Minds and Brains

Philosophy of mind is a lively field overflowing with competing theoretical frameworks. In my own estimation, most contemporary debate centers around the competition between computational representationalism and 4EA philosophy of mind. For those who don’t know, 4EA refers to the school of thought which claims that the mind is not a representing computer, but rather, an embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affective, dynamic system. There is a lot to unpack in this mantra. Embodied refers to the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty and the emphasis on the lived body as the starting point for philosophical investigation of cognition. Embedded refers to the fact that the neural system is embedded or nested within a organized body and environment and cannot be analyzed independent of its behavior within both a physical environment and a social-cultural milieu. Enacted refers to the way in which action-control is not a matter of sensing-modeling-planning-acting, but rather, regulating the  intrinsic behavioral dynamics of autopoiesis (emergent self-organization) so as to effectively utilize resources in the environment. Extended refers to how the cognitive system actively offloads tasks onto external environmental props so as to free up limited cognitive resources (e.g. using a notepad as external memory storage). Affective refers to how the intrinsic behavioral dynamics of emergent self-organization are driven by an emotional attunement or affectivity that valences stimuli in terms of meaningful salience thresholds e.g. good/bad, inviting/threatening, etc. Such affectivity is grounded by what Damasio calls “background feelings” and what Ratcliffe calls “feelings of being-in-the-world” or “ways of finding oneself”.

In my (admittedly biased) opinion, 4EA philosophy is a superior philosophical/empirical paradigm for interpreting the vast majority of psychological research in a metaphysically respectable fashion.

But this is not the future of philosophy of mind.

In order to glimpse the future, we must take extension more seriously. We must look beyond the artificial thought experiments involving notepads and walking canes and instead develop an appreciation for how mind is extended and changed by propositional reasoning i.e. narrative practice, the giving and asking for reasons (rational stories) for actions and events (with implicit inferential commitments holding us responsible for the things we do/say). This is why I think people like Robert Brandom and Daniel Hutto are going to take us into the next generation of cognitive science: 4EAC. Embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affective, constructed.

Julian Jaynes has already cleared the underbrush to prepare the way for social-linguistic constructivism. And not your Grandpa’s neutered Sapir-Whorf hypothesis either. I’m talking about the linguistic construction of consciousness and higher-order thought itself. In other words,Vygotsky, not Whorf. Indeed, “Saying that consciousness is developed out of language means that everybody from Darwin on, including myself in earlier years, was wrong in trying to trace out the origin of consciousness biologically or neurophysiologically. It means we have to look at human history after language has evolved and ask when in history did an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a mindspace begin.”

The introduction of constructivism into 4EA philosophy of mind will provide a new intellectual trajectory for understanding the unique structure of human consciousness in distinction to our nonverbal animal cousins. Whereas Alva Noe and Evan Thompson have done an admirable job capturing the essence of animal consciousness (what I simply refer to as “nonconscious cognition” or “behavioral reactivity”), they have unwittingly conflated two distinct levels of mentality: primary and secondary consciousness, prereflective and reflective awareness,  cognition and metacognition, automatic and controlled processes, etc. As I put it in a footnote to my recent paper, “What Is It Like to Be Nonconscious? A Defense of Julian Jaynes“:

Unfortunately, even thinkers within the externalist paradigm for perception have overlooked this important point, placing the “mystery” of consciousness in terms of explaining the nonconscious what-it-is-like of phenomenal sensory experience. So while I agree with Alva Noë (2004, 2009) when he argues that visual perception is a process of enactive exploration of the world enabled by automatic sensorimotor skills, when he claims that this body-world interaction fully constitutes the conscious mind, he too is falling into the trap of confusing consciousness with cognition, mistakenly thinking that the latter subsumes the entirety of the former. Moreover, this conflation is so rampant that  even when Andy Clark (2009) argues against the notion that we can explain consciousness by recourse to an enactive account of perception, he still buys into the original claim that what needs explaining about the conscious mind is “the elusive ‘what-it-is-likeness’ that seems to characterize a subject’s experience of a certain kind of redness, of a certain voice, or of a pain in her stomach” (p. 1-2). If Jaynes is right, then such what-it-is-likeness is not what needs explaining in coming to terms with the “mystery” of consciousness. Instead, what needs explaining is narratizing within a functional mind-space through cultural-linguistic conditioning in childhood.

