantum computers that perform quantum computation Such computers would be able through phenomena of quantum interference to perform a new class of computations which are not possible with todays computers Classical computation is actually an oxymoron as computation has always been quantisized (computation works with bits and bytes not with continuous values) Based on the odd outcomes of quantum experiments Deutsch decides that our universe cannot possibly constitute the whole of reality it can only be part of a multiverse of parallel universes Deutschs multiverse is not a mere collection of parallel universes with a single flow of time He highlights the contradiction of assuming an

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Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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                                                                                                                                                                  • Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist
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Page 25: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Deutsch

external superior time in which all spacetimes flow This is still a classical view of the world Deutschs manyverse is instead a collection of moments There is no such a thing as the flow of time Each moment is a universe of the manyverse Each moment exists forever it does not flow from a previous moment to a following one Time does not flow because time is simply a collection of universes We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments Each version of us is indirectly aware of the others because the various universes are linked together by the same physical laws and causality provides a convenient ordering But causality is not deterministic in the classical way it is more like predicting than like causing If we analyze the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we can predict where some of the missing pieces fall But it would be misleding to say that our analysis of the puzzle caused those pieces to be where they are although it is true that they position is determined by the other pieces being where they are

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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                                                                                                          • Book review of Howard Eichenbaum
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                                                                                                                  • Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco
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                                                                                                                          • Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg
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                                                                                                                                  • Book review of George Lakoff
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                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Paul MacLean
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                                                                                                                                                  • Book review of Steven Mithen
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                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Hilary Putnam
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                                                                                                                                                                  • Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist
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                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Terrence Deacon
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                                                                                                                                                                                  • Book review of David Chalmers
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                                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Steven Mithen
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                                                                                                                                                                                                  • Book review of Matt Ridley
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                                                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Henry Stapp
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                                                                                                                                                                                                                  • Book review of Paul MacLean
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                                                                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Colin McGinn
Page 26: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

Howard Eichenbaum COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEMORY (Oxford Univ

2002) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum has written a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of research on the neurological bases of memory The book is organized around four themes which in English all begin with the letter C connection cognition compartmentalization consolidation These four aspects cover most of what one needs to know about how the brain does memory

Connection is about the electrochemical mechanism that allows a brain to retain information about what happened We know that this is due to the plasticity of the neural network ie to the fact that the strength of each connection between two neurons can change in time and does change in response to each new stimulus The book offers a short introduction to the history of neurology through the main discoveries and the main contributors

Cognition is about the external behavior of memory what we see as psychologists not as physicists

Compartmentalization (a rather horrible term and rather misleading in this case) is the most interesting part of the book and has to do with the discovery of different kinds and processes of memory The book describes how the brain accomodates several different memory systems each of them involving the cortex but each characterized by different pathways leading from the cortex to other areas of the brain Studies on amnesia (particularly by Neal Cohen in 1980) show that there are at least two different kinds of memory declarative memory (the memory that one can consciously remember which is forgotten in an amnesia) and procedural memory (the skills and procedures which are usually not forgotten as people with amnesia can still perform most actions they have learned throughout their lives) Recent studies seem to prove that the hippocampus is the key to declarative memory or at least the key to linking together declarative memories Procedural memory is realized by circuits that involve the motor areas of the cortex and two loops that spread through the striatum and the cerebellum acquiring skills is indeed a complex phenomenon Emotional memory on the other hand seems to depend on the working of the amygdala These three memory systems are physically connected to the cortex along different pathways which means that they can work in parallel

The book is also useful to learn more about the structure of the brain There are four main areas (lobes) of the cortex frontal parietal occipital temporal lobes Each one is a complex entity with its own specialized sub-areas So are the hippocampus and the amygdala an understanding of their functions requires an understanding of their structure

Consolidation is about the physical processes that allow for memories to become permanently encoded in the brain Two main processes have been identified one in which the strength of connections is fixed by a localized sequence of chemical events and one in which the strength of connections is calculated

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Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 27: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Howard Eichenbaum

through extensive processing that involves several areas of the brain (a reorganization of memory)

Finally retrieval of a specific memory involves the ability to search the consolidated memories which requires the existence of a working memory where we can store items for a few seconds This function is most likely implemented by the prefrontal cortex

The value of the book is not su much in speculating how many kinds of memory a brain has but in offering detailed physical hypotheses on how each of these memory systems works inside the brain

