Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds

276 Pages·2012·2.931 MB·English

by  Murray Shanahan

Title Pages
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and
Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds
Murray Shanahan
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199226559
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226559.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Embodiment and the Inner Life (p.ii)
(p.iii) Embodiment and the Inner Life
(p.iv)
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Title Pages
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Dedication
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and
Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds
Murray Shanahan
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199226559
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226559.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) ‘We move from silence into silence, and there is a brief stir
between, every person's attempt to make a meaning of life and time’.
George Mackay Brown, For the Islands I Sing (p.vi)
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(p.vii) Preface
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and
Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds
Murray Shanahan
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199226559
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226559.001.0001
Preface
(p.vii)
This text is the outcome of over three decades of reflection on the mind
and the brain. Hardly a day has gone by since my early teens when I
haven't thought about what makes humans and animals tick, how our
brains work, and how it might be possible to build artefacts that behave
like us. Yet the disciplines that address these questions are surprisingly
immature even today. So the present work is highly speculative, and the
critical reader will find plenty to gripe at. So I must appeal for a certain
degree of charity and open-mindedness. An overarching theory of
cognition and the brain that can be shot down is better than no
overarching theory at all—as long as it is well-informed, up-to-date, and
carefully thought through. And of course, it is always possible that
aspects of the theory are right.
I have debts of gratitude to many people. Academics from a variety of
fields have been kind enough to respond to my unsolicited emails
prodding them for details or clarifications of their work. To attempt to
thank each one individually would be to risk embarrassing omissions.
So I hereby offer my generic thanks. Certain colleagues I must single
out, however. Bernie Baars has been unfailingly generous with his time,
his insight, and his support. His influence permeates my thinking, as
will become obvious. Igor Aleksander has been similarly magnanimous,
offering me valuable advice and help during a difficult intellectual
transition, as I set aside much of the work on which I had built my
academic reputation while my amateur's interest in consciousness
began to infuse (some might say infect) my professional life. My thanks
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(p.vii) Preface
also to many other people with whom I have had useful, and often
inspiring, discussions on the subject matter of the book, particularly
Ron Chrisley, Nicky Clayton, Owen Holland, Adrian Moore, Richard
Newcombe, Anil Seth, and Aaron Sloman. I apologize to any friends I
have forgotten. Finally, my thanks to Imperial College for giving me the
freedom to pursue my somewhat unconventional interests.
To my wife and children I must apologize. During the years of my
writing this book they have been forced to put up with an especially
distracted husband/father, and all in all they have coped rather well.
Still, I won't deny that without them I would have finished the book
more quickly. But my life would have been so much impoverished.
Lastly, on the advice of my sensible friends I will resist the temptation
to thank Tooty, our cat. But his faithful presence (p.viii) throughout this
project, usually in my rocking chair, is hereby duly recorded. He is
looking at me now as I write, disapprovingly. I know what that look
means. It says: ‘You must not allow anthropomorphism to cloud your
scientific judgement’.
Murray Shanahan
North Norfolk and South Kensington
December 2009
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Introduction
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and
Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds
Murray Shanahan
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199226559
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226559.001.0001
Introduction
Murray Shanahan
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226559.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
An individual's consciousness and advanced cognitive abilities allow
him/her to envision the future even in the absence of prior knowledge
and experience. Furthermore, the succession of the consciousness of
experiences enables him/her to sympathize and empathize with other
conscious creatures such as animals and other humans. Man's
consciousness and cognition also gives him the ability to think about a
myriad of things — both abstract and concrete — in their past, present,
and future states. Consciousness and cognition also allows man to think
about his/her own consciousness as well as its character, contents, and
limits. This book does not intend to solve the philosophical mind–body
problem and the problem of intentionality and embodiment; rather it
aims to dissolve it by utilizing both theoretical and scientific studies to
further understand the mysteries that it holds.
Keywords:   consciousness, cognition, mind, body, intentionality, embodiment
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Introduction
Why does death concern us? Other animals are naturally fearful in the
face of danger. But humans have a special relationship with death.
Irrespective of religious inclination, most of us are, at some time in our
lives, exercised by the possibility of our own extinction, a possibility
that other animals cannot fully entertain. Unlike the rest of the animal
kingdom, we can imagine such an event. We can reflect on the
possibility, and we can acquire beliefs about it. But what exactly is it
that death threatens to extinguish? A common sort of answer would be
that it threatens to extinguish consciousness. As in a dreamless sleep,
in death (perhaps) I will experience nothing. Or rather, as death unlike
sleep is (allegedly) a permanent condition, there will no longer be a
consciously experiencing ‘I’.
Here's another taxing question. Why does the joy or the suffering of our
fellow creatures matter? If an inanimate object such as a brick or a
television is abused in some way or other, we may feel distaste or
displeasure, but we do not feel compassion. Yet when a fellow creature
squeals in pain, we feel sorry for it. Or if we are indifferent, our
indifference itself is noteworthy in a way that it is not in the context of
a shattered brick. But what exactly distinguishes the brick from the
