Intro to Philosophy of Mind

Intro to Philosophy of Mind (Minds, Brains, Machines)

Finally getting to teach my first philosophy of mind course at uni which is both exciting and a bit daunting.  I will try and track my progression in this blog as I go.  The first step, already completed, was getting the reading list together.  Here I tried to balance my own desires to show the problems with representational theories of mind while presenting a fairly standard picture.  I also wanted to include Merleau-Ponty, who I think is essential phenomenologist needed to understand current debate (there was also a course dedicated to Heidegger the previous semester).  The mid-semester break was quite late in the year, so that also helped shape the course, making the last few weeks a concentrated look at the phenomenological approach.  I’ve included the full reading list below for those interested but I’ll mention some notable inclusions.

My biggest mark on this course is that I leave out the discussion of dualism you normally have in such a course, or at the start of a philosophy of mind textbook (e.g. Kim, Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson).  For me what is interesting about dualism now is its resurgence, which stems from the argument: by now we should have a naturalised account of the mind, because we do not, there may be problems with naturalism/phyiscalism.  For me, this new found doubt is of more compelling than the history reasons that drove Cartesisn dualism.   To this end I didn’t start with a passage from Descartes, rather Ryle’s Descartes’ Myth.  To me this piece helps introduce the core ideas of the modern debate as well as the critique them all at the same time.  It also starts the course with an impressive source material; it is fairly easy to read and sets a good philosophical tone.

Another notable quirk is my reliance on John Haugeland’s work.  For me his development from a traditional, computational account of the mind to the more Heideggerian approach is indicative on the development of Western philosophy of mind in general.  Of particular interest is how in his textbook from the 80s he talks, like many did, of the mind, almost, being accounted for, as if there are just a few kinks to be ironed out.  He then later critiques this position, in particular in the paper Mind Embodied Embedded where he pushes his more Heideggerian approach.  Additionally, Haugeland’s work not only reveals the moves away from computationalism but also how similar the theories are.  If you track what is kept the same in his work you see the base level assumptions that I think are problematic.  That said, I won’t be delving too much into that aspect, rather just showing the transition and how it shows how the debate around the mind is still active and developing.

Now its time to go write some lectures!


Reading list
- Gilbert Ryle (1949) “Descartes’ Myth”, Chapter 1 of The Concept of Mind
- John Haugeland (1985) “The Saga of the Modern Mind”, Chapter 1 of Artificial Intelligence
- Jaegwon Kim (2010) Chapter 3 AND Chapter 4 of Philosophy of Mind (3rd edition)
- David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson (2007) “Common-sense functionalism”, Chapter 3 of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (2nd edition)
- John Heil (2012) “The Representational Theory of Mind”, Chapter 4, pp. 104-120 in Philosophy of Mind
- Ned Block (1980) “Troubles with functionalism”, Chapter 22 in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, ed. Ned Block
- Susan Blackmore (2007) “David Chalmers” in Conversations on consciousness
- Frank Jackson (1982) “Epiphenomenal Qualia” Philosophical Quarterly 32 p.127–136
- William Ramsey (2013) Eliminative Materialism http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/
- John Haugeland (1998) “Mind Embodied Embedded” in Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind
- Gallagher and Zahavi (2012) “Introduction p. 2-11” of The Phenomenological Mind 2nd Edition
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception TBD
- Gallagher and Zahavi (2012) “Perception”, Chapter 5 in The Phenomenological Mind 2nd Edition
- Taylor Carman (2005) “Sensation, Judgement, and the Phenomenal Field”, Chapter 2 in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty

Google Nexus 7 academic review

After using the Nexus 7 since December I thought I would have a quick write up of how I thought it was for my studies.

Firstly, the model I have is the 32 GB, wifi version (so no mobile internet) and for its price it is a powerful machine.  Compared to some of the Android based phones I have tried it is very responsive and really has an excellent quality screen.  When buying it I was comparing it to the iPad mini which is the same size though more expensive.   In the end I thought the price difference was just too great and went for the Nexus, mainly because it was actually cheaper than the 16 GB iPad mini, and I knew I would need the extra space.

The primary reason for me getting a tablet is to read journal articles from.  For this the screen is great.  It is a nice size to both hold and to read.  I was worried the screen would be too small, but with the ease at which you can zoom in and out this has never been a problem.  I bought one book from the Google Play book store and it is a pleasure to read, especially with the inbuilt dictionary.  This I hear is an old feature for e-readers but it is one I very much appreciated.

