“What Makes Us Think” (2000) is a lively debate between Ricoeur, a philosopher and Changeux, a neuroscientist. In the debate Ricoeur claims that there is no way to reconcile statements about the human brain as an object with statements about the experience of what happens in minds. He claims that we do not experience our brains. Changeux asserts that certain advances in neuroscience are a first step toward “objectifying” the “subjective” or, in his words, a first step toward “the possibility of examining psychological facts as physical facts”.
One such advance Changeux mentions is the use of brain imaging technology (positron emission tomography or PET and functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI.) PBS recently ran a program on the use of fMRI to show brain activity that corresponds with recognition of words. Tab did a thread on current fMRI use in this way.
It is now possible to catalogue correspondences between brain activity and words and between brain activity and emotions. While Ricoeur admits that such correspondences are possible, he believes that laboratory situations and neuroscientific methodology present a description of objects, not of personal experiences.
If Changeux is correct, such philosophical criticisms as “category error” or “reification” need revision in order to be effective. I’ll reserve my opinion until I see yours.
No response? Surely this OP is not that obscure. It gets the mind-matter issue into the 21st century. You don’t have to read the books I recommend in order to state your opinion, which may include ideas better than those I’ve read. The argument about fMRI, and other imaging tecniques, as cataloguing brain activities involved in word recognition, emotions, pain, color recognition, schizophenic hallucinations and epileptic seizures is a suggestion that, in Changeux’s words “psychology can be naturalized”. What we consider subjective only can be objecively described. The last bastion of ego, the isolate, personal experience, can be explained as physical.
my opinion:
i’m definitely in Changeux’s camp - i don’t ascribe to the notion that subjective experience is actually distinct from brain activity (the activity of objects) - if, for theoretical purposes, you want to call it an emergent property or something like that i don’t necessarily have any problem with that - We can, for instance, distinguish heat from the heightened molecular activity of matter conceptually, but that is a reification in itself - scientifically, they are the same thing - if we are to describe consciousness in any sense scientifically, then we ought to get over this notion that there is something quintessentially unique about subjective experience
people like Ricoeur seem to be against a scientific treatment of consciousness - they don’t seem to realize that it’s just another way of talking about the same thing he is talking about - certain thinkers seem hell-bent on preserving subjective experiences from being described scientifically, but personally i can’t understand that impulse - why on earth should we resist the notion that there can be objective facts about subjective experiences?
i think subjectivity and objectivity exist on a spectrum, it’s in many ways a false dichotomy
ultimately, i would say it’s the Ricoeurs of the world who are most guilty of category errors
Dear Ierrellus,
Suppose that I am reclining comfortably in a laboratory room, listening to the distant whir of machines, including some that are conducting magnetic resonance imaging of my brain, as you and I speak. We are speaking about this and that, the weather, the colour of flowers, politics and recent events. Casually, you (the experimenter) tell me a story, which you ask me to imagine vividly as if it were real, as it’s told.
In the story I learn of a beautiful maiden with long, blonde hair and eyes as blue as the summer sky. She sits on the edge of a pond, and combs her hair, her elegant, slow movements perfectly reflecting in the pond. You tell me that her name is Surprise Lily, and for a split-second, the picture in my mind loses its anthropomorphic contours. I think of a flower reflecting in the pond, just as you conclude the story by telling me of a sudden breeze that comes from somewhere unbidden, and disturbs the surface of the pond, so that I no longer see the woman, the Lily, or anything for that matter.
But you are not interested in ponds and Lilies at all, you are recording using your machines the subtle, tiny physical manifestations of thoughts and feelings in my body. What is the picture you see? At first, there is a woman, she combs her hair, then it is a flower (you know because a different region is activated), and finally the coherence is lost - the “breeze” disperses the experimental image. After this, after pouring over papers and experimental data, you sit and marvel in your office: what was it that you just recorded? You wanted to record a thought and a feeling, but instead recorded only the reflection of thought and feeling in a sort of “pond” - the brain - susceptible to many unexpected breezes.