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 28: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press 2000) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Spanish neurologist Francisco Mora and the American biophysicist Carl Girolfi have an interesting theory on what brains do for us they regulate our temperature Their reconstruction of how life was born on Earth and how brains were born on Earth is biased towards showing that from the beginning life was capable of reacting to temperature even the earliest unicellular organisms must have been capable of sensing heat and cold Heat after all was the primeval source of energy for living organisms These organisms required heat to survive and the main source of heat came from the environment The progenitors of the living cell the protocells were probably units of energy conversion converting heat into motion just like a heat engine The Dutch chemist Anthonie Muller the proponent of thermosynthesis has shown in 1995 that such systems could form spontaneously in the primordial conditions of the Earth If they survived these organisms must have developed a way to react to positive and negative stimuli such as correct or excessive amount of heat The early nervous system were assemblies made of cells already capable of sensing and reacting to temperature Prove is that all known organisms including unicellular ones are capable of avoiding adverse environmental temperatures In other words throughout evolution all organisms were capable of sensing external temperature The authors speculate that during the transition from water to land (from stable temperature to wildly variable temperature) the nervous system must have learned to control body temperature Nocturnal animals must have developed also a means to overcome the loss of environmental heat and produce heat internally And the autonomic control of temperature was born This feature allowed the evolution from cold-blooded animals (animals whose temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment whose only sources of heat are external sources) to warm-blooded animals (animals that maintain constant body temperature by producing heat internally) Cold-blooded animals are dependent on environmental heat when ambient temperature rises they are active and seek food when ambient temperature decreases their motor activity slows down Warm-blooded animals overcame this limitation thanks to that self-regulating feature thanks to the ability of producing heat internally when heat from outside is not enough And they freed themselves from their habitat they were capable of changing habitat because they were capable of maintaining their body temperature regardless of changes in the external supply of heat A very efficient self-regulating heat engine that maintains temperature constant opens up new opportunities for evolution one organ that benefited was the brain that could grow to its actual size and complexity If it didnt have ad adequate supply of energy the brain would not be capable of performing the tasks it performs A hot organ is required for thinking Modern mammals who have the highest demand for internal production of heat regulate temperature through a whole system of thermostats not just one Experiments have proved that mammals have not one but many centers of control of body temperature in the spinal cord in the brainstem in the limbic system and mainly in the hypothalamus Rather than one point of control this is more like a complex system that peaks in the hypothalamus Ultimately the brain is responsible for maintaining a constant temperature the very constant temperature that allows the brain to function

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Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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                                                                                                                                                                  • Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist
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Page 29: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Gisolfi Carl amp Mora Francisco

That said the authors turn to some puzzling aspects of body temperature First of all humans can survive only in a narrow temperature range a few degrees below or over 37 degrees a human body becomes a dead body Why regulate at 37 degrees instead of say 20 It turns out that 37 degrees is the ideal temperature for balancing heat production and heat loss Fever sounds like a paradox why would the body increase heat production to the point of threatening its own survival Does fever enhance survival or is it an evolutionary mistake It turns out that fever does enhance survival but not the kind a selfish person likes Fever is a mechanism to preserve the species rather than the individual either it kills the parasite or it kills the individual who is carrying the parasite and who could infect the others Tha authors finally deal with sweating which they prove is a cooling system (and not surprisingly prominent in humans) with the circadian cycle of body temperature and iits relation to sleep (sleep could be a way to cool off) and finally with physical exercise which also causes an increase in body temperature like fever but of a benign kind Although the style is too technical for a general audience the book contains a wealth of observation that could benefit ordinary people as well as scholars

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Book review of Elkhonon Goldberg

Elkhonon Goldberg THE EXECUTIVE BRAIN (Oxford Univ Press 2001)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Russian neurologist Goldberg Elkhonon a pupil of Luria has written a book devoted to the importance of the frontal lobe the youngest part of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) The frontal lobe is credited with liberating an organism from the slavery of instinct of elevating it from the stimulus-response kind of life to the perception-cognition-action kind of life Unfortunately the book is mostly the recount of his favorite clinical cases (plus a bit of autobiography) than an analysis of how the frontal lobe works Goldberg has an interesting take on the lateralization of the brain the right emisphere is best at dealing with new situations whereas the left emisphere seems limited to performing routines The cycle from novelty to routine is one of the fundamental features of cognition Its the ability to synthesize the world in stereotyped action that allows us to survive and eventually perform complex tasts Cognition depends on this transition of information from the right to the left emisphere So the right emisphere does a key job Lesions to the left (dominant) emisphere tend to be more dramatic and immediate but Goldberg argues that lesions to the right emisphere can be more damaging in the long term although less visible Goldberg also questions the belief that the brain is structured in modules He argues that at least the neocortex does not work as a set of modules but rather as a surface that smoothly transitions from one cognitive function to another There is a cognitive continuum The mental representation of something is a whole which is distributed around the neocortex In 1989 Goldberg announced his theory of gradients What interacts is not different modules but different gradients Goldberg believes that modularity is limited to the older parts of the brain whereas the newer parts employ this gradients-based processing

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Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 31: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of George Lakoff

George Lakoff WOMEN FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS (Univ of

