Evolutionary Philosophy
  • Home
  • Worldview
    • Epistemology
    • Metaphysics
    • Logic
    • Ethics
    • Politics
    • Aesthetics
  • Applied
    • Know Thyself
    • 10 Tenets
    • Survival of the Fittest Philosophers >
      • Ancient Philosophy (Pre 450 CE)
      • Medieval Philosophy (450-1600 CE)
      • Modern Philosophy (1600-1920 CE)
      • Contemporary Philosophy (Post 1920 CE)
    • 100 Thought Experiments
    • Elsewhere
  • Fiction
    • Draining the Swamp >
      • Further Q&A
    • Short Stories
    • The Vitanauts
  • Blog
  • Store
  • About
    • Purpose
    • My Evolution
    • Evolution 101
    • Philosophy 101

Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy

3/29/2020

2 Comments

 
Picture
As I make the transition in this series from philosophy to neuroscience, a natural step between these two disciplines (some might even call it an evolutionary step) would clearly be with the work of Patricia Churchland. She's a philosopher and neuroscientist who thinks that "philosophers are increasingly realising that to understand the mind one must understand the brain."

I'll start with a few snippets from the 
podcast Nous, and its episode: Patricia Churchland on How We Evolved a Conscience. Churchland has a book out now called Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, which I know is not the same thing as consciousness, but her discussion still has some relevant information for us.
  • There were some philosophers who thought that if we went off and really studied the language of what we MEAN by the word consciousness, we’d be able to understand it. But other philosophers said, wait a minute, we might be mistaken about what we mean.
  • Philosophy is a proto-science that must remain in touch with empirical discoveries. Science cannot tell us why something is right or wrong. However, science gives us all sorts of information that we take into account.
  • Why did we become social? It started when we became warm blooded. Warm blooded creatures need about 10 times more nutrition though. One way to compensate for this requirement was for mammals to develop a new structure in the brain—a cortex—which allowed them to store a tremendous amount of information in the brain and to integrate it. The cortex relied on the subcortical parts of the brain for motivations, sleep/wake patterns, etc., but the cortex allowed for a kind of predictive prowess that had not been seen on the planet before.
  • This all comes with a cost though. You can’t have memory unless you can build structure on the neuron. To tune the brain up to an environment requires that you are super immature when you are born. Snakes just are born and go off into the world. Mammals can’t. It was like evolution took a step backwards. This immaturity then led to the need for caregiving, which led to parents who care. Once caring for offspring turns on, family units, sociality, norms, and morality all take off.