One then becomes interested in the pond. One builds more advanced, more sensitive machines. A few years pass, and now there is no need for bulky MRI and other laughably old-fashioned technologies. Now you can read a person’s thoughts and feelings much better using a simple-looking “little wire” that attaches discreetly to their left toe. Nanites within the wire take continuous measurements on the living cells they neighbour with, and the toe tells all: about the pond, the hair, and the Surprise Lily. There is no real need to scan the entire central nervous system, when the periphery is wholly enervated with its constituent parts also, and makes no secret at all about what is going in in the “central office”.
A few more years pass, and you acquire for your laboratory machines of almost unthinkable subtlety and precision. You can now measure and record the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of thousands of people, from a point in space approximately 10km above the Earth’s surface. The enlarged pond measured has many simultaneous reflections, but you see them all, all of the time, using your fine, All-seeing-eye mAchine. It would have been obvious to you, but not to us, so it bears restating: it is not necessary to directly measure the brain to acquire data about the thoughts and feelings of various beings. Indeed there are beings who lack brains entirely, but certainly do not lack thoughts and feelings! Advances made in sensor technology inevitably lead to the scenario already described: first you are measuring the electrical activity in the brain, then a little toe suffices, then you can do it from a point in space several km away from the subject, and finally, you find you can read the actual physical manifestations of the same thoughts and feelings in the guts of a sacrificial animal, on a completely different planet, of a different solar system, seemingly unrelated to your object of study, and yet - there you have it, their thoughts and feelings are yours to read again, given that you are sufficiently “attuned” to the wanted pattern.
Considering the story of the Surprise Lily for the umpteenth’s time, you may find yourself asking the profound question: “what, god-damnit, is the opposite of the physical anyway?” The easy answer, which by then you’d have rejected wholly, was that it’s “the spiritual”. But what is that in turn? Is information, for example, physical or spiritual (the pond has and knows of no maidens or images in general, it carries information by accident, it’s a “pure coincidence” that we can imagine looking at a reflection of a woman looking at herself in the pond - a pond which, incidentally, doesn’t even exist). Is not the spiritual DEFINED as the image (include: imitation, obraz) of God? And if so, is all that is physical not the reflection of His thought(information) on the surface of an eternal pond of the proto-material sea of potentiality?
But we are still going to poke the electrode around and see if we can objectify the subjective. Programmatic induction of subjective experience by inducing CNS states. The All-seeing eye 10km above the earth. The final desacralization and rape of Being by its cunning replacement: acting-as-if, as if one truly is separate in gloria mundi.
-WL
I don’t really see how the brain imaging stuff affects anything. Surely, before the technology existed to do this, people on both sides of the debate had no problem imagining it, or seeing it’s eventuality. Going all the way back to Leibniz, I think it’s been understood that what happens in the brain corresponds to what happens in the mind.
uglypeoplefucking- Heat is increased molecular activity because there’s nothing else to say about it. Every effect it has on physics and chemistry is an extension of the fact that it is increased molecular activity. However, ‘heat’ in the sense of how increased molecular activity feels isn’t that way. Heat doesn’t make water boil by virtue of the fact that it ‘feels warm’ or has the specific character to our minds that it does. It is that character that is subjective.
The problem with thinking of subjective experiences as properties of brain activity is that our experiences aren’t properties- they are objects with their own properties. Think of the properties of a pencil. It’s being yellow, it’s being made of wood, it’s having an eraser on one and and a point on the other. That list of properties relates to the pencil in a certain way. Now think of the properties of an figure in your imagination. Let’s say it’s blue, fuzzy, somewhat small, and speaks with an Antarctic accent. Those properties don’t relate to your neurons, or even to something your neurons are doing. They relate to a completely different thing- a mental thing- which may owe it’s existence to the activity of your neurons, sure.