Jon Cogburn is a great professor because he always inspires me to work on really cool problems. Yesterday was the first day of his graduate seminar on animal cognition and he already suggested an awesome topic for my term paper: Does Heidegger’s account of understanding require language? Since we are reading Brandom, and Brandom uses a similar contrastive approach whereby humans are understood as being discontinuous from animal minds in virtue of linguistic-inferential doings, I will defend Brandom by defending Heidegger’s argument (which Brandom himself is heavily indebted too). I think I am also going to use Charles Taylor’s account of constitutive self-interpretation and Tomasello and Clark’s account of linguistic constructionism to demonstrate the way in which language modifies understanding so as to create world-richness. And this account will be structured by a holistic, usage-based (rather than formal) model of language acquisition wherein the syntactical abilities of young children are primarily item-specific with only little ability for systematicity.  Here is an abstract I whipped up last night:

Gary Gutting recently posted an article to the NY Times philosophy column “The Stone” in which he had this to say:

Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable atheism.

I’m quite familiar with these “agnosticism is more rational than atheism” arguments. I usually find the proponents of these arguments to be insufferable in their quest to prove agnosticism a superior philosophy to that of atheism, a more “juvenile” or “arrogant” position put forward only by the philosophically naive (Dawkins, etc).

Gutting seems to suggest that because sensible people report some kind of direct awareness of a divine being and because theologians have found ways of rationalizing these experiences, this lends credence to the supposition that agnosticism is the preferable stance insofar as we can’t “reject the [supernatural] hypothesis out of hand”. But this begs the question against the possibility of giving an overwhelming empirical explanation of exactly why and how religious hallucinations are possible.

Let’s say we have two competing explanations of the religious experience of “direct awareness of a divine being”. The first explanation is based on a naturalistic metaphysics. It starts from the expansion of the universe, the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, organisms, mammals, apes, and humans, etc. It tells this story in exquisite detail, with all the gory details filled in how the brain evolved over time. At some point in history, a side effect of human brain evolution was the advent of auditory hallucination wherein we experienced our dead ancestors, friends, deities, and demons talking to us. The naturalistic explanation thus explains the origin of “divine awareness” in terms of how the hallucination of divine authorities projected from the subconscious mind had some kind of adaptive power. Scientists are now able to experimentally induce the experience of a “divine being” by magnetically stimulating certain parts of the temporal cortex with a so-called “God Helmet“.

The second explanation is the supernatural explanation, which suggests that the best explanation of why we seem to experience immaterial realities and impossible experiences of divine beings is that there actually are divine beings and immaterial realities. Think about the logic of this for a second. This would be like saying the best explanation of why dreams are magical is that dreams actually are magical, as opposed to simply being the result of the brain being in an altered state of consciousness. It substitutes complete explanatory power for zero explanatory power. We can induce subjective experience of supernatural entities with magnetic stimulation, but the best explanation of what actually causes the experiences is that there actually are supernatural entities? Unless someone can put forward a non question-begging argument as to why induced experiences are different than “real” divine experiences, the supernaturalistic explanation seems to simply fly in the face of the well established  rationality of scientific metaphysics.

Philosophers seem to think that religious experiences are based on logical speculations about necessary beings. On the contrary, the first gods were crude auditory hallucinations. Look at the book of Amos. God is experienced as a thunderous booming voice:

“The LORD roars from Zion

and thunders from Jerusalem;

the pastures of the shepherds dry up,

and the top of Carmel withers.”

If you look at the subjective reports of these “direct experiences of divinity” and compare them with the reports of schizophrenic auditory verbal hallucination, the similarities are striking. For example, 20 year old schizophrenic Tobas reports:

I felt the Lord in me. This is when the voices began. At first they were only whispers, but then louder, but still soft. It was Jesus speaking to me. He would tell me what to do and ask me questions. Jesus would speak to me alone and no one else. Then I became a backslider. The Devil started talking to me. (He was unable to imitate the voice of the Devil) The devil told me bad things. He told me to kill myself. The Devil just wouldn’t leave me alone because I was a backslider.

