Does cognitive neuroscience make dualism redundant?

Precisely my good man.

This is why it has long been my opinion that the 'solution' to the question of the Mind is insoluble. Myself, I think that it is the question itself that is the source of the problem...

 

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I don't think it is so hopeless.

It took a while, but psychology, for example, did acknowledge that there is more to a human than just what can be observed in a psychological laboratory - social psychology was born and a different view of what constitutes human personality, the human sense of selfhood.

If cognitive neuroscience would see the mind as something that is both individual and collective, as psychology does (and other disciplines too), that obsession with pinning it all down to the brain could not be taken for granted anymore.

Cognitive neuroscience insists on pinning it all to the brain because this is simply how the field of cognitive neuroscience is defined, this is what it does.

The only question is how come some people give it such absolute credence at the exclusion of other disciplines.

 

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Right. This is the ironic part. If science can detect something then it is matter/energy. If they find something associated with brains that they can detect - yes, that was redundant - then this will be brain even if the attributes of whatever this is are not at all like glial cells or anything else currently part of brains. Dualism is eliminated by the ever expanding definition of what is 'material'. Which is fine, per se, but it leads to useless confusions in discussions between scientists and religious people, for example, where the word 'immaterial' get used by both sides as if anyone knows what this term means - because, really, 'material' is a historically bound concept in flux, and a term with almost no attributes except that it can be detected - unless it is strings in string theory, etc. Right now we know that there are em fields around brains and bodies. We know that mental processes can be interfered with by messing with these. Fields are not like bones or noses or the corpus callosum. It seems to me there is a dearth of insight, often, about philosophy of language issues.

If anything that is ever found in the future by scientists to have anything to with what philosophers referred to with the term 'mind' it will be called material. Well, duh, of course, then, immaterial is a useless term for scientists. What we learn is how they talk and want to, but very little about 'reality' or experience through this conclusion.

 

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Why don't we talk about the perception of sight.

- Do we all agree that photons enter the retina and are absorbed by special neurons called photoreceptors.
- The retina is a part of the CNS, part of the brain actually. It develops from the diencephalon.
- Retinal ganglion cells (neurons) are connected to the photoreceptors by bipolar cells.
- RGCs then carry action potentials to where they project at the thalamus.
- Neurons in the thalamus project back to the Primary visual neocortex.

Thus, visual information from photon stimulation is carried from the eye to the thalamus and on to the neocortex.

Do we all agree this is true? I mean, there's nothing magical about this. It doesn't require a soul. It's purely based on a physical system.

 

We don't know what it requires for matter to notice things.

And? Where is the viewer? Is the viewer seeing itself or something else and where are these 'things'? How is there a viewer? Why isn't simply a domino chain of causes and effects with no 'self' seeing?

There are black boxes here, but they have names, so it seems like we are not saying 'black box'. There's also the issue of the sustained experience and how all these causal chains are unified and coordinated? How the brain as works as a coherent whole, I mean they just found out that the nerve impulses may in fact be sound rather than electrochemical charges running along the nerve.

http://scienceblog.com/cms/physicis...rve-impulses-say-sound-more-likely-12738.html

We can put together a desciption of a process with a bunch of words that are actually reifications of long term processes - things in constant flux - like many of the terms in your description and it can give the illusion of completeness and solidity, when in fact we do not fully understand those processes and nouns nor are we sure the description is complete. And that's not even getting to the touchy issue of why there is an observer at all. The observer whose experiences/sense data/phenomenal life made up every observation that went into making those words, all of which refer to things these strange observers experienced.

 

I lay in a baby basket in the Maternity Ward at Sacred Heart Hospital, staring up at the ceiling, simply gathering data. No second thoughts or analysis of why, where...etc.

A length of hours, days, months, years passed (I don't really recall the duration) in a similar data gathering mode. No second thoughts...

It was then I caught myself...waking from a dream. I was juxtaposed from my then "usual data-gathering regiment", to a new second analysis mode of operation.

This is my simplest rendition of my earliest conscious state, and illustrates the use of several different brain areas in the consciousness development processes.

 

That stirred some interesting posts

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I was more or less just speaking about the initial transduction of photon energy to the V1 (primary visual neocortex). These pathways are very well understood and mapped out. So much so that we can indeed follow on from a single photon to the visual cortex in the occipital lobe. One could think of these particular neurons like cabling. We also have a really good idea of the biochemistry from photon to the back of the brain (layer 4 of our 6 layer neocortex).

I was just wondering if we can all agree that yes, photon energy is transmitted to the neocortex in a physical manner. No need for a soul to underpin any of this process.