Dear WL,
That was quite beautifully written, but:
why not? is there something sacred about the consciousness cow?
and i should correct myself before anyone else does - i have never read Ricoeur, i shouldn’t have attributed anything to him particularly - my contention is not with Ricoeur, but with those who might share the opinions that i was, perhaps unjustly, attributing to him.
That’s solely a matter of definitions, lowercast deformedcopulations. I suggest we call things out for battle as they are, thus making reference not to a cow from the questionable cliche, but to the sacred Ur (urus, tor or aurochs). That would provide us with a proper symbol for what you and I are perhaps to discuss in the future.
I am the sacred, which you can at all times ascertain scientifically by observing how exactly is it that “I am” is not limited by words. Reality is too komplex for oral kommunikation, says one wise bird with big mournful eyes. The crudification of the subjective experience by words (the necessity of using words, systems and categories) is known in psychiatry as “distortion”, and in theology as “grammatism”. I am suggesting to you in many underhanded ways that agrammatism is the prime philosophical virtue to strive for in our day and age.
The desacralized modern human being merely constructs sentences according to template, and calls these semi-auto linguistic tics “his thoughts”. Yet to a philosopher, a thought is something simultaneously more primitive and more encompassing, because a thought qua thought relies on associative linkage, also known sometimes as the poetic or metaphoric “language” (no specific language need be involved). Though only the vestigial remnants of this extraordinary faculty are still available and responsive today, the great insights that the modern human being can already only dream of, are in truth still just an eye-blink away even if they are for the moment wholly unconscious.
Your sense for the beautiful responds to gentle caresses.
-WL
for some reason that post makes me want to start drinking - you are very talented
agrammaticism (sic?) can’t always be an option however
that’s part of the reason why we have metaphor and poetry in the first place
These are good arguments. WL, I would agree with UPF. As Changeux notes, these tests are by no means exhaustive or definitive of anything. They are first steps. So I would also ask what it is about objectifying the subjective that you find personally threatening? If what is mental cannot be described as natural, it must be supernatural. I personally see these advances in technology as opening new horizons of understanding from which I can more fully appreciate what I think and feel. I don’t need some dual perspective in order do this. Ucci, good to have you aboard.
My take–
What I find important to consider here has to do with the how and why we seem to require that processes are seen as static in order for us to articulate what they mean to us. The picture and the word are such stable processes. In our view from the mesocosm we see processes through the lens of our experience with structure. I do not think we impose our experience with structure on some environment that has no structure. I believe that our experience of being structured and of structural functions allows us to identify structure as it exists in our bodies and in our environments.
A PET scan of schizophrenic hallucinations differs from the drawing of a bison done on a cave wall by our prehistoric ancestor only in sophistication. Both pictures indicate what is happening within and outside of our “minds”. Neither picture threatens the elaborate and “personal” experience of consciousness I enjoy.
UPF,
Ricoeur does acknowledge correspondences beween brain activity and mental activity. His main objection is that the correspondences do not give more than a paltry desciption of our experience of consciousness.
(sorry i missed this yesterday, Uccisore)
yes every effect on physics and chemistry - but that’s just more science - there is much more we can say about the concept of heat, consider the phrase, “the heat is on” - that’s a metaphor, right? what’s it mean and what’s it’s relationship with increased molecular activity?
all of this (throws arms wide) is subjective in a certain sense, sure - but that doesn’t mean science can’t understand it and put it in scientific terms - science is one of the contexts in which we can understand heat, why not let it be one of the contexts in which we understand mind?
if these mental objects owe their existence to the activity of neurons then they must relate to the activity of neurons, i’m willing to bet that every aspect of such objects corresponds to some form of neural activity - those are odds i’m willing to take, and i’m not a gambling man
Experiencing the brain presupposes a subject who experiences. Also a claim to any experience presupposes not only an awareness of the experience as an object, but also a recognition of it as an experience. Any recognition implies a duality or division between the subject and the object. How can there be an experience of unity with the brain where there is a subject left out of the object of experience?
