| jump to week | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
|---|
Whatever your philosophical bent, you believe (intuitively) in yourself as a continuous self. That is, you think of your episodic memories not just as having happened, but as having happened to you. (I'm trying to avoid the thorn bush of a term, "consciousness" — let's just focus on the fact that when you remember this year's birthday party, you consider the "you" that attended said party to be, in a very real sense, the same "you" that attended last year's birthday party.)
Even a two neuron system can "remember" an input (as we learned in 214), so the continuous self is by no means a prerequisite for any memory. Presumably, then, the notion of "self" connecting the stores of episodic memories in the brain developed at some point in the brain's evolution towards greater complexity (and towards greater capacity for higher-level functions). I can think of two possibilities for this development: (a) it developed as a happy accident from the particular way various systems in the brain interact. It is a neat phenomenon, but peripheral to higher level activity. (b) It developed necessarily, since a complex, evolutionarily useful memory system requires the continuous self for many of its high-end functions.
How likely is either scenario? What might be an evolutionary advantage to the notion of a continuous self? As compared to, say, a being that has all our powers of memory (and our desire for self-preservation/gene-spreading) but does not possess a continuous self image? Can we even conceive of such a creature?
[SE]
There are over 6.5 billion people on earth each leading their own life. Since there are so many people on such a large [plant], each person's contribution to society seems miniscule. Would you agree the following statement: "The world revolves around each one of us, yet we are so insignificant, we are nothing?"
[SE]
"The ineffable core of my story."
Borges brings up an interesting point about language that applies to the relationship between writer and reader, as well as that between speaker and listener. In The Aleph he states that "All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past." So, if an author writes the word "apple," the reader will become conscious of that word and its correct representation only if the writer and reader share the same association between the word and the physical object. Language is therefore a tool used to transmit a state of mind from one conscience to another. But does verbal communication convey truth or merely a degree of verisimilitude? If our pasts are alike, you will understand what I have said, but not exactly what I intended.
[SE]
Concerning the question posed by Francis Crick and Christof Koch concerning the position of consciousness: "It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not; what is the difference between them?" It may be interesting to think of this question in terms of social consciousness. I begin by presuming that there may be such a thing as collective consciousness that we may not be able to perceive, but merely postulate. There exists the possibility that such consciousness arises in relatively small groups as well as large, even global groups. If you can bring yourself to imagine distributed consciousness then you can begin to wonder about my question:
[SE]
[Vicky]
According to Wikipedia, cognitive science is defined as the scientific study of the mind or the intelligence. This interdisciplinary study often involves research in education, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and biology. This expansive field often covers topics such as the capacity to focus, the techniques used to process language, the ability to memorize, and the aptitude to learn and process information. Generally, or at least for most people, all of the aforementioned topics and disciplines are characteristics or skills of human beings. However, in delving deeper, could it be possible that animals (at least those at the top of the [hierarchal] chain) be said to share these same traits as well? To illustrate this question even further, take a chimpanzee as a common example. A chimp can arguably be said to focus its attention on a task such as grooming its fellow chimps. They have a rudimentary form of communication to alarm each other of impending danger. Their ability to memorize is evident in their capability to recognize their homes, the members of their family, and the same techniques they use over and over agin to obtain food. As for the ability to learn, chimpanzees often learn basic problem solving skills from their elders by observing their movements and actions. Thus, could certain animals also be said to have cognition?
[SE]
In the discussion of memory in Through the Den of the Metaphysician McCulloch states that "while we are young we may grow many new connections." There are those events from our childhood that our parents told us about over and over again until we felt as if we remembered the event. How is it that one tells the difference between remembering an event because of the experience and remembering the event from being told about it?
[SE]
In McCulloch's paper [he] makes the following remark.
[SE]
If I am studying my mind, I must be using my mind to study it; how can I be sure that my observations are unbiased? Put slightly differently: if I am looking at an orange, I can make judgments about that orange based on the visual input which I perceive, but how can I be sure that the visual input accurately reflects the physical orange in the outside world?
[SE]
One's subjective experience is exactly that — narrow, prejudiced, one-sided and relentlessly unique. In this light, what can we know of others' conscious experience, and what can others know of our own?
[SE]
In the chapter Through the Den of the Metaphysician WS McCulloch states that in-built reflexes within the central nervous system scale down a given input stimulus 'through a series of transformations to the canonical one among its many possible exemplars'. He then goes on to say that 'This one serves as the original in the cave of the sun.' I am guessing this is referring to Plato's Allegory of the Cave found in his 'The Republic' where [man] is chained in a dark cave, facing a wall on which a myriad of shadows that are mere reflections of 'reality', constantly change and coalesce. What man takes as real is actually a shadow, a poor copy of the original.