Agreed?




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My earliest recollection is at the Zoo when I was a whooping 3-4 years old!

 

Not sure how this helps your argument.

One could similarly trace a system of cause and effect to the ignition key ... which of course says absolutely nothing about it being the central mechanism to combustion engines.

 

Let me critique this from another angle without even raising the specter of a soul or dualism....

Your model breaks down to

A----------B--------------C-----------etc.---------------(something happens in the neocortex)

Light impinges on the retina - which is the outer extension of the brain in this model - and starts a line of dominoes falling.

Here's the problem with this model.

It is not what science, even, says is all that is happening with vision, however it is precisely the kind of reductionist, linear and passive models of being in the world that falls out of science, again and again.

Seeing is active in the extreme.
First our eyes are always moving in unconscious movement - saccades, which are initiated by the frontal and parietal portions of the brain (iow portions of the body not mentioned in your model). These do all sorts of things - hide the blind spot, scan the field of vision, etc.

Second seeing is much more like a blind person with a cane, tapping the world, than some passive model of perception. Our eyes - governed by both conscious choices and unconscious ones - are seeking, looking for, choosing amongst. Our WHOLE BODY is supporting this ongoing activity by muscular contractions and movements which in turn are monitered and affected by what is seen.

Third a significant percentage of the nerves that are involved with creating the visual image come from portions of the brain that are NOT involved in perception directly. WE are constantly filling out what we see with the eyes with memory and anticipation. The actual second to second image we 'take in' is radically incomplete.

The model you wrote leads to several philophical positions or rather is part of them.

The self is passive. Causation is linear and easy to track. The self is not the whole body, but rather a kind of epiphenomenon, nowadays localizing (magically) in the neocortex. Selves are really pieces - analogous to a huge amount of lines of dominoes - that run in parallel, at most, and in lines. Rather than a huge complicated system which may have emergent properties that are not handled, in fact are hidden or glossed over, by these newtonian models of existence.

It also tends towards a homonculus problem and the related overarching binding problem....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem

All very left brain thinking, which makes sense since so much of schooling is left brain dominant and punishes holistic thinking, especially as one heads into the sciences.

We should not be surprised that selves are more and more being considered illusions when this type of linear, reductionist approach gets aimed at us.

What this approach allows is a way to model selves so that simple causal interventions can be created and patented - the whole psychopharmacological explosion - and anything that might feel out of control and nebulous for certain kinds of minds, no longer feels that way.

And in the process we are being told we really do not exist and what exists is a bunch of pieces.

In reality, without even raising dualistic models, we already know that many things are happening at once when we see - emotions and thus endocrine processes all over the body, for example, and motivations and goals and imagination all contribute to every act of seeing.

Note: act.

But we end up with things like Dennett's 'benign' user illusion coming out of AI, philosophy and science
ironically by selves who are taking up a lot of space
with their selves and values
while denying their own and everyone else's existence.

The very 'region' via which ALL empirical observation has taken place - phenomena/experience - is being called an illusion.

Which should make all their conclusions fruit of a poison tree, but miraculously it never seems to.

 

Nope! And you have no idea if a soul is needed to underlie this process since, for example, you have no idea why there is someone who experiences qualia when this happens. Unless you think that dominoes feel themselves struck and the sensation of falling when they are hit also. Nothing in your model explains the experiencer. If this is simply a given that we can skip over and need not explain, then the only consistent position I can see is a panconsciousness.

LG and I - if I may presume LG's reaction to a degree - will welcome such a foray into positing consciousness, should you give it a shot.

 

i could not agree more.

 

I'm not making an argument I just want to see if we agree to this thus far.

Do we?

 

Firstly, Doreen, I was not talking about the act of "seeing", I was simply talking about physical processes (as best we understand them - which is pretty damn good) in how photonic information is relayed from the retina to the neocortex. We can trace these neural pathways by dissection (visual look at them) as well as by using dyes, electrodes, etc.... There's nothing all that complicated. We don't have to understand "what a photon is" to scientifically describe these processes.

Do you agree that these pathways are the means by which photon energy is changed into a chemical/electrical impulses? If yes then that's great we agree. If not then do you have another hypothesis on how photon energy is transmitted from the retina to the brain (for now I'm assuming you agree that the retina is the organ of sight?)



(2) Take a look at the diagram below. These are visual field deficits due to lesions in the pathways from the retina to the visual cortex (except for the bottom deficit with is in the neocortex - macular sparing).