These are the experiential grounds for Gutting’s “preference” for agnosticism. What are we supposed to make of the prevalence of auditory hallucinations in nonpsychotics, of the prevalence of hallucinated playmates in childhood, of the prevalence of voice hearing in the homeless and even in nonverbals? Naturalistic metaphysics theoretically has an explanation for all of this. Supernatural explanations of such phenomena barely make sense and certainly aren’t capable of producing theories such that prediction and control of the phenomena become possible (as with naturalistic metaphysics).

I have one last point. Gutting says:

It follows that [atheists] have no good basis for treating the existence of God as so improbable that it should be denied unless there is decisive proof for it. This in turn shows that atheists are at best entitled to be agnostics, seriously doubting but not denying the existence of God.

Gutting makes a familiar move here against the atheist. He makes it such that the atheist is said to “deny” the existence of God, that is, to say “there is no God and I am 100%” positive of this because of such and such arguments”. This is not my understanding of atheism. I am, strictly speaking, an agnostic atheist. That is, someone who lacks a belief in god (a-theist) but does not claim “there is no God and I am sure of it”. For all I know, Deism is an open possibility. But I can’t think of a good reason why the pathetic scribblings of human theologians and metaphysicians would accurately represent anything about this supposed Deist-God that exists “outside” the natural universe. In this respect, we can say that agnostic atheism is the “preferred” stance for all possible gods, but given the naturalistic explanation of human religious experience, atheism is preferable in respect to particular deities hallucinated by the faithful. And moreover, since agnostic atheism is itself a properly respectable a-theism (lacking all positive endorsement of the claim “supernatural deities exist”), we can say that atheism in general is preferable over agnosticism.

I am very happy to announce that my paper ‘What Is It Like to Be Nonconscious? A Defense of Julian Jaynes‘ was accepted for publication (upon the condition of minor revision) by one of my favorite journals: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. I will finally be able to put something in the publication section for my CV! This has been a long time coming, and it’s not from lack of trying. Since starting my philosophical studies at UCF in 2006, I have submitted three different manuscripts to three different journals. All of them were rejected, with only the last one receiving serious comments from reviewers. But in all honesty, I am glad none of those papers were accepted. They were immature and lacking rigor and originality. But I learned a lot about what it takes to be published in a professional academic journal. As one reviewer said, I needed to learn how to “present  a much clearer and more compelling case for what it is that you are offering that is both useful and novel.” Well, with this current paper, I am hoping to have done exactly that. Here’s the abstract:

I respond to Ned Block’s claim that it is “ridiculous” to suppose that consciousness is a cultural construction based on language, and learnt in childhood. Block is wrong to dismiss social constructivist theories of consciousness on account of it being “ludicrous” that conscious experience is anything but a biological feature of our animal heritage, characterized by sensory experience, evolved over millions of years. By defending social constructivism in terms of both Julian Jaynes’ behaviorism and J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, I draw a distinction between the experience or “what-it-is-like” of nonhuman animals engaging with the environment and the “secret theater of speechless monologue” that is familiar to a linguistically competent human adult. This distinction grounds the argument that consciousness proper should be seen as learned rather than innate and shared with nonhuman animals. Upon establishing this claim, I defend the Jaynesian definition of consciousness as a social-linguistic construct learnt in childhood, structured in terms of lexical metaphors and narrative practice. Finally, I employ the Jaynesian distinction between cognition and consciousness to bridge the explanatory gap and deflate the supposed “Hard” problem of consciousness.

My two anonymous reviewers thought that I succeeded in showing Block’s rejection of social constructivism is too rash. I take this to be a novel step forward in defense of Dennett-style social-constructivism, which has been hit hard by critics. My aim was to show that Julian Jaynes was largely written off by academics with vested interests in their own terminology and assumptions about the nature of mind and consciousness. Moreover, I was really ambitious with this paper. I wanted to reset the terms of debate in philosophy of mind circles.

