An intermezzo in my series of consciousness posts. It's been a while since I posted, so I needed to oil the chain.
In conversations about consciousness, the voice of the garden-variety biologist (Mr B) often gets drowned out. This is typically due to blithely confident philosopher-types who act as if the armchair provides just as much authority as the lab bench when it comes to consciousness. Equally perplexing is that some folk's confidence actually becomes bolstered by the paucity of theoretically significant experimental results about consciousness. A lack of data makes good scientists less confident, not more confident, about a topic. (There are interesting parallels with creationism here.)
I am happy to start by inverting this antiscientific bias about consciousness. In that spirit, I will grant Mr B sole control of the lectern until he has finished saying what he has to say. Only then will I entertain questions from those armchair pilots who believe they have deadly objections to Mr B's project. At that point we will be better posed to see if they are right.
While I am not Mr B, for the above reasons I do consider myself his advocate. Because it is becoming a distraction to talk about him in the third-person, I will simply speak in his voice for a bit. Because confusion is likely to follow such a grammatical shift, this post will serve as a handy reference (especially for those tempted to bemoan my ignorance of what the philosophers have (putatively) contributed to our understanding of consciousness).
Next up, we'll get back to the science.
3 comments:
In conversations about consciousness, the voice of the garden-variety biologist (Mr B) often gets drowned out. This is typically due to blithely confident philosopher-types who act as if the armchair provides just as much authority as the lab bench when it comes to consciousness.
Sure, but remember that it's all to easy to ignore the actual details of someone's argument and instead just label them as a type of person ('garden-variety biologist', 'blithely confident philosopher-types') and critique them solely on the basis of the types of argument that type of person is meant to make.
Anon: I have spent a good deal of time with such real and overconfident philosophers of mind.
That said, of course there are nuances and hopefully I will not overlook important arguments in the final product. As I said, I'll let the armchair pilots in eventually. Indeed, my goal is ultimately philosophical as well as scientific, a fairly synoptic picture of the science of consciousness but also the limits.
Stepping back a bit, I am not taking a science-first approach in my posts (the inversion I spoke of) just because my primary expertise is neuroscience. I believe the best philosophy follows science, not vice-versa. For instance, the best philosophy of space and time came after Einstein. The best phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) came after the Gestalt theorists and drew on their work quite explicitly. The best ideas about the foundations of mathematics came post-Godel.{1}
Pushing the physics analogy, I am not even sure we have had an Aristotle of consciousness yet, much less a Kepler, Newton, or Einstein. The data are so impoverished, so little is known, that to be dogmatic is cute, but mistaken. There are ridiculously confident people on all sides of the consciousness debate.
Because of the lack of conclusive data, I believe most views on consciousness are sane alternatives right now. What you find compelling will be a function of the assumptions and biases you bring to the table in the first place. Some will gravitate to Chalmers, some to Dennett, the Churchlands, Colin McGinn, Dennett, some to Quantum Kookiness, etc..If you are a creationist you will likely be a dualist. :)
Sociologically, choosing a perspective here unfortunately has much in common with the dynamics of religious choice. It is based more on historical, cultural, and other extrarational factors than evidence and reason. I realize I am overstating and oversimplifying things a bit here, and I'm certainly not going to push things into a kooky postmordernist sociology of science direction! Ultimately, our theory of consciousness should be grounded in good evidence and reason.
Frankly I am more interested in the science than the above more philosophical points, but that is some of the territory I plan to cover in future posts (or the book because this is frankly becoming too big in my notes for a bunch of blog posts).
[{1} In practice science and philosophy coevolve to some degree, though with a much larger arrow of influence from science to professional philosophy rather than vice-versa.]
Re: quantum kookiness. I resemble that remark!
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