Chicago Press 1987) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

In this historical landmark of a book Lakoff starts off by demolishing the traditional view of categories that categories are defined by common features of their members that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols that concepts are internal representations of external reality that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects Through a number of experiments Lakoff first proves that categories depend on two more factors the bodily experience of the categorizer and what Lakoff calls the imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy mental imagery) of the categorizer His close associate Mark Johnson has shown that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts some schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience (eg the container schema the part- whole schema the link schema the center-periphery schema) We know these schemata even before we acquire the related concepts because such kinesthetic schemata come with a basic logic that is used to directly understand them Thus Lakoff argues that thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with (they are directly understood in terms of our physical experience) basic-level concepts (which are meaningful because they reflect our sensorimotor life) and kinesthetic image schemas (which are meaningful because they reflect our spatial life) Other meaningful symbolic structures are built up from these elementary ones through imaginative processes such as metaphor As a corollary everything we use in language even the smallest unit has meaning And it has meaning not because it refers to something but because it is either related to our bodily experience or because it is built on top of other meaning-bearing elements Thought is embodiment of concepts via direct and indirect experience Concepts grow out of bodily experience and are understood in terms of it The core of our conceptual system is directly grounded in bodily experience Meaning is based on experience With Putnam meaning is not in the mind But at the same time thought is imaginative those concepts that are not directly grounded in bodily experience are created by imaginative processes such as metaphor Categorization is the main way that humans make sense of their world The traditional view that categories are defined by common properties of their members is being replaced by Roschs theory of prototypes Lakoffs experientialism assumes that thought is embodied (grows out of bodily experience) is imaginative (capable of employing metaphor metonymy and imagery to go beyond the literal representation of reality) is holistic (ie is not atomistic) has an ecological structure (is more than just symbol manipulation) Lakoff reviews studies on categories (Wittgenstein Berlin Barsalou Kay Rosch Tversky) and summarizes the state of the art categories are organized in a taxonomic hierarchy and categories in the middle are the most basic Knowledge is mainly organized at the basic level and is organized around part-whole divisions Lakoff claims that linguistic categories are of the same type as other categories In order to deal with categories one needs cognitive models of four kinds propositional models (which specify elements their properties and relations among them) image-schematic models (which specify schematic images) metaphoric models (which map from a model in one domain to a model in another

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Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 32: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of George Lakoff

domain) and metonymic models (which map an element of a model to another) The structure of thought is characterized by such cognitive models Categories have properties that are determined by the bodily nature of the categorizer and that may be the result of imaginative processes (metaphor metonymy imagery) Thought makes use of symbolic structures which are meaningful to begin with Language is characterized by symbolic models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system Categorization is implemented by idealized cognitive models that provide the general principles on how to organize knowledge From his web site We conceptualize the world using metaphor so commonly automatically and unconsciously that were not aware of it As a result we think metaphorically a large part of the time and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world Over the past fifteen years its been discovered that we share a fixed conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of metaphorical mappings each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another typically more concrete domain Our brains are built for metaphorical thought Since weve evolved with high-level cortical areas taking input from lower level perceptual and motor areas it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 33: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 34: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 35: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 36: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam THE THREEFOLD CORD MIND BODY AND WORLD

(Columbia Univ 1999) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

Putnam is a philosopher deservedly famous for 1 writing in a very ambigous and confusing style 2 making a big deal of small issues and 3 changing his mind very often Such is the case with the first part of this book whereis Putnam simply tells us that he thought it over and now believes our perceptions tells us the truth He used to side with most philosophers who think perceptions are intermediaries between our mind and reality Well never truly know what is out there Now Putnam believes we do know what is out there it is what we perceive The second part of the book is occupied with the mind-body problem Putnam takes issues against two popular views First he criticizes the thought experiment of the zombie a being who is identical to you atom by atom but does not have a mental life Putnam thinks this is an oxymoron because mental life is caused by your bodily content Therefore same body same mind On the other hand Putnam also takes issue with the identity theory that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain (the same way electricity is identical with the motion of charged particles) Putnam thinks that mental states are in a sense outside the body To some extent mental states are due to the environment The content of a mental state depends the environment and may vary between identical people in different worlds For example the concept of water that I have depends on the fact that I grew up in a world where water is what it is in this world and it has been named that way and used for some purposes and so forth In another world my concept of water would be different Putnam prefers to think of the mind as a set of skills or capacities All of this is fine and dandy but 1 it is not written in a very clear style so it lends itself to several possible interpretations 2 it makes a big deal of a couple of trivial ideas that are shared by billions of people who did not spend the best years of their lives pondering them and 3 we already know that Putnam will change his mind again (long may he live of course)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Milestone books in Philosophy of Mind