On my view, we have been so caught up with talking about the conceptual possibility of zombies, we never even stopped to consider the extent to which humans and other animals actually are zombies. But cognitive science is all about zombie perception, they just don’t know it. I tried to show that it is only dogma to suppose that there is nothing it is like to be a zombie (i.e. nonconscious). Hence the question: What is it like to be nonconscious? I argued that there is indeed something-it-is-like to be nonconscious: organic behavioral reactivity, flow, automaticity, habit, etc. As Jaynes says,

Consciousnes is a much smaller part of out mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of…It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around to something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

By closely examining the assumptions of Block, I try to reframe the consciousness debate in terms of its opposite: the subconscious. Contrastive phenomenology indicates a deep difference between prereflective cognition and reflective consciousness. By distinguishing these two different levels of phenomenology, I attempt to deflate both the explanatory gap (why experience goes with behavior)  and the Hard problem (is there a function of consciousness?).

Check it out!

I should add, one of the reasons why I am excited about this publication is that now I can use a published paper as my writing sample for when I apply to PhD programs this Dec/Jan. A Master’s thesis under my belt, 4.0 gpa, good GRE, published writing sample, good letters, and good fit all give me confidence about my chances this season. My last time applying to PhD programs was disastrous because (1) my writing sample and SOP were immature (2) I only applied to three (top) schools which I didn’t really fit in at (3) I was naive about the level of competition for top philosophy programs. This time around, I have a much better idea of where I want to study, what I want to do, a much more  research oriented statement of purpose, deeper background knowledge, and stronger writing. Feeling good!

Frank Jackson is famous for the following argument:

Mary the color scientist knows all the physical facts about color, including every physical fact about the experience of color in other people, from the behavior a particular color is likely to elicit to the specific sequence of neurological firings that register that a color has been seen. However, she has been confined from birth to a room that is black and white, and is only allowed to observe the outside world through a black and white monitor. When she is allowed to leave the room, it must be admitted that she learns something about the color red the first time she sees it — specifically, she learns what it is like to see that color.

Pretty simple, right? The argument is usually put like this:

1. Before exiting the room, Mary knew everything physical about the phenomenon of seeing the color red.
2. After leaving the room, Mary gains new information about seeing the color red, namely, the information concerning what it is like to see that color.
3. Accordingly, there are some truths about seeing color that are not physical.
4. Therefore, physicalism as a theory of phenomenal properties is false.

This argument is sometimes said to be a definitive proof for the existence of things called “qualia”. And because the thought experiment shows that qualia are not physical things, physicalism is false because it claims that what we call mental things are really just physical things. Right? Well, not really. The only thing this argument knocks down is a giant strawman of physicalism. Here are my thoughts:

• On first blush, the whole thing is dreadfully implausible. Accordingly, it becomes difficult to extrapolate from science fiction to what’s actually going on in someone’s mind when they perceive a red object. Physicalism’s explanation of seeing the color red should be based on studying normal people looking at red objects under normal lighting conditions (similar to the lighting conditions and medium composition in which we evolved for millions of years: day and night). If Mary had been confined to a black and white room for the entirety of her life, her visual cortex would be wired (“fire together, wire together”) completely differently than a normal person, and may not even be capable of discriminating colored objects. Moreover, anyone who spends their entire life in a single room is going to have some serious neural abnormalities compared to the average human adult. If Mary stepped outside of her room into the real world, I’m not sure she would learn anything about colored objects since her brain had never been exposed to the light reflecting off colored objects, and accordingly would have not been properly configured for discriminating colored objects in the way a normal human adult does.
• Jackson’s physicalism is a strawman because he is assuming that physicalists are internalists just like him. He says that a physical story about seeing color would talk about the “neurological firings that register that a color has been seen”. Notice that word “register”. It sounds so innocuous, doesn’t it? This way of talking is actually an inheritance from John Locke’s empiricism. Locke thought that the purpose of consciousness was to copy experience onto the “white paper” of the mind, which was devoid of ideas at birth. To register something is to record it somewhere. To record is to copy. When Jackson talks about the brain “registering” the color, he really means copying the properties onto a recording format, which is then read off or “interpreted” by the Inference-machine.
• In other words, Jackson’s strawman of a physicalist story is the famous “Glassy essence” or “Mirror of nature” theory that Richard Rorty always talked about. It can also be called the Myth of the Given because it is implicitly assumed that the perceptual stimulus for animal perception is an objective (i.e. valueless) world which is given as such to the organism. In a way, this is trivially true. Of course an objective world is given to organisms. But the objective world is not stimulating. In other words, animal brains did not evolve to be responsive to the properties theorized in physical science such as wavelengths or protons. They evolved so as to be responsive to the ecological level of reality. In Gibsonian terms, we can say that animals evolved in a niche such that the information for the specification of affordances (values) is invariant over retinal transformation. Therefore,  the stimulus information discriminated by animals is immediately meaningful for the animal insofar how it perturbs the system is familiar to its nervous system in virtue of the history of interaction with these very values. Affordances are really just possibilities. We perceive the world in terms of the different possibilities afforded by the environment. And as Matthew Ratcliffe has pointed out, these possibilities should not just be seen in terms of bodily possibilities, but also event possibilities e.g. seeing manifold possibilities for social interaction, for how objects might behave in the world, etc.
• Therefore, we must reconceptualize what it means for Mary to “gain new information” when she steps into the colored world. First and foremost, she would gain possibilities for discrimination, not registration. It wouldn’t be that there was now a new “quale” or phenomenal object floating around inside a conscious space, being associated with other quales. This is ridiculous. When the brain perceives a red firetruck, it doesn’t just “copy” or “register” the objective physical properties onto an internal film for later recovery. Upon seeing a red firetruck coming right at you, the very elementary subcomponents of the stimulus are valenced in terms of “Oh shit, get out of the way!”. It is patently ridiculous that an organism would have evolved a object-registering capacity before a threat-discrimination capacity. This fact explodes the Myth of the Given because it turns out that what stimulates animals are meanings, which is to say possibilities.
• So, now we can see a tacit premise in Jackson’s argument: (4a) Physicalism is committed to the Myth of the Given. However, since physicalism is not necessarily committed to the Mirror-hypothesis, Jackson’s argument only defeats a weak strawman of physicalist explanations of color perception. Because ecological theory holds that “information for perception” is relative to the individual possibility space of the perceptual agent, Mary could definitely not have learned about “all there is to know” about perception while trapped inside a black and white room, since she had never explored her own possibilities for discrimination in the real world. But why this should “prove” physicalism to be false is beyond me. Of course Mary is learning “something”. But we should not take this too literally, for possibility-spaces, valences, and meanings are not “things” in the way a stump of wood is a thing. It is a thing only when speaking metaphorically. The Myth of the Given, where given ideas are  ”quales” manipulated in cognitive space by the brain, is itself a metaphor for understanding perception,structured by our everyday experiences with individuated (possibly withdrawn?) objects that can be manipulated in physical space, just like ideas.

Those writing on logical methods impress me in the same way as would a speaker attempting to improve his eloquence by learning about brain speech centers, about voice mechanics, and about the distribution of nerves to the larynx – as if knowing these anatomical and physiological details would create organization where none exists, or refine what we already have.

~Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

In his reply to Justin Fisher’s critical review of Ken Aizawa and Fred Adams’ book The Bounds of Cognition, Aizawa has this to say:

A familiar claim in the extended cognition literature is that much of the history of psychology has been marked by prejudice.  This is the prejudice—a remnant of Descartes’ enduring legacy—that cognitive processes occur only in the brain.  Cognitive psychologists simply assume that the mind is realized by the brain.  We find one or another version of this charge in Clark and  Chalmers (1998), Haugeland (1998), Rowlands (1999, 2003), and elsewhere.  Rather than supposing that cognitive processes occur only within the brain, the advocates of extended cognition propose that there are good grounds for thinking that cognitive processes span the brain, body, and environment.  The extended cognition movement should, therefore, be seen as a liberating revolution.

In this post, I want to clear up some misconceptions about what is being claimed by extended cognition (EC) theorists. Ultimately, I can only speak for myself but I want to offer my own explanation of EC’s internal theoretical commitments. Aizawa seems to imply that by denying “the mind is realized by the brain”, EC theorists are committed to the claim that cognitive processes literally occur somewhere else than in the brain. Thus, when EC theorists claim that cognitive processes “span the brain, body, and environment”, Aizawa takes this to mean that EC theorists are literally saying that there are cognitive processes going on over here (in the brain) and also over there (in the world), and not just in the brain.