Just how does the subject come into being at all?
I just realized there’s a really interesting thread here. But I’m kind of drunk and at th e moment its waaaay over my head. Maybe tomorrow…
experience precedes the subject, the subject is experience experiencing itself, experience remembered and symbolized - the subject comes into being wherever there is an entity that identifies with itself - riddle me this: when the subject recognizes itself as such, where is the object of that recognition? there isnt really one - for among other reasons there is nothing permanent or absolute in the subject/object duality implied by recognition
everything is experience(d), so everything is subjective, but everything exists, so everything is objective - the distinction is always contextual, and often not useful at all
I wonder if you’ve done justice to where the disagreements lie. Because this seems very straightforward to me. I’m not sure why anyone would disagree.
Good rigor. But you underestimate the divide. I’ll give here a swatch of the Ricouer-Changeux debate to identify the different perspectives. This part of the debate concerns experiments with imaging brain activity that corresponds with recognition of faces in brains with lesions.
Ricoeur: Something happens in my brain, and when you tell me what happens in my brain, you add to my knowledge of the base, of the underlying neural reality; but does this knowledge help me in trying to decipher the enigma of a face? Do you believe that you understand the faces of others in the street, in your family, because you know something about what happens in their brain?
Changeux: Of course. I understand not only the type of face to which I attach a name but also its expression, the emotions it communicates, its ethical claims.
Ricoeur: Here I confess to being perplexed. Earlier I have had the occasion to express my perplexity in the case of dysfunctions, deficits, lesions and so on. Objective knowledge of the causes of such disorders may improve our understanding of thesituation experienced by the patient, in particular through a therapeutic intervention that ideally the patient ought to understand, accept, and integrate with his daily behavior. But what of successful behaviors–felicitous behaviors as I have called them? How is objective knowledge to be integrated with daily understanding? This is a problem raised by your example of the understanding of faces; what does knowledge of the brain add here?
Changeux: This knowledge will, I hope, permit us to better understand others, to know how to introduce greater harmony in human relationships, to recognize others as belonging to a single humanity.
Ricoeur: Greater harmony would be obtained by changing something in our mutual experience, notby acting on the brain.
Changeux: But our mutual experience unavoidably involves our brains. It will not happen, of course, by acting directly on the brain but indirectly through dialogue, the exchange of ideas, deliberation, and access to various extranal resources. . . .
So, you are saying that the OP suffers because we here are all in total agreement as to what objectifying the subjective entails?
WL,
So that I’m not pinned to wall and classified as a particular species of human, I’ll try to elaborate on my position in this thread. As a published poet I, too, have waxed prolific on the joie de vivra of aesthetic appreciations personally known. But–when Ricoeur describes Changeux’s neuronal model for “naturalizing psychology” as “an impoverished view of the Psyche”, I take umbrage as Changeux does.
Realizing the mathematical substrate of musical compositions in no way detracts from my delight in hearing Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” or Rachmaninoff’s (another neurotic like me) “Piano Concerto in A Minor”. When I teach music I begin with the structural relationships that exist among notes, keys and chords. Hopefully, a student will get beyond the rote learning and into the spontaneous recognition of “when I do this, that happens”, into the realm of creative possibilty. That realm does not bypass any structural process; it simply speeds them up.
But is this experience had by a subject therefore isolate? It would have to be in order to show duality. What if the brain-mind dualism is a pragmatic “what if”?
The subject is a human experience based on our evolved consciousness of self, a neocortexial affair. So we use the experience to describe the this of other organisms. When we use it to desribe a rock, we get into the slippery slope of things in themselves. A good source of explanation on the evolved sense of self is Nicholas Humprey’s “A History of the Mind”.
Do you realize that you just challenged/disputed Ricoeur’s thought here?
I suppose I’d still have to see more. The part I just selected from your quote seems to be an example of total agreement. So I’m still not sure where the disagreement is. Is it just a difference in what the two of them think it’s important to emphasize?