My question is: is there a universal 'one', i.e. the end product of the sum of transformations the initial stimulus underwent, that applies to everyone or does each person, based on their own perception of reality, make their own unique 'one'?
[SE]
[John]
For an Aleph to be true (or complete), wouldn't it have to be infinite in other senses as well? The point where all sounds, touches, smells, and tastes are accessible.
[SE]
[David]
The proliferation of research articles in all fields suggests an innate yearning by humans (at least) to unravel the mysteries of "it all" beyond that which idle perception will allow. Our persistence in this endeavor attests to the pleasure received by participating in this search. Our individual contributions, though small in the scheme of things, must be selfless, since we will unlikely be present for the finale. That is, a greater motivation, beyond ourselves, must encourage such behavior. What is this motivation and is it our objective?
McCulloch concludes his essay Through the Den of the Metaphysician optimistically assuming "that God did not give us our senses to fool us." What dangers could we encounter if we misplace this fundamental assumption? Specifically, our progress in our search to understand "it all" is based on evaluations as told with our senses. Deceiving our senses is the business of magicians. But, if our senses are insufficient to completely unravel the big mystery, for what reason is it hidden from us? Furthermore, is it worth asking why the mystery does not revealed itself to us directly?
[SE]
[Ben M]
The protagonist of The Zahir is slowly losing control over his thoughts. He finds himself unable to manipulate his attention as he once could. His mind is controlled by the very object of his attention.
We feel that we control our conscious thoughts. We believe that when we decide to visualize an object, a not-determined force within us calls forth that object willfully. So we may feel, then, that The Zahir smacks of the supernatural, the fantastic.
But consider the activity of the set of neurons that allows for you to visualize (to focus on, to imagine, etc.) an object "in the mind's eye". Let us call this pattern of activity the output of the brain's visualizing system. This output — the mind's act of attending to some imagined object — will depend wholly on (a) the activity of input neurons, and (b) the system's synaptic weights, which cause certain input patterns to excite or inhibit certain output patterns, and which have been trained by experience.
If the output activity pattern depends only upon the current inputs (from the environment) and the connections trained by previous sensory experiences, it would seem that a patient calculator, given full knowledge of the inputs plus relevant weights, could trivially predict our output activity. Do we have control over the objects of our attention? To what degree?
(Addendum: To take a mechanistic view, if we think of the Zahir as a particular set of set inputs that (and programmers may feel at home here) causes the neural system to enter some kind of loop, or infinite regress, or even as a kind of "Gödel number" for the brain's perceptual system, the story then becomes less supernatural, though perhaps no less fantastic.)
[SE]
We feel that our actions are subject to our will on most occasions, and imagine we feel that the will itself is subject to nothing; because when by a denial of it we are provok'd to try, we feel that it moves easily every way, and produces an image of itself even on that side, on which it did not settle. This image or faint motion, we persuade ourselves, cou'd have been compleated into the thing itself; because, shou'd that be deny'd, we find, upon a second trial, that it can. But these efforts are all in vain
[Gita]
When you discuss Alerting in section 9.1.1, you say "[t]he computational challenge of alerting consists [...] of making a decision on the basis of necessarily cursory and partial data" (400). Alerting is possibly the most important attribute of the nervous system of wild animals, despite being "necessarily flimsy;" It alerts prey to the presence of predators and vice versa, among other things. On a survival basis, alerting is not so prominent in the lives of humans. Is the process of alerting evolutionarily diluted in the human system through lack of use? The example that comes to my mind is that of the 2004 tsunami; very few animals died in the disaster because they were "forewarned" through some system that humans lacked.
[SE]
[Michal]
This question is a follow up to Kevin O'Regan's discussion of "the feeling of the color red." The same color (for example, red) looks different when viewed from different angles, under different lighting conditions, etc. For example, a red desk in a dark room might look black when considered in isolation, but our visual system still 'knows' that it is red. Similarly, a red desktop, when viewed under direct light may appear white or bright yellow when seen from a particular angle. How does our visual system interpret an object as red even when the lighting makes it look black or yellow? Does our visual system make interpretations by comparing objects in our world — by considering colors relative to one another? It seems so, but just how does our visual system compare colors of different objects in a nearly black room to accurately perceive colors?