Frankly, I think that there has been a great confusion on what exactly 4EA ontology is committed to in regards to the “location” of cognition, largely due to the EC theorists not making their underlying ontology and epistemological assumptions fully explicit. What has been missing in these discussions of the mind “spanning” or “extending into” the environment is the epistemological theory of direct realism. Direct realism is a counter-theory to the Cartesian idea that the primordial mind is ontological split from the objective world by means of a subject-object model, the Lockean idea that primordial cognition is the manipulation of mental Ideas which re-present sense-data to a spectorial consciousness, and the Kantian idea that the mind is always directed to “mere phenomenal appearances” rather than the objective in-itself.

Descartes simply assumed that the primordial mind is ontological separate from the objective world. Locke took up this assumption and “naturalized it” by turning the Mind Substance into the Mind Process (operating over re-presentations). Berkeley simply assumed that the stimulus available for perception was poor and inadequate for specifying the world. Kant borrowed from all these assumptions and supposed that consciousness was never directed to the in-self, but rather, to the mere phenomenal appearances or representations of the world. Gibson undercuts all these assumptions with one fell swoop by redefining the nature of perception. Indeed, he says:

Perceiving is an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness. It is a keeping-in-touch with the world, an experiencing of things rather than having of experiences. It involves awareness-of instead of just awareness. It may be awareness of something in the environment or something in the observer or both at once, but there is no content of awareness independent of that of which one is aware.

It is in this paragraph that we can find the meaning of the EC thesis that cognition “aint just about the brain (alone)”. On my reading, EC theory isn’t committed to the claim that brain cognition literally leaks into the world. Leaking, spanning, extending, spreading, etc. are all just metaphors for the thesis of Gibsonian direct realism, which is a general theory of intentionality, that is, a theory about how the mind relates to reality. So when Alva Noe claims that “Consciousness is not something that happens inside us…it is something we achieve”, we should understand this exactly in terms of Gibson’s claim that “perception is an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness.” This is no radical claim. What is radical is to continue buying into the same worn-out assumptions of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant! As Noe says,

Human experience is a dance that unfolds in the world and with others. You are not your brain. We are not locked up in a prison of our own ideas and sensations. The phenomenon of consciousness, like that of life itself, is a world-involving dynamic process. We are already at home in the environment. We are out of our heads.

Peter Hankins from the wonderful site Conscious Entities just posted a short review of Alva Noë’s latest book, Out of Our Heads. Peter is skeptical of Noë’s claim that we are not just our brains. My response is in the comments, which I reproduce here:

As someone very sympathetic to Noe, let me attempt a defense of his claim that the mind is “out of the head” and that it is not just the brain which is important to consciousness, but rather, the joint brain-Earth interaction.

First, in regards to agency, Noe takes his cue from Varela and Maturana’s theory of autopoietic systems. Autopoietic theory says that the unicellular organism is the root of all mind because (1) we evolved from unicellular organisms and (2) our ontogenetic history starts as a unicellular organism. Accordingly, Noe defines agency in terms of the self-regulating, goal-directed autonomy demonstrated by these autopoietic systems. Organisms are said to be “structurally coupled” with the environment. While sure, this might not be agency *qua* agency insofar as it is not metacognitive, there are reasonable grounds to suppose that autonomous goal-directed behavior can support a “minimal” sense of agency. Accordingly, when Noe claims that bacteria are conscious, one must keep in mind a distinction (which he, unfortunately, does not draw) between primary consciousness and secondary consciousness (metacognition, introspection, etc). Noe’s claims become a lot less radical when you realize his theory of “enaction” is only really applicable as an explanation of primary consciousness, not secondary consciousness.

Second, in regards his claim about the brain not being sufficient for consciousness, let me explain. If we accept the basic teleological nature of organsisms, then we can say that brains evolved to react to entities in the real world (in accordance with their internal needs/interests). We can say that brains are intentionally directed towards the real world insofar as information necessary for surviving is to be found “out there”, in the world. So primary consciousness is directed at the world because this is how survival works: we seek stimulus-information for the control and guidance of behavior. This grounds Noe’s claim about the brain being necessary but not sufficient for mind in at least two ways. First, we could not imagine an organism without an environment. Organisms, by definition, evolve in environments. And whereas the environment does not need the organism to exist, the organism needs the environment to exist. Second, the brain is not sufficient for consciousness because he defines the brain’s teleological “purpose” as attending towards information in the environment. This is where Noe takes his cue from J.J. Gibson’s theory of ecological optics.