That's a nice short, sharp, prod to get us philosophers studying the evolution of brains. A much more rigorous argument can be found in Churchland's essay 
"Neurophilosophy", which was a chapter in the fantastic edited collection How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism. Here are some useful points from that essay:
  • The words “mind” and “brain” are distinct. Even so, that linguistic fact leaves it open whether mental processes are in fact processes of the physical brain. … [For physicalists] the important problem concerns how the brain learns and remembers, how the brain enables us to see and hear and think, and how it enables us to move our eyes, legs, and whole body. Their problem concerns the nature of the brain mechanisms that support mental phenomena. Interestingly, dualists also have a closely related set of problems: how does soul stuff work such that we learn and remember, see and hear and think, and so forth. Whereas in neuroscience, physicalists have a vibrant research program to address such questions, dualists have no comparable program. No one has the slightest idea how soul stuff does anything.
  • Studies of a few patients who had suffered bilateral damage to the hippocampus showed them to be severely impaired in learning new things. … Memory losses associated with dementing diseases also linked memory with neural loss and further suggested the tight link between the mental and the neural. Important also are studies of attention using brain imaging along with single neuron physiology. These varied studies suggest that at least three anatomic networks, connected but somewhat independent of the other, are involved in different aspects of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control.
  • Developments in psychology, especially visual psychology, also implicated neural networks in mental functions, and this work tended to dovetail well with neuroscientific findings on the visual system. Explanations of color vision, for example, depended on the retina’s three cone types and on opponent processing by neurons in the cortical areas. … Visual hallucinations were known to be caused by physical substances such as LSD or ketamine, and consciousness could be obliterated by drugs such as ether, as well by other substances employed by anesthesiologists, such as propofol. No evidence linked these drugs to soul stuff.
  • Short-term memory can be transiently blocked by a blow to the head or by a drug such as scopolamine; emotions and moods can be affected by Prozac and by alcohol; decision making can be affected by hunger, fear, sleeplessness, and cocaine; elevated levels of cortisol cause anxiety. Very specific changes in whole-brain activity corresponding to periods of sleep versus dreaming versus being awake have been documented, and explanations for the neuronal signature typifying these three states have made considerable progress. In aggregate, these findings weighed in favor of the physical brain, not of some spooky “soul stuff.”
  • A methodological point may be pertinent in regard to the dualist’s argument: however large and systematic the mass of empirical evidence supporting the empirical hypothesis that consciousness is a brain function, it is always a logically consistent option to be stubborn and to insist otherwise, as do Chalmers and Nagel. Here is the way to think about this: identities—such as that temperature really is mean molecular kinetic energy, for example—are not directly observable. They are underwritten by inferences that best account for the mass of data and the appreciation that no explanatory competitor is as successful. One could, if determined, dig one’s heels in and say, “temperature is not mean molecular kinetic energy, but rather an occult phenomenon that merely runs parallel to KE.” It is a logically consistent position, even if it is not a reasonable position.
  • With the benefit of contemporary physics, we can see that the causal interaction between nonphysical stuff such as a soul with physical stuff such as electrons would be an anomaly relative to the current and rather well-established laws of physics. More exactly, it would affect the law of conservation of energy. If brains can cause changes external to the physical domain, there should be an anomaly with respect to conservation of energy. No such anomaly has ever been seen or measured.

​Brief Comments
In previous posts, we saw how argument alone could make the case that thinking of consciousness as a non-material or panpsychic phenomenon is not helpful. Now, we see a glut of empirical evidence supporting the idea that consciousness is a physical phenomenon. Does that prove the case? Of course not. Knowledge is never proved in this way. Churchland's point, however, is exquisite, and right on the nose, that one can always dig their heels in about this and remain consistent, while also being unreasonable. This is something all philosophers should keep in mind.

What do you think? Any other important points jump out at you from these quotes? Let me know in the comments below.

--------------------------------------------
Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
2 Comments
SelfAwarePatterns link
3/29/2020 09:46:20 pm

I've never read Churchland at length, but find myself agreeing with most of what I hear about her views.

On her takedown of Chalmers and Nagel, I'm reminded of something neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg said in his book on the frontal lobes. He largely dismisses the whole topic of consciousness as nothing but arguing about the soul in disguise. When I read the Nagels, Goffs, and Chalmers' of the world, I'm tempted to agree.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
3/30/2020 01:19:30 pm

Her essay in the book "How Biology Shapes Philosophy" was a standout. Wen she talks about neuroscience, she's obviously an expert (to me, a non-expert, anyway). When I read about her book "Conscience" I mostly think, well, yeah, we knew that evolutionary history already. (Her emphasis on the warm-bloodedness as a key moment in history is strong though.) When she talked about morality in the later parts of the Nous podcast (which I did not transcribe), it's obvious to me that's not her area of philosophical expertise. She mostly just seems deeply pragmatic there though in that Canadian / midwestern aw shucks let's just get on with it kind of way. That's good for science. And I appreciate that generally.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Subscribe to Help Shape This Evolution

    SUBSCRIBE

    RSS Feed


    Blog Philosophy

    This is where ideas mate to form new and better ones. Please share yours respectfully...or they will suffer the fate of extinction!


    Archives

    January 2023
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    May 2019
    March 2019
    December 2018
    July 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    April 2012


    Click to set custom HTML
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.