Other milestone books of Philosophy and Science

Chomsky Noam SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957) Broadbent Donald PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION (1958) Popper LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (1959) Whorf Benjamin Lee LANGUAGE THOUGHT AND REALITY (1956) Blumenberg Hans Metaphorology (1960) Quine Willard WORD AND OBJECT (1960) Putnam Minds and Machines (1960) Prigogine Ilya INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (1961) Levinas Emmanuel Totalite` et Infini (1961) Kuhn Structure Of Scientific Revolution (1962) Austin John Langshaw HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (1962) Culbertson James THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (1963) Feyerabend Paul Mental Events and the Brain (1963) Laing Ronald The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1964) Marcuse Herbert LHOMME A UN DIMENSION (1964) Barthes Roland Elements de Semiologie (1964) McLuhan Marshall Understanding Media (1964) Vygotsky Lev THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (MIT Press 1964) Rorty Richard Mind-body Identity (1965) Buchler Justus METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES (1966) Gibson James Jerome THE SENSES CONSIDERED AS PERCEPTUAL SYSTEMS (1966) Foucault Michel The Order of Things (1966) Koestler Arthur THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE (1967) Derrida Jacques Speech and Phenomena (1967) Morowitz Harold ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (1968) Von Bertalanffy Ludwig GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY (1968) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Dennett Daniel CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1969) Simon Herbert Alexander THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL (1969) Searle John SPEECH ACTS (1969) Mayr Ernst POPULATION SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1970) Monod Jacques LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE (1971) Pribram Karl LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (1971) Tulving Endel ORGANIZATION OF MEMORY (1972) Neisser Ulric COGNITION AND REALITY (1975) Thom Rene STRUCTURAL STABILITY AND MORPHOGENESIS (1975)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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                                                                                                                                                                  • Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist
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Page 38: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Wilson Edward Osborne SOCIOBIOLOGY (1975) Putnam Hilary MIND LANGUAGE AND REALITY (1975) Grice Paul Logic and Conversation (1975) Dawkins Richard THE SELFISH GENE (1976) Haken Hermann SYNERGETICS (1977) Jaynes Julian THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977) Gould Stephen Jay EVER SINCE DARWIN (1978) Rosch Eleanor COGNITION AND CATEGORIZATION (1978) Guy Murchie SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (1978) Lovelock James GAIA (1979) Dreyfus Hubert WHAT COMPUTERS CANT DO (1979) Eigen Manfred amp Schuster Peter THE HYPERCYCLE (1979) Francisco Varela PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY (1979) Hofstadter Douglas GODEL ESCHER BACH (1980) Lakoff George METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980) Prigogine Ilya FROM BEING TO BECOMING (1980) Maturana Humberto AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (1980) Margulis Lynn SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (1981) Crick Francis LIFE ITSELF (1981) Dawkins Richard THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE (1982) Cairns-Smith Graham GENETIC TAKEOVER (1982) Marr David VISION (1982) Mandelbrot Benoit THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (1982) Johnson-Laird Philip MENTAL MODELS (1983) Anderson John Robert THE ARCHITECTURE OF COGNITION (1983) Barwise John amp Perry John SITUATIONS AND ATTITUDES (1983) Bunge Mario TREATISE ON BASIC PHILOSOPHY (1983) Breitenberg Valentino VEHICLES EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY (1984) Winson Jonathan BRAIN AND PSYCHE (1985) Changeux JeanPierre NEURONAL MAN (1985) Minsky Marvin THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1985) Parfit Derek REASONS AND PERSONS (1985) Gazzaniga Michael SOCIAL BRAIN (1985) Ornstein Robert MULTIMIND (1986) Dennett Daniel THE INTENTIONAL STANCE (1987) Edelman Gerald NEURAL DARWINISM (1987) Dyson Freeman INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS (1988) Hawking Stephen A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988) Maynard Smith John EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS (1989) Lockwood Michael MIND BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (1989) Penrose Roger THE EMPERORS NEW MIND (1989) Langton Christopher ARTIFICIAL LIFE (1989)

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Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 39: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist

Hobson J Allan THE DREAMING BRAIN (1989) MacLean Paul THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (1990) McGinn Colin THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991) Donald Merlin ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991) Calvin William THE ASCENT OF MIND (1991) Fuller Buckminster COSMOGRAPHY (1992) Jouvet Michel LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (1992) Kauffman Stuart THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (1993) Stapp Henry MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (1993) Pinker Steven THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994) Fauconnier Gilles MENTAL SPACES (1994) Plotkin Henry DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (1994) Gell-Mann Murray THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR (1994) Ridley Matt THE RED QUEEN (1994) Jauregui Jose THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (1995) Churchland Paul ENGINE OF REASON (1995) Damasio Antonio DESCARTES ERROR (1995) Mithen Steven THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (1996) Chalmers David THE CONSCIOUS MIND (1996) Deacon Terrence THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) Mora Francisco THE HOT BRAIN (2000)

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Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 40: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (Norton 1998)

(Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon believes that language and the brain coevolved evolved together influencing each other step by step In his opinion language did not require the emergence of a language organ Language originated from symbolic thinking an innovation which occurred when humans became hunters because of the need to overcome the sexual bonding in favor of group cooperation Both the brain and language evolved at the same time through a series of exchanges Languages are easy to learn for infants not because infants can use innate knowledge but because language evolved to accomodate the limits of immature brains At the same time brains evolved under the influence of language through the Baldwin effect Language caused a reorganization of the brain whose effects were vocal control laughter and sobbing schizophrenia autism As a consequence Deacon rejects the idea of a universal grammar a` la Chomsky of innate linguistic knowledge There is an innate human predisposition to language but it is due to the coevolution of brain and language and it is altogether different from the universal grammar envisioned by Chomsky What is innate is a set of mental skills (ultimately brain organs) which translate into natural tendencies which translate into some universal structures of language Another way to describe this is to view language as a meme Language is simply one of the many memes that invade our mind and because of the way the brain is the meme of language can only assume such and such a structure not because the brain is pre-wired to such a structure but because that structure is the most natural for the organs of the brain (such as short-term memory and attention) that are affected by it Chomskys universal grammar is an outcome of the evolution of language in our mind during our childhood There is no universal grammar in our genes or better there are no language genes in our genome The way language is structured reflects its evolution Deacon recognizes a hierarchy of meaning The lower levels (iconic and indexical) are based on the process of recognition and on associative learning The highest level (symbolic) are based on a stable network of interconnected meanings Symbols refer to the world but also refer to each other The individual symbol is meaningless what has meaning is the symbol within the vast and ever changing semantic space of all other symbols Deacon also deals with consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual world created by symbols He distinguishes three types of consciousness based on the three types of signs iconic indexical and symbolic The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals But symbolic reference is different because in his view it involves others it is a shared reference This reference includes the self the self is a symbolic self The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references The self is not bounded within a body Deacon believes that Artificial Intelligence (thinking machines) is possible and not too far from happening easier than commonly believed

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Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 41: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Chalmers