However, when it comes to academic reading while it is still easy to do, what the Nexus is lacking is good, annotation software.  I have tried several now, the two that are worth mentioning are ezPDF Reader and Adobe Reader.  I bought the ezPDF reader after checking out some reviews and it does have a lot of features that are useful.  That said, it also has some severely annoying problems.  The first is that it does not support the continuous scrolling of documents, it operates on the page turning system.  This is fine for reading a book, but if I am annotating articles it really is a pain.  I often want to got back to page, check what I just read, or maybe highlight the end line of a page and first line of the next page, erase an annotation and so on.  For doing such document annotations the lack of scroll suddenly becomes very noticeable.

It also makes it extremely hard to select annotations that you have put on the page.  Often the texts I read are sometimes scanned, so there is no easy option to highlight the text, you literally have to draw a straight line under what you want to emphasise.  With my shaky hand this can often lead to mistakes which I want to easily remove or change.  For some reason this is not easy to do with the ezPDF Reader, when you try to click on an annotation to edit it, it rarely gets selected.  I ended up just going to a menu, where all the annotations are listed and selecting it from there.  However, this process breaks your flow and is just too slow to be considered functional.

Instead, I found that the Adobe Reader is in fact then the best annotation software for me and it is free!  It lets me continuously scroll and lets me select the annotations easily for editing.  It doesn't have all the range of annotations that exPDF has but it does the basics well.  I would really like something that works as well as Adobe but with more features.  Something I hope will be created in the future...

I should mention that I do use a stylus when I annotating texts.  I just bought one from Officeworks, nothing fancy.  It works well enough, though like all capacitive screens the stylus works, at best, most of the time.  After playing with a Wii U I much prefer the Wii U's resistive screen but no tablets I know of use this technology.

This brings us to the other requirement of academia, putting text into the tablet.  Text entry is sloooow with the Nexus, at least for me.  Even with the swipe technology it really takes a while to enter text.  I am not the fastest sms texter, so it is no surprise that I am slow, but it is at a much slower pace than I had hoped for.  Don't get rid of your laptop and desktops just yet.  It is fine for annotations on PDFs or quick notes (Evernote is a great note taking app) but it is just that little bit too slow for note taking in a seminar or lecture.

I do have one final gripe to add, once the battery is low, plugging it into the wall does not produce enough energy to allow you to keep using it while it is charging.  This means you have to stop using the tablet even if it is plugged into the wall.  I have never had any device require this and I think it is a consequence of the low price.  This is definitely one area the iPad mini outclasses the Nexus 7.

Overall I find using the the Nexus fun and it is great for checking email, facebook, twitter etc.  It is also good for reading texts though I have yet to find the ultimate annotation software.  The main advantage for me is the move from paper to electronic copies of books and journal articles. It means I have my papers with me everywhere I go (thanks to the excellent Dropbox android app).  This has proven to be the biggest help as I can read something on the go, then have all the highlights on that text ready when I sit down to write.  As a creation tool, however, it is not quite there yet.  It really should be considered to be part of your academic technology tool box, rather than a do-it-all device.

Cross reference

I have been busy updating my Academia.edu profile rather than this blog so I thought I would cross post to show I am alive.

One issue I am thinking about is whether I put up a "Gonzo Journalism" section on my Academia profile or not.  It would contain the pieces I have written, and will write, for the student newspaper.  These are general playful or outright silly in nature.

Can't work out whether it would hinder or help me....

Anyway, my profile is at:
http://latrobe.academia.edu/NikAlksnis

A trip to Barbados

In November (2012) I attended the Cavehill Chips philosophy conference at the University of West Indies, Barbados. While everyone still insists that I only attended for a junket it was actually a very productive trip.

The primary reason I attended was that it was a small conference specifically in my area and it matched up with La Trobe's funding cycle. How rare that happens!

But it was a joy to attend a conference where everyone was on the same page. Added to that, most people were like me, trying to put new ideas out there in a hostile environment. Reassurance like that goes a long way.

The second reason was that Shaun Gallagher was there and, due to small nature of the conference, I hoped I could corner him for some serious questioning! I really wanted to see his responses to some issues I had with his work. This was mainly driven by some feedback I received saying I was creating a straw man out of the phenomenological embodied position. I did get my cornering chances and I left feeling quite assured that this was not the case. I think the tough questions I am asking are valid and something the phemon cogsci movement must address (namely offline cognition).

So the general feeling after the conference was keep calm and carry on!

That said, due to the location most attendees were from America, and I was once again reminded of just how political and tough their system is. This is not a critical comment, more one of sympathy for just what people must endure to eek out even a modicum of success if recognition. Unfortunately Australia and the many European universities are headed that way.