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So, these are the visual fields "perceived" by the "observer". For example, the top right is a blank right visual field (due to removal of the right eye).
Would you agree that visual perception is dependent on these neural pathways? It is clear that when you cut the pathways from the right eye, you become "blind" in that eye and no longer "observe" anything from that retina. The visual precept is LOST for that eye. No more "visual cognition" based on photonic energy detected in the right retina occurs for that eye.

Agreed?



(3) I wonder, if YOU had a visual field deficit, do you think you'd strongly rely on the science of vision and visual perception to cure your blindness? I'm not trying to pull the no atheists in foxholes fallacy, but am really just curious. Because at the end of the day, for me, that's as much about consciousness as the general discussion. What I mean is, the scientific method does such a superior job of describing these processes that lead to visual perception that ALL of us here would run to our nearest science-trained eye surgeon at the mere hint of visual field deficit.

Wouldn't you agree? If not you'd be in the extreme minority. Most people will seek "reductionist" medical advice as quickly as possible when their visual field is defective. Why? Because that probably the BEST CHANCE you have of saving your sight.




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I hope I'm not coming across badly here. I'm simply trying to take the most logical approach to describing the cognition of vision.

 

Well, seeing is an act, so if you are describing physical processes and it does not take this into account it in both misleading and incomplete and not slightly.

I already pointed out in another thread that we don't even know they are chemical/electrical impulses. The two physicists, as description of whose study I linked too, demonstrated that there should be more heat generated by that model. And their model, based on sound, explained something heretofore mysterious: how many analgesics work. I think there are black boxes through out. And nowhere do I see any mechanism for consciousness in your model.

I also mentioned that even within conventional science the images we see are said to be created using perception from the eyes AND guesswork, anticipation, filler from other parts of the brain. I added to this my own sense that seeing is affect by the whole person, both on conscious and unconcscious levels, including emotions.

People see. Animals see.

Organs do not.

I have never claimed that eyes are not involved in seeing. All I keep saying is that your model is incomplete and not insignificantly. And, going back to the car issue. All sorts of things could stop the car from starting: ignition issues, wet sparks, no gas, a drunk driver, an emp pulse from a nuclear explosion....and so on.

None of this is helping you with saying here is what sight is, period, and there is no need for a soul to explain anything.

This is actually not what I would do first or perhaps at all. But that would open a large can of worms.

You seem to be missing the point. You are taking my criticism of you model as if I am saying eyes are not necessary for vision.

I am saying your model is not sufficient, remotely, to explain vision.

I am saying there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy

and you are taking this to mean

I do not think the things dreamt of in your philosophy matter.

Ibid.

 

Interesting knowledge level of subject matter you have. Thank you for the interesting information.

You need, at the juncture, to relate this back to the form of "cognition" that a "blind since birth" subject would have. Obvious too, that I can close my eyes, and disregarding the "phosphene afterglow patterns", still retain a conscious entity "personage " of myself intact. Perhaps you are saying that if we remove all sensory input, that this sense of individual conscious personage would vanish.

 

OK, let me start again.

If we go back to the picture posted you can see the neural pathways from the retina to the brain (note: we all thought yes, FROM the retina TO the brain seemed reasonable). If we are reading a sentence and our field of view is stable, we can clearly recognize that visual information in our field of view is transmitted to our brain via specific pathways.

So, IF we can read the sentence (a cognitive process) the first step in receiving that information (via photons) will be retina.

Thus: retina->thalamus->brain->cognition


WE agree to the first three steps correct?



Note: No I'm not a visual specialist, it's not my area of study at all, but yes I do know a little about vision and visual pathways as I had to cover this subject area years ago when I worked in a medical school.

Note2: No, I'm not referring to "seeing" anything just yet. Just getting the visual field information FROM the retina TO the brain.

 

As Doreen pointed out, your explanations of vision effectively end at the point of consciousness so your entire effort to bring this to bear on a chemical/reductionist breakdown of consciousness is misleading.

IOW we certainly do not agree that your reductionist offering of the phenomena of vision is anywhere near complete (what to speak of when you try to extrapolate the analogy to that of consciousness)

 

the first three steps in what?

 

Well, I've stayed out of this until now....

Precisely.

...and I'm one of those 'reductionist materialists'... lol

 

"...Thalamo-cortico-thalamic circuits consist of looped neural pathways that connect the thalamus to the cerebral cortex, and connect the cerebral cortex back to the thalamus. Some researchers propose that such circuits allow the brain to obtain data on its own activity, making self-awareness possible..."
"...Damage to the thalamus can lead to permanent coma..."
(courtesy: Wikipedia)

Thus: retina->thalamus->brain->thalamus->cognition