David Chalmers THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press 1996)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers presents a formidable theory of consciousness Basically Chalmers believes that consciousness is due to protoconscious properties that must be ubiquitous in matter and that psychophysical laws not of the reductionist kind that Physics employs will account for how conscious experience arise from those properties There is instead nothing mysterious about our cognitive faculties such as learning and remembering they can be explained by the physical sciences the same way they explained physical phenomena Chalmers therefore changes the scope of the mind-body problem by enlarging the body to include the brain and its cognitive processes and by restricting mind to conscious experience Cognition migrates to the body Consciousness on the other hand is truly a different substance or better a different set of properties and just cannot be explained by the natural laws of the physical sciences The study of consciousness requires a different set of laws just because consciousness is due to a different set of properties The book is organized like a mathematical treatise with definitions first a few corollaries and finally the main argument Chalmers contends that the mind is more than just conscious experience and by this he probably means that there is more in the brain than just consciousness (mind is an ambigous term and some probably use it interchangeably with consciousness in which case Chalmers statement would be a contradiction in terms) For Chalmers mind is any state of the brain that causes behavior For example I may drink because I am thirsty I may move my hands because I want to grab an object I may buy a plane ticket because I believe the fare will go up These mental states may or may not be conscious Chalmers therefore distinguishes between the conscious experience that he calls the phenomenal properties of the mind and the mental states that cause behavior that he calls the psychological properties of the mind Phenomenal states deal with the first-person aspect of the mind whereas psychological states deal with the third-person aspect of the mind Psychological properties have by his definition a causal role in determining behavior Whether a psychological state is also a phenomenal (conscious) state does not matter from the point of view of behavior What conscious states do is not clear but we know that they exist because we feel them Mental properties can therefore be divided into psychological properties and phenomenal properties These two sets can be studied separately It turns out that psychological properties (such as learning and remembering) have been and are studied by a multitude of disciplines and in a fashion not too different from physical properties of matter (given their causal nature) whereas phenomenal properties constitute the hard problem A psychological property causes some behavior no less than most material properties A phenomenal property is a fuzzier object altogether Chalmers also distinguishes awareness and consciousness awareness is the psychological aspect of consciousness Whenever we are aware we also have access to information about the object we are aware of Awareness is that access It is a psychological state that has a causal nature Consciousness is a term more appropriately reserved for the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (for the emotion for the feeling) Chalmers is de facto separating the study of cognition from the study of consciousness Cognition is a psychological fact consciousness is a phenomenal fact Psychological facts by virtue of their causal (or

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Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 42: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Chalmers

functional) nature can be explained by the physical sciences It is not clear instead what science is necessary to explain consciousness To start with Chalmers focuses on the notion of supervenience Chalmers goes to a great extent to clarify the theory of supervenience but mostly ends up proving how flaky that theory is A set B of properties supervenes on a set A of properties if any two systems that are identical by properties A are also identical by properties B For example biological properties supervene on physical properties any two identical physical systems are also identical biological systems Local supervenience is a stricter variant of supervenience two identical paintings are not worth the same amount because one is the original and the other one is a replica therefore financial properties do not supervene locally on physical properties Whenever the context matters (in this case who painted the painting) local supervenience fails Local supervenience implies global supervenience but not viceversa (One could object that an exact copy of a painting is identical to the original for all purposes Chalmers idea of a replica presupposes that it is not an exact atom by atom copy it is a similar painting that an art expert can tell from the original) Logical supervenience (loosely possibility) is also a stricter variant of supervenience some systems could exist in another world (are logically possible) but do not exist in our world (are naturally impossible) Elephants with wings are logically possible but not naturally possible Systems that are naturally possible are also logically possible but not viceversa For example any situation that violates the laws of nature is logically possible but not naturally possible Natural supervenience occurs when two sets of properties are systematically and precisely correlated in the natural world Logical supervenience implies natural supervenience but not viceversa In other words there may be worlds in which two properties are not related the way they are in our world and therefore two naturally supervenient systems may not be logically supervenient (Although it is not clear what is logically possible that is naturally impossible it all depends by ones definition of our world and by ones scientific knowledge as ancient Greeks would have certainly considered Einsteins spacetime warping a natural impossibility) Chalmers then argues that most facts supervene logically on the physical facts (if they are identical physical systems they are identical period) There are few exceptions and consciousness is one of them Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical This is by far the weakest part of the book Once one sees that there is truly only one kind of supervenience the magicians trick is revealed What Chalmers is saying is quite simply that the physical sciences can explain everything except consciousness and he uses his several variants of supervenience to prove it mathematically Truth is that at the end we have to take his word for it So Chalmers conclude that consciousness cannot be explain by physical sciences (more appropriately cannot be explained reductively) The first 132 pages basically read like a (more or less) rigorous proof that consciousness cannot be explained by existing science Unlike other philosophers Chalmers does not conclude that consciousness cannot be explained tout court but only that it cannot be explained the way the physical sciences explain everything else by reducing the system to ever smaller parts Chalmers leaves the door open for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness Chalmers is claiming that Materialism is false thats all His proof is weak at best Following the same reasoning one could prove that Biology is false Chalmers argument basically goes back to the zombie question if a physical copy of you is built by some futuristic machine would that copy of you experience the same feelings you experience Chalmers argues that physical identity is not enough but honestly his 132-page proof does not amount to much more than an act of faith Whatever the merits of the proof his claim is that materialism is doomed Chalmers does not rule out monismt he theory that there is only one substance he only rules out that the one substance of this