It would also be interesting to see if our visual system is as talented when faced with a photograph of a red desk in a dark room as it is when faced with the dark room itself. My prediction is 'no' — while we can tell in a dark room that a desk is red, we probably cannot tell when looking at a photograph of the same scene (at least not as accurately). If I am right, then perhaps our visual system also deciphers colors by comparing different views of the same object under a constant lighting condition in addition to comparing an object's color to the colors of objects around it.
[SE]
The problem of perceiving the color of a desk in a dark room is certainly different from perceiving the color of the same desk (under the same illumination) as recorded in a photograph. First of all, the photograph is recorded on some type of film (analog and digital) and then presented via some display (printed photo or a monitor). To properly perceive the color of the desk which has been captured as some type of photograph, one hopes (quite optimistically I must say) that the recording system records the colors veridically and the display device recreates the captured colors.
While I make this point, I immediately recall the common disappointment naive photographers encounter when viewing indoor photographs that have a terrible orange coloring. This is a consequence of not compensating with white balance (adjusting the colors so that a white object in the room appears white--regardless of the present illuminant, an incandescent bulb in this case). In short, correcting this orange coloring is a distortion of the true colors (the mixture of the object reflectance and the scene illuminant). However, we often desire this distortion to generate a photograph that corresponds to what we perceived when the photograph was captured.
Our visual system manages to separate the reflectance spectra of an object from the incident illuminant. However, this separation is not the actual reflectance present, which is the multiplication of the illuminant with the object's reflectance. So, we must ask ourselves how "correct" is our perception of object color?
[Maksim]
According to the lecture, "the environment presents far more perceptual information than can be effectively processed" and "tasks require partial information." This means that a person can potentially look at an image or a situation differently from the person next to him/her as a result of a variance in attention allocation. Since so many people come from different backgrounds (i.e. race, origin, education level, income level, etc.), how strong is the correlation, if any, between similar backgrounds in regards to specific attention focus? If a group of people look at a painting with 10 differently colored dots, is there a common characteristic between those that focus their attention first on the same color or specific region (i.e. red dot, green dot, etc.)?
[SE]
[Jessica]
As stated in class, we do not see the world as jumble even though our eyes dart about. This is due to saccadic suppression. In other words, during the time that the eyes move, top down processes block information from getting to the brain. information presented during this time is thus harder to detect. Neither the blur that the eyes see or the subsequent gap in visual information is noticeable to the perceiver. Is this system really necessary? Or could we adapt to a blurred world? After all people have adapted to seeing the world shifted right, left, and even upside down. Seccondly, are there new ways we can take advantage of this system?
[SE]
[Frank F]
I believe to fully understand consciousness we must consider the system it arises in. Computations alone can't explain how it arises. If they did then we could, in theory, someday create a conscious system (or some would say artificial intelligence). The cognitive mind (that of which we are studying) can do some very interesting and complicated things. For example, it can play chess so well that real grand masters can be given a run for their money. But the cognitive mind, when playing chess, does not feel driven to win. It doesn't enjoy putting its partner in checkmate, or feel saddened or annoyed if it loses a match. The cognitive mind can be programmed to cheat at chess, but not to feel guilty when it does. Our very own Dr. Neisser (1967) states that the study of cognition is not about dynamic factors (like emotions) that motivate behavior.
Programming a system to be conscious would include programming emotional experience, since feelings through which we know our emotions occur when we become conscious of the unconscious workings of emotional systems in the brain. The problem is that something other than 'us' does not have the right kind of composition. Thus, it's not about assembly is about the building blocks. How can we fit emotion into our understanding of consciousness and how does attention utilize emotional arousal?
[SE]
[David]
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through' narrow chinks of his cavern." —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
In attempting to contextualize his powerful mescaline experience in the classic book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley found these words particularly well suited to explaining his chemically-inspired view of consciousness. To him, the experience revealed a world far more alive with complexity and visual information than the typical rainy monday morning would suggest to one operating under normal consciousness. In light of this metaphor, does the concept of attention as a filtering process help in our understanding of consciousness?
[SE]
[Amir]
In Borges' The Zahir we see a man lose the ability to remember the existence of a pepper mill. He subsequently becomes obsessed with his inability to remember the pepper mill. How could his loss of the normal human ability to control his attention — and thus properly allocate cognitive resources — be seen as a loss of consciousness and/or self?
[SE]
[Ben D]
I, also, would echo a resounding "not!" to Richard Rhodes' [oversimplified] premise that "understanding consciousness means finding the biophysical mechanisms that generate it." Accordingly, while we can create maps of saliency and the attentional processing of visual input, even diagramming correlations of specific neural regions to different stimuli, these observations fall short of providing a full understanding of consciousness. We may well be aware of the precise neuroanatomy of this process, mapping out various bottom-up and top-down computational sequences and the like, but it seems that exploring other aspects of consciousness might further shed light on the nature of this issue. As we discussed in class on Monday, understanding consciousness involves the discover of the computations generating it, how these work, and why. My questions is: what sort of "why" is this? An inquiry as to the potential evolution[ary advantage] of consciousness (and hence purely causal development), or a deeper probing of its purpose.