Next post I'll say something on the actual philosophy discussed there!

New year

Just wishing all a happy new year and add the typical pledge to update the blog more. I just got myself a Nexus 7 to help with this and to be active in the online philosophy community in general.

Will also post some thoughts on using the tablet for academia. So far the biggest lesson is that you need a stylus to annotate PDFs and other texts. Really makes the experience much more enjoyable.

But I will post shortly about the philosophical adventures I've been up to in the last few months.

Not radical enough

Here is a review/critique I wrote on Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin's new book Radicalizing Enactivism.  Like most anti-representation or anti-content theories, they are against content only up to a point.  What I fail to understand, is when such theories introducing representations or content, what happens to all the arguments they just mounted against them?  Why do those arguments only apply to a subset of representations and not when these authors want to use them? For more see below:

Title: A reply to Radicalizing Enactivism: how scaffolding fails to solve the hard problem of content

Extended Abstract: In their new book, Radicalizing Enactivism (RE), Hutto and Myin present compelling arguments for why basic minds do not have content.  In particular, they introduce the Hard Problem of Content (HPC) i.e.: that “informational content is incompatible with explanatory naturalism” (RE, p. xv).  By reviewing a range of theories, the pair demonstrate the futility of recent attempts to distinguish content from covariance.  Content is information within a system, whereas a covariant system can be explained purely by way of causal interactions.  However, in spite of these arguments, Hutto and Myin do not present a theory of mind that is content free.  Instead, they label a total rejection of content as really radical enactivism (RRE), which they claim is a bridge too far.  They conclude that while basic minds do not have content, highly intelligent minds, such as human minds, do trade in content and that this content is made possible due to our linguistic abilities.  In this paper I will challenge Hutto and Myin's conclusion and show how their appeal to language is at odds with the arguments employed by RE to deny contentful cognition.  Hutto and Myin themselves fail to make the choice in the dilemma that they claim HPC presents: either solve how content arises from covariance (even though it does not seem possible to rectify with naturalism) or give up content altogether.

Firstly, I will explicate why an appeal to content is seen as necessary to account for intelligent minds.  For this we must go back to Hutto’s earlier work in which he argues that linguistic minds necessarily have content.[1]  Hutto relies on the Davidsonian model of language, which involves propositional attitudes, such as believing that it is raining outside, or desiring a piece of cake.  These attitudes are contentful because they are about things.  We can know this aboutness because propositions have a truth value.  For example, the statement “it is raining outside right now,” can be true or false depending on the state of the world.  This idea is then used by Hutto[2] to conclude that any language user must have propositional attitudes and therefore content.  In other words, as language is necessarily propositional, any language user must have propositional states in order to be able perform linguistic tasks.

Where Hutto and Myin diverge from a traditional propositional approach[3] is that they insist that the linguistic cognition is only possible through social practices.  This is predicated on the idea of scaffolding, i.e. that the ability to perform certain actions is necessarily linked to an agents' interaction with, and development alongside, elaborate tools and structures in the agent's environment.[4]  This idea of scaffolding appears to be an extremely useful one in terms of understanding the development of human capabilities.

However, what it does not do is solve the HPC, in particular, how the learning of linguistic social practices leads to the creation of content.  This could be contrasted to non-linguistic practices that, supposedly, would not lead to content; for example, learning to use utensils to eat with (forks in some cultures and chopsticks in others).  While there is no doubt that the idea of scaffolding does seem to fit within a naturalistic framework, it does not actually answer the question of how content arises within cognitive systems.  The idea that language is propositional is not validated by the claim that language arises due to social practices.  All it tells us is something about how we learn language, not the constitution of language itself (contentful or not).  To solve the HPC in favor of content, a plausible naturalistic account for the emergence of content is requisite.  At best, Hutto and Myin’s appeal to languages as being contentful could be seen as falling back on the Default Linguistic Mind (as opposed to the Default Internal Mind, see RE, p.137).  This position assumes content is involved in linguistic cognitive practices without reflecting on how it arises within a causal, naturalistic world.

With this assumption exposed, we can see how it works against Hutto and Myin’s particular approach.  For the majority of the book, the authors employ a bottom-up strategy that is at the heart of enactivism: the development of a theory of cognition based on the low-level mechanics of cognition systems.  This is precisely what leads them to conclude that content is often mistaken for covariance and it is covariance that explains cognition at this level.  However, while Hutto and Myin use a bottom-up approach to dismiss other contentful theories of cognition, their statement that language must involve content is driven purely from the top-down received view that language is necessarily contentful.  The bringing together of these two approaches does not make the neat fit that the authors seem to believe it does.