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Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 43: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Chalmers

world is matter as we know it with the properties we currently know So even his claim that materialism is false strongly depends on the definition of matter Materialists would certainly still call matter the one substance that includes the known properties of matter in which case Chalmers theory would be simply a new materialist theory of mind Then Chalmers proceeds to present his own theory of consciousness that he calls naturalistic dualism (but might as well have called naturalistic monism) It is a variant of what is known as property dualism there are no two substances (mental and physical) there is only one substance but that substance has two separate sets of properties one physical and one mental Conscious experience is due to the mental properties The physical sciences have studied only the physical properties The physical sciences study macroscopic properties like temperature that are due to microscopic properties such as the physical properties of particles Chalmers advocates a science that studies the protophenomenal properties of microscopic matter that can yield the macroscopic phenomenon of consciousness His parallel with electromagnetism is powerful Electromagnetism could not be explained by reducing electromagnetic phenomena to the known properties of matter it was explained when scientists introduced a whole new set of properties (and related laws) the properties of microscopic matter that yield the macroscopic phenomenon of electromagnetism Similarly consciousness cannot be explained by the physical laws of the known properties but requires a new set of psychophysical laws that deal with protophenomenal properties Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical the psychophysical laws will explain this supervenience they will explain how conscious experiences depend on physical processes Chalmers emphasizes that this applies only to consciousness Cognition is governed by the known laws of the physical sciences Chalmers then turns to the relationship between cognition and consciousness Phenomenal (conscious) experience is not an abstract phenomenon it is directly related to our psychological experience Consciousness interacts with cognition and that interactaction gets expressed via what Chalmers calls phenomenal judgements (I am afrai I see I am suffering) These are acts that belong to our psychological life (to cognition) but that are about our phenomenal life (consciousness) Chalmers realizes a paradox phenomenal judgements that are about consciousness belong to cognitive life therefore can be explained reductively but he just proved that consciousness cannot be explained reductively The way out of the paradox is to assume that consciousness is not relevant that we can explain phenomenal judgements even ifwhen we cannot explain the conscious experience they are about ie the explanation does not depend on that conscious experience ie that feeling or emotion is irrelevant Chalmers cautions that this conclusion does not necessarily imply that consciousness (as in free will) is irrelevant for behavior but it surely does smell that way If we can explain behavior about consciousness without explaining consciousness it is hard to believe that behavior requires consciousness Chalmers takes these facts literally our statements about consciousness are part of our cognitive life and therefore can be explained quite naturally just like any other behavior I speak about my feelings the same way I raise a hand There is a physical process that explains why I do both It also happens that we are conscious not just that we talk about it and that part cannot be explained (yet) If we had a detailed understanding of the brain we could predict when someone would utter the words I feel pain So Chalmers believes that our talk about consciousness will be explained just like any other cognitive process just like any other bodily process This is not the same as explaining the conscious feelings themselves and it leaves open the option that feelings are but an accessory an evolutionary accident a

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Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

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Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

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Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 44: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of David Chalmers

by-product of our cognitive life with no direct relevance to our actions This conjecture represents a quantum leap for philosophy of mind Since Descartes the dilemma has been how do body and mind communicate Chalmers realizes that body extends to the brain and brain is responsible for many phenomena that we consider mind and that are no more mysterious than the movement of a hand Therefore within the Cartesian dichotomy body must be enlarged to encompass brain processes and mind must be restricted to conscious experience Otherwise most of the mystery is not a mystery at all the way mind remembers or learns is no more mysterious than the way a muscle gets stronger or weaker What is mysterious is that remembering and learning are sometimes associated with conscious experience That is the real puzzle how does a brain process of remembering (that is ultimately an electrochemical process of neurons triggering each other) communicate with our conscious life of feelings and emotions that seems to be located in a completely different dimension The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate Chalmers also offers an explanation of phenomenal judgement based on the theory of information After all his definition of cognition is pretty much that of information processing cognition is the processing of information from the moment it is acquired by the senses to the moment it is turned into bodily movement Information is what pattern is from the inside Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious Since information is ubiquitous he also gets entangled in the question whether everything has feelings and of course if experience is ultimately due to information there is no reason why anything would not be associated with experience Just like every other physical property we know is widespread in the universe there is no reason why experience (defined as the macroscopic effect of protophenomenal properties) should no be widespread Objects may well have a degree of consciousness Chalmers natural dualism is therefore a close relative of panpsychism Furthermore if information leads to experience there must be a lot more experience than we feel because the brain processes a lot more information than we are aware of But then parts of the brain may have experience that does not travel to the I The I is not necessarily all the is experienced by the brain The I may simply be a chunk of coherent information out of the many that arise all the time in the brain The book includes two chapters on popular subjects just for the heck of it one on Artificial Intelligence and one on Quantum Mechanics The latter is another reason to buy the book Chalmers arguments are adorned with lots of subtleties for philosophers but Chalmers is certainly aware that those philosophical subtleties tend to annoy readers from other disciplines (and tend to age badly) The bottom line is that Chalmers believes consciousness can be explained by studying nonphysical properties of matter and that the mind-body problem is truly a cognition-consciousness problem This is a view that researchers from several scientific disciplines may be keen to share

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Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