[SE]
[Fabian]
It seems that information processing within ourselves occurs within conscious and unconscious processes. Imagine that you were cut off from all of your subconscious processes. One direction you might think in is that without filtering of the bulk of information coming in, you would be completely overloaded, as in Borges' Aleph, but on the scale of an individual's senses, not the entire universe. On the other hand, you might think that no information would make it into your conscious "core". As in the Zahir, your mind might enter a sort of infinite loop that is a sort of worthless consciousness because there is nothing else to be conscious of.
But these bounds on consciousness leave me unsatisfied and curious about how to proceed to discuss consciousness. They seem to be describing all too well the limits of any computational machine as much as the limits of a person: useless if overloaded, and useless if cut off from new information.
Cognition is information processing, and information processing is independent of the substrate. If we explore consciousness in terms of cognitive problems (problems of information processing), could it be that the day we come to understand consciousness is the day we acknowledge that machines are conscious? Or will we have to wait for them to learn to speak entirely on their own accord and describe at length their capacity for thought before we accept it? Am I selling consciousness short by not considering creativity?
[SE]
[John]
There is evidence to support that men are superior to women in spatial ability, which is one of the few domains in cognition where sex differences appear. Futher studies have also found that in women, spatial ability is correlated with verbal ability - not so in men. How do these differences in cognition affect the attention of men and women? Is it possible that certain features (e.g. color, angles) are more salient to a certain sex?
[SE]
[Vicky]
In Itti and Koch's Computational Modeling of Visual Attention, it is emphasized that "attention and eye movements tightly interplay, posing computational challenges." How is it that we are able to piece together what our eye is transferring? That is, if the eye is constantly darting about and picking up images at incredibly high rates and our attention constantly shifting as our eyes take in those images, what internal mechanism in us memorizes those bits and pieces of image so that our brains can transform it into something meaningful? Such as, for example, understanding that what we are seeing is a book on a table.
[SE]
[Alex La]
Since every element of the mind is encased in our cabeza, we must assume that consciousness can be found there as well. As evidence, we have seen that attention has physical systems that are interconnected with other physical systems in the brain. When I pose my question, I assume that all other elements of consciousness can be located in this way. I also assume that consciousness is necessary for maintaining a single personal identity. So I ask, can dissociative identity disorder be observed as a physical separation of consciousness? And will a separation of consciousness occur if I take too much "Substance D"?
[SE]
If my concept of me is a virtualized instance of me within the virtual recreation of the world as I represent it from data from my senses, then what is actually doing the virtualization? It seems there are two different "me"s, one which consists of the system in its entirety, which I don't usually consider as myself, and one that is the representation of me within the virtualized world.
So then if all that I am is the virtualized representation of myself, "I" am not real. So who/what is doing the virtualizing? If I am the entire framework within which I carry out virtualization of the world and me in it, would not any reference to me be like referring to the Brahman or the Buddha, in that there cannot be anything but myself? Then there would be no point in referring to "me".
Perhaps some sort of system/virtualized instance duality is in order?
[SE]
[Maksim]
The first-person perspective relies on the functioning of the scientifically proven five senses. It has been shown that some senses can be replicated via sensory substitution. Some members of the scientific community argue that it is possible that there exists a sixth sense. How would the knowledge of another sense affect a person's first-person perspective? Is a sixth sense even a possibility and if it is, can it be replicated?
[SE]
[Ben M]
If you're not from the philosophy department, then there's a chance you have a utilitarian bone in your body, and if so you may wonder to yourself what practical enrichments your area of study offers to humanity.
What might be some general effects of the popularization of the knowledge that "there is no whole self," that the phenomenal first-person perspective is an ever-present model, ignorant of its central place within a virtual simulation of reality?
This question isn't meant to consider big topics like free will versus determinism or egoism or some form of nihilism. These are issues the course should take up in general, but I'm limiting my question here to the specific issues raised on Monday that just relate the seeing, attending, phenomenal self.