While a bottom-up/top-down switch is common to other enactivist theories, [5] Hutto and Myin’s position relies so heavily on showing that content does not easily emerge from within a naturalistic framework (if at all), the fact that they posit content without specifically tackling the HPC is puzzling.  Moreover, it undermines their critique of other appeals to content: if radical enactivism can simply ignore the HPC when it is convenient, then surely any other theory can too.  The insistence that language must involve content is no different from the insistence that basic minds must involve content if neither side is backed by an account of how content arises.

In light of these concerns, I will conclude that RE presents a strong case for why cognition should be understood as contentless.  The only mistake the authors make is that they view their own work as pushing back the location of content (outside of basic minds), when they should instead view their work as ultimately rejecting content altogether.  Their appeal to language in order to introduce content seems more like a traditional philosophy of language reflex than a thoroughly thought out position.  Only by removing this reflex does the book become a radical work at all.

---

[1] Hutto, D. D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Socio-Cultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[2] Hutto is not alone in making this step , for a very similar combination of language and cognition see Clark, Andy (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[3] cf. Fodor, Jerry A. (1975). The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[4] Sterelny, Kim (2010). Minds: extended or scaffolded? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4):465-481.

[5] Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Thoughts on the AAP conference 2012

I just attended the AAP (Australian Association of Philosophy) conference, the largest philosophy get together in Australia.  It was my second time attending this annual conference, this time at the University of Wollongong.  Even with my limited experience of conferences I think it is a fun but a little weird.  Due to attendance and presentations being open to all comers there is a diverse range of talks and a wide range of attendees.  This tends to make the conference more about getting your field of research across to a wider audience then really tackling a problem in depth.  That said, I have seen very technical talks, and I think that is where I experience the weirdness.  The conference is many different things to different people, I find this makes it hard to connect to people the way you can at smaller and more focused conferences.  At the AAP everyone seems to take pride in butting heads together.

There is also a lot of talk around the big names, seeing what the high profile figures are up to.  This is both in terms of the keynote speakers (which were of a very high quality this year) but also those well-known in the Australian philosophy scene.  For a quick review of those of interest to me: I still don’t understand David Chalmers’ metaphysical project.  The detailed work he does, and encourages his students to do, is a level of technicality I don’t see as being beneficial.  The main concerns around his work don’t seem to got away anytime soon through careful metaphysical considerations.  That said, you cannot fault the quality of the work.

I have a similar concern with Peter Godfrey-Smith’s work.  In his talk he discussed the topic of information transfer between animals.  It must be said, it was a fascinating topic and the insight provided into a bias in Dawkins work was informative.  As was Godfrey-Smith’s appeal to David Lewis, which will no doubt offer something useful to the topic.  Yet the overall treatment was very black-box in nature as “signaler” and “receiver” were simple components in a very simple model.  This is at odds with the modern embodied-embedded/ecological approach.  If there really is a revolution towards more holistic approaches it is a very slow going one, having to reach each topic in philosophy individually.

While I was not able to attend I heard that Kim Sterelny’s work is still impeccable, probably the best at tackling philosophy of mind from an evolutionary/biology perspective.  Also the talks by the La Trobe contingency went well, though there seemed to be a strong accented voice of disagreement in a couple.

My own talk was on at a bad time, the first talk of the morning the day after the conference dinner.  So not many people had yet recovered.  I was told it was good by those that did attend, basically because everyone agreed.  This type of feedback is not the best but it is nice change to the normally combative comments I get.  The talk was essentially the same challenge to affordances that I outlined in my previous blog post.  From the mammoth text below I changed it into a more presentable form and tighten the argument.  The conclusion is still the same, that affordances can explain innate perception to action behaviours but not more complicated cases.  For that, something more is needed.  Whether it is representations or something else I left it as an open question.  That is the work of the next chapter in my thesis and will be revealed soon.

As a last comment both on my talk and the conference: it is only when I go to such conferences that I realise how “heideggerian” I am in contrast to many of those working in philosophy of mind.  This both excites and scares me.  For on one hand I have a good amount of knowledge that many do no posses, while on the other, the work I do seems outside the radar of most.  However, I think it is too late for me to change now.  I both enjoy this type of philosophy too much and also think it is right way for phil. of mind to be heading.  All that said, the conclusion at the end of my talk was that Heideggerian AI was Heideggerian enough.  I regret not using that as the title for the talk itself.  Maybe next time.