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Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (1 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (2 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (1 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Paul MacLean

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

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                                                                                                                                                                  • Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist
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                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Terrence Deacon
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Page 45: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson

1996) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British archeologist Steven Mithen has found evidence in archeology that cognitive fluidity caused the modern mind to arise First came social intelligence the ability to deal with other humans then came natural-history intelligence the ability to deal with the environment and tool-using intelligence last language Once the ability to fully connect all these faculties developed the modern mind was born Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared 100000 years ago and initially behave like Neanderthals showing little intelligence Two momentous transformations in human behavior occurred with art and technology (60000 years ago) and with farming (10000 years ago) In order to explain these breakthroughs Mithen resorts to Jerry Fodors modular model of the mind Initially human minds were dominated by a general-purpose form of intelligence Then a module appears that was specialized for socializing The social intelligence module is shared with other primates so it must predate humans Then other modules were born each specific to one domain around the main general-purpose module The modules evolved separately Eventually Mithen admits four types of intelligence (four modules in the mind) social technical (tool-making house building) natural-history (eg animal behavior) and linguistic These modules were not connected these intelligences were not communicating Mithen can thus explain why there is no archeological evidence of social life when (judging from brain size) social intelligence must have been already quite developed a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence made it impossible for humans to conceive of tools for social interaction The hunters-gatherers of our pre-history were experts in many domains but those differente expertises did not mix just because the minds of those humans could not mix different types of intelligence Cognitive fluidity (mixing intelligences) changed that and caused the cultural explosion of art technology religion Suddenly humans acquired minds in which modules have been connected For example tools started being use to transform nature Religion was a by-product of mixing these intelligences because mixing intelligences one can produce supernatural beings Farming was also a product of cognitive fluidity and in turn caused a redefining of intelligences (emergence of new intelligences disappearance of old ones) The factor that contributed or caused cognitive fluidity may have been the dawning of consciousness Self-awareness may have integrated intelligences that for thousands of years had been kept separate Mithens evolutionary theory mirrors in many ways Annette Karmiloff-Smiths theory of child development

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httpwwwthymoscommindmithenhtml25072003 230207

Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindridleyhtml25072003 230428

Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (1 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (2 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (1 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Paul MacLean

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (2 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindmcginnhtml25072003 230844

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    • Book reviews - Cognitive Science
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                                                                  • Book review of David Bohm
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                                                                                  • Book review of Antonio Damasio
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                                                                                          • Book review of Antonio Damasio
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                                                                                                                                                                  • Piero Scaruffi cognitive scientist
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                                                                                                                                                                          • Book review of Terrence Deacon
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Page 46: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley THE RED QUEEN (MacMillan 1994) (Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British biologist Matt Ridley following in the footsteps of William Hamilton thinks that cooperation helps evolution Evolution is accelerated even by parasites Life can be viewed as a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors In a sense co-evolving parasites help improve evolution The emphasis in evolution has traditionally been on competition not cooperation although it is through cooperation not competition that considerable jumps in behavior can be attained Sexuality itself evolved for evolutionary purposes Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites Parasites have a harder time adapting to the diversity generated by sexual reproduction whereas they would have devastating effects if all individuals of a species were identical

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindridleyhtml25072003 230428

Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (1 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (2 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (1 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Paul MacLean

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

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Page 47: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp MIND MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-

Verlag 1993) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

This book collects several essays in which the American physicist Henry Stapp tackles the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of Quantum Theory In accord with Whitehead and Von Neumann and Heisenbergs event-based interpretation of Quantum Theory Stapps thesis is that reality is created by consciousness as consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function that in turn causes reality to occur Stapps quest is for the primal stuff from which both mind and matter originated or a quantum theory of consciousness Classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts Stapps theory of consciousness is therefore based on Quantum Mechanics He believes in Heisenbergs ontology only waves and events really exist Reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities He even draws parallels with William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects The universe is represented by one huge wave function The collapse of any part of it gives rise to an event The collapse of a part of the wave function for the brain is the formation of an idea Mental life is made of events in the brain An updated view is presented in his lectures as follows Stapps quantum theory of consciousness is based on Heisenbergs interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions ie of quantum discontinuities) He observes that this view is similar to William Jamess view of the mental life as experienced sense objects His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory when it was clear to its founders that science is what we know Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge Each of us is a knower and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science According to this pragmatic view Quantum Theory was therefore a knowledge-based discipline Von Neumann introduced an ontological approach to this knowledge-based discipline Stapp describes Von Neumanns view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations That is why it is a collection of subjective acts although an objective one Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism all that exists is that subjective knowledge therefore the universe is now about matter it is about subjective experience Quantum Theory does not talk about matter it talks about our perceiving matter Stapp rediscovers George Berkeleys idealism we only know our perceptions (observations) Stapps model of consciousness is tripartite Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain Each event is an increase of knowledge That knowledge comes from observing systems Each event is driven by three processes that operate together

The Schroedinger process is a mechanical deterministic process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newtons Physics given its state at a given time we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time) The only difference is that Schroedingers equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities rather than just one certainty

The Heisenberg process is a conscious choice that we make the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question This implies in turn that we have a degree of control over Nature Depending on which question we ask we can affect the state of the universe Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect as a well known process in which we can alter the

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (1 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (2 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (1 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Paul MacLean

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (2 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindmcginnhtml25072003 230844