animal here? A common sort of answer would be that an animal
possesses consciousness whereas a brick does not. An animal's life is a
succession of conscious experiences, and it is the character of those
experiences—good or bad—that matters. The story of a brick, on the
other hand, makes no mention of such things.
We need not endorse the precise wording of these answers—any choice
of words would be open to philosophical critique—in order to accept
their general tone. Consciousness is not a philosopher's invention. It is
central to our humanity. It is what we care about most. The elemental
facts of birth and death, of suffering and joy, serve to dramatize the
concept of consciousness to the point of undeniability, if not to bring it
within the sphere of definability. The aim of the present book—or rather
the aim of the larger intellectual project of which the book forms a
small part—is to account for this fundamental of the human
predicament in scientific terms. That the Universe contains conscious
creatures is a curiosity and a wonder, and the scientific understanding
we seek must explain this wonder, must explain how it is possible. The
challenge is not so much to explain how this came about, historically
speaking, but rather to (p.2) explain what it is that allows conscious
creatures to stand out, in the way they do, against the backdrop of the
physical Universe.
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Introduction
Here is another curiosity, another wonder in need of a scientific
account. Not only does our consciousness possess an ever-changing
character, joyful or wretched in turns, it also has content. Our
conscious thoughts are about things. The things they can be about
include not only the furniture of the everyday world, but also
abstractions such as numbers, electrons, musical genres, and political
beliefs. Most remarkably, our conscious thoughts can be about our own
consciousness, its character, its content, its temporal limits, and its
place in the Universe. It is this capacity for reflection that so exquisitely
and poignantly shapes the human predicament.
Now, it will be obvious to anyone with the slightest education in
philosophy that the earlier paragraphs allude to two of its deepest and
longest standing difficulties, namely the mind–body problem and the
problem of intentionality. But the opening chapter of the present book
belongs to the relatively youthful tradition of trying, not to solve such
problems, but to dissolve them. According to this way of thinking,
which was inaugurated by Wittgenstein, a fog of metaphysical
confusion is liable to obscure a proper view of mind. We cannot hope to
find the desired scientific explanations amid this fog, forever wandering
from one ism to another (dualism, materialism, cognitivism,…). Yet to
emerge from the fog is to return to a kind of prelapsarian state, a state
before philosophy, which is also a state after philosophy. This post-
reflective condition is hard to attain, and requires sustained, personal
confrontation with philosophy itself, working through its founding
concepts—language, meaning, truth, mind, experience, and so on.
Although the book is best seen as a whole, it's quite possible for one
reader to accept the philosophy and reject the science, while another
reader rejects the philosophy and accepts the science. (The possibility
of rejecting both goes without saying.) Not everyone with a scientific
interest in the mind is so exercised by philosophy as to become mired in
metaphysics. Those who are not so mired—and indeed those who are
but find a continentally inflected approach unsatisfactory or pretentious
—may safely ignore the exclusively philosophical portion of the book
(Chapter 1), and proceed directly to the material that takes for granted
a license to investigate consciousness and cognition using the scientific
method (Chapter 2 onwards). In an important sense, those who are
untroubled by philosophy's largest questions, and who are able to do
science without those questions sneaking up behind them, are
privileged. They are in much the same position as the post-reflective
philosopher. Both characters maintain a kind of silence in the presence
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Introduction
of philosophy's demons, and each is duly empowered to make progress
on the scientific front.
(p.3) This is not to say progress can be made without an appropriate
conceptual framework. According to the argument of the book, the
right conceptual framework must be built around the fact of our
embodiment (Chapter 2). Cognition has arisen because it beneficially
modulates a creature's behaviour. That is to say, it helps the creature to
survive, to thrive, and to procreate, and to do this it intervenes in the
sensorimotor loop by means of which the creature interacts with its
physical and social environments. Cognition's trick is to open out the
space of what the environment affords the creature beyond what is
immediately apparent. For a cognitively well-endowed creature, that
space of possibilities—the space of potential affordances—is
combinatorially structured, which is to say the possibilities for action
can be assembled and re-assembled in arbitrarily many ways.
Moreover, the space of potential affordances is open-ended. The
enculturated creature, especially, can invent. The open-endedness of
the space of possible affordances and its combinatorial structure
commend its exploration, and this is cognition's forte.
Now, what of consciousness? Another feature of the right conceptual
framework, according to this book, is a contrastive approach to
consciousness. Rather than consciousness ‘in itself’ (whatever that
might mean), the initial object of study should be the contrast between
two conditions, the conscious and the unconscious, in circumstances as
closely matched as possible. This conscious/unconscious distinction is
(so very nearly) within empirical grasp. However, a number of strange
temporal phenomena and near paradoxes (such as colour phi and the
Sperling effect) make it hard to design experimental paradigms in
which the distinction is incontrovertible. Chapter 3, in lieu of fully
operationalizing the distinction, resorts to a science fiction scenario in
which an idealized contrastive data set is constructed for a human
subject in an ecological setting. The proposed experimental paradigm is
not practically realizable, but it serves as a yardstick.
With an empirically meaningful target in view, albeit an idealized one,
we can advance towards a ‘theory of consciousness’. The primary
influence on the ideas presented in Chapter 4 is Baars's notion of a
global workspace architecture, which comprises a set of parallel
specialist processes that compete and co-operate in a struggle for
system-wide influence. According to the theory, the distinction between
the unconscious and conscious conditions aligns with the difference
between localized processing and processing mediated by the global
workspace. In the conscious condition, so the argument goes, a kind of
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