This is also the crucial point of the Ferret experiments. The experiments don’t show that the brain is not important for consciousness. What they show is that the brain evolved so as to be directed at stable environmental invariants (which lead to invariant patterns of stimulus). This is the essence of the ecological thesis that Noe defends. Take away the world, and the brain has nothing to “resonate” to, in Gibson’s terms. For this reason, the brain is not sufficient for primary consciousness. Accepting this thesis doesn’t imply that the brain is unimportant to consciousness. On the contrary, it merely seeks to demonstrate the essential purpose of the brain: to be directed towards the world, not create an inner 3D model of it. Here, Noe borrows from Rodney Brooks is accepting that “the world is its own best model.”

Perceiving how things are is a mode of exploring how things appear. How they appear is, however, an aspect of how they are. To explore appearance is thus to explore the environment, the world. To discover how things are, from how they appear, is to discover an order or pattern in their appearance. The process of perceiving, of finding out how things are, is a process of meeting the world; it is an activity of skillful exploration.

~Alva Noë, Action in Perception, p. 164

If you haven’t noticed, Graham Harman has been attacking Metzinger’s theory of consciousness for some time now. Although I do not totally agree with everything Metzinger has to say (he is an internalist whereas I am an externalist), I do agree with him that the self is not an object, but rather, a function. It is an operation rather than a thing or repository. Accordingly, over at Larval Subjects, I said:

Now, you can take issue with functionalism as an explanation of mind, but Metzinger is only taking it to its logical conclusion, so if you are going to fault him on this point, then you will need to also confront the huge literature defending functionalist explanations of the mind e.g. Global workspace theory, Dennettian multiple-drafts theory, etc.

In response, Graham Harman had this to say:

Nonsense. I can just as easily say “Metzinger will need to confront the huge literature defending substance e.g., Aristotle, Suárez, Leibniz etc.” And Metzinger doesn’t do this. Nor does he need to, especially. He makes a philosophical argument for why the self isn’t a thing, and it’s a rather feeble argument, one that can be dispatched in a few pages. You can’t send people to the library every time they corner you philosophically.

Harman doesn’t seem to realize that Metzinger is not the only one to present the “feeble” argument that the self is not a thing, but rather, a function. Julian Jaynes said the same thing. So has William James, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Baars, Jesse Prinz, Robert van Gulick, David Armstrong, William Lycan, just to name a few (out of dozens). Moreover, there are thousands of articles on Global Workspace Theory and Multiple Drafts theory, which Metzinger takes up and modifies in terms of his functionalist phenomenal self-model theory. Is Harman really that naive to think that he can “dispatch” decades of rigorous argumentation and scientific theorization in a few pages? Has Harman even read the necessary background literature to adequately critique functionalism as a theory of mind? Has he ever read Daniel Dennett? Or Bernard Baars? Does Harman realize that there are thousands of articles published in the field of consciousness studies every year? I find it humorous that Harman thinks he is competent enough to dismiss 30 years of functionalist theorizing as “feeble” when he doesn’t even have a detailed account of the mind, except to say that the mind is an object. They even have working computer models of consciousness as a function. Does Harman even have a competing theory of consciousness? Does he even have a working counter-definition of consciousness? Or any concrete critique of Metzinger’s testable claims about how consciousness functions? What is Harman contributing to the field? Does he realize that people like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have been demolishing the idea that the self is literally an object for twenty years? Where does Harman get off feeling intellectually superior to Metzinger? Does he really think he has “cornered” functionalism as a theory of consciousness? Metzinger has at least made a concrete contribution towards investigating the hard issues related to mind and consciousness. Harman is stuck in the clouds, thinking that discussions of Leibniz and substance are actually relevant to contemporary models and explanations of consciousness and cognition. Until Harman is willing to actually read the literature, develop a working counter model of consciousness, or step outside his comfort zone of pure philosophy, I won’t take his critiques of Metzinger very seriously. If you want to read a real critique of functionalism, read someone like Ned Block or Thomas Nagel.