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Page 48: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Henry Stapp

course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is freezed if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly) We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe) Otherwise nothing is going to happen

The Dirac process gives the answer to our question Nature replies and as far as we can tell the answer is totally random Once Nature has replied we have learned something we have increased our knowledge This is a change in the state of the universe which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain Technically there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned

Stapps interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers Each knowers act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe One persons increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe and of course it changes it for everybody else Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter but about our knowledge of such behavior Thinking is a sequence of events of knowing driven by those three processes Instead of dualism or materialism one is faced with a sort of interactive triality all aspects of which are actually mind-like The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another ie the evolution of the universe And then there is a choice from the outside the reply of Nature which as far as we can tell is random Stapps conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain

Further browsing

Prof Stapps home page A review of Stapps book in Psyche - an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness An essay on quantum consciousness Quantum D a mailing list for discussion of quantum theory Physics on the brain (A New Scientist forum) On Quantum Physics and Ordinary Consciousness by Stephen Jones Is The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Satisfactory by Ahmet Kip An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation by J G Cramer Quantum Phenomenology by Allan F Randall David Bohms Quantum Potential by Tony Smith

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindstapphtml (2 of 2)25072003 230659

Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (1 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Paul MacLean

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindmacleanhtml (2 of 2)25072003 230817

Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

Permission is granted to downloadprint outredistribute this file provided it is unaltered including credits

httpwwwthymoscommindmcginnhtml25072003 230844

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Page 49: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Paul MacLean

Paul MacLean THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press 1990)

(Copyright copy 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The American neurologist Paul MacLean is a proponent of microgenesis the view that the structure of our brain mirrors its evolution over the ages Mac Lean believes that our head contains not one but three brains a triune brain Like the layers of an archeological site each brain corresponds to a different stage of evolution Each brain is connected to the other two but each operates indivually with a distinct personality The neocortex does not control the rest of the brain all three parts interact although it is true that the neocortex interacts in a more cognitive manner But the brain that interacts in a more instinctive manner can be as dominant and even more And ditto for the emotional one The oldest of the three brains the reptilian brain is a midbrain reticular formation that has changed little from reptiles to mammals and to humans This brain comprises the brain stem and the cerebellum It is responsible for species-specific behavior instinctive behavior such as self-preservation and aggression The cerebellum and the brainstem constitute virtually the entire brain in reptiles The most basic life-sustaining processes of the body such as respiration heart beat and sleep are controlled by the brainstem More precisely the brainstem is the brains connection with the autonomic nervous system the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat breathing etc that do not require conscious control It has always active even when we sleep It endlessly repeats the same patterns over and over mechanically It does not change it does not learn In the beginnings this system was basically most of the brain and limbs and organs were controlled locally Most mammals share with us the limbic system which MacLean believes was born after the reptilian system and was simply added to it The earliest mammals had a brain that was basically the reptilian brain plus the limbic system MacLean therefore believes this to be the old mammalian (or paleomammalian) brain The limbic system contains the hippocampus the thalamus and the amygdala which are considered responsible for emotions and emotional insticts (behaviors related to food sex and competition) These emotions are functional to the survival of the individual and of the species This system is capable of learning because it contains affective memories which is emotion-laden memories Ultimately the limbic system is about pain and pleasure avoiding pain and repeating pleasure The neocortex is the main brain of the primates which are among the latest mammals to appear All animals have a neocortex but only in primates it is so relevant most animals without a neocortex would behave normally This neomammalian brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as language and reasoning The oldest brain is located at the bottom and to the back The newest sits on top and to the front They all complement each other to produce what we consider human behavior Each is an autonomous unit that could exist without the others The elegance of MacLeans model is that it neatly separates mechanical behavior emotional behavior and rational behavior It shows how they arose chronologically and for what purpose And it shows how they coexist and complement each other They constitute three steps towards modern intelligence

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Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 50: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Paul MacLean

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Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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Page 51: Book Reviews - Cognitive Science

Book review of Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press

1991) (Copyright copy 1999 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini duso )

The British philosopher Colin McGinn claims that consciousness cannot be understood by beings with minds like ours In other words we will never explain consciousness because our minds are not capable of explaining it Inspired part by Russell and part by Kant McGinn thinks that consciousness is known by the faculty of introspection as opposed to the physical world which is known by the faculty of perception The relation between one and the other which is the relation between consciousness and brain is noumenal or impossible to understand it is provided by a lower level of consciousness which is not accessible to introspection In more technical words consciousness does not belong to the cognitive closure of the human organism Understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities just like a child cannot grasp social concepts or I cannot relate to a farmers fear of tornadoes McGinn notices that other creatures in nature lack the capability to understand things that we understand (for example the general theory of relativity) There are parts of nature that they cannot understand We are also creatures of nature and there is no reason to exclude that we also lack the capability of understanding something of nature We may not have the power of understanding everything unlike what we often assume Some explanations (such as where the universe comes from and what will happen afterwards and what is time and so forth) may just be beyond our minds capabilities Explanations for these phenomena may just be cognitively closed to us Phenomenal consciousness may be one such phenomenon Is our cognitive closure infinite In other words can we understand everything in the world Is there something that we cant understand McGinn thinks that our cognitive closure is not infinite that there are things we will never be capale of understanding And consciousness is one of them Mind may just not be big enough to understand mind

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