[SE]
[...] Defining our own goals involves emancipating ourselves from this evolutionary process, which, over millions of years, has shaped the microfunctional landscape of our brains and the representational architecture of our conscious minds. For millions of years, Mother Nature has talked to us, through our reward system and through the emotional layers of our PSM. We have to learn to take a critical stance toward this process, and to view our own phenomenal experience as a direct result of it.' We have to stop glorifying our own neurophenomenological status quo, face the facts, and find the courage to think about positive alternatives in a rational way. In the end, taking responsibility for the future development of our own conscious minds also is an obvious implication of the project of Enlightenment."
[Michal]
If two people are put in the same exact environmental situation, do they experience it in the same way? Is what they feel identical? For example, if two people sit in the same exact seat of a roller coaster (assume identical weather conditions and time of day), will they experience the same exact thing? It can be sure that their reactions to the same roller coaster ride will be slightly different, but is the phenomenal experience itself the same? This question explores whether or not the phenomenal 'what it is like' consists of the relationship between self and external experience or if it is solely based on the translation from external experience.
[SE]
[Alex La]
In Gallagher's article Conceptions of the Self, he highlights two of Dennett's interesting beliefs about the inevitable construction of stories in the mind. First, Dennett claims that "for the most part we don't spin them [the stories]; they spin us", which means that we are not in control. Dannett's second claim is that the narrative self is a product of this "spinning". If the narrative self is not in control, does this mean that the conscious experiencer is just going for the ride?
[SE]
In Gallagher's article, Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science he discusses the immunity principle. The immunity principle states that "When a speaker uses the first-person pronoun ('I') to refer to him or herself, she cannot make a mistake about the person to whom she is referring". However, there are some people who when referring to themselves use the third person. For example instead of saying "I want to go for a walk" they would say "Sarah wants to go for a walk". What are the implications to one's sense of self if they refer to themselves in the third person? Does this immunity rule still apply?
[SE]
[Fabian]
Selfhood was described as being the conscious experience of being someone. But the description leaves room for a simple word substitution to have a profoundly baffling, but hopefully not impossible question: can one have the conscious experience of being a plant? It would be a little more useful to think about whether the 'someone' can change. Could a virtual reality system generate a parallel selfhood for the user? Would it have to be human?
[SE]
[Stan]
In his phenomenal paper titled 'Are you living in a computer simulation?', Nick Bostrom (2003) builds a very solid argument for the (absurd?) idea that we are all living in a computer simulation that is run by a post-human civillization with the enormous computing power to make it all believable. It sounds crazy at first but in the end it all comes down to how fast a processor you have. Anyway, as I was reading the paper, I could not help but see the link to Metzinger's (2003) 4-step model of the phenomenal self. Assuming both authors were right in their arguments (albeit the former is wildly speculative but for argument's sake let's assume away) then we have an egg-chicken conundrum because here we are simulating the system (step 2) while the system is simulating us. Is that possible? To avoid a stupid question-stupid answer scanario, I am going to paraphrase this into: Since the "use of the virtual representations generated by the senses often involves SIMULATION of events/situations", this creates the necessity for multiple such simulations superimposed on each other and running in tandem. (eg: I'm talking to you, predicting your reactions to my comments so as not to offend you and also imagining what my roommate has cooked for dinner, etc etc ad infinitum.) However, if we are all part of a computer simulation, would it not succumb into an infinite regression (that even its megaprocessor would not be able to extricate it from) as it does not have the brain's capacity for not recognizing the simulation as part of the system? The simulation (for each one of us) is by default part of the system (the computer simulation system that is).
[SE]
[Frank F]
In John Searle's famous "Chinese room argument", he maintains that the man inside doesn't really understand the processes that he carries out. SImilarly, the distributed processing of our brains across different modules mimics a number of men following rulebooks written by the hands of evolution. For some thoughts, I have no idea as to how my brain came up with the representation. My brain, in a sense, seems to know more than I am ever aware of. I can't seem to find the difference between our minds and the proposed A.I. model Searle hopes to discredit. Also. if we are thinking things, and apparently our brain operates by manipulating symbolic entities, or representations. What could possibly give those representations the meaning they have? What, for example, must be true about us if we are thinking of a horse (or unicorn) when none is present?
[SE]
[John]
Many religious persons believe that they can hear the voice of God issuing answers to their prayers. Do you think these people lack (or ignore) a sense of self-agency? If yes, what explains the need to do so? In categorizing the different senses of self William James included a spiritual self - is this category necessary?
[SE]
[Alex La]
It should be understood that I am blind in my right eye but have good vision in my left. Naturally, I am curious about phenomena related to stereoscopic vision. I now look at my left hand so closely that I can hardly focus on the texture. If I had I right eye to simultaneously look closely at my other hand, what would that experience be like? I am particularly interested in the competition among the two eyes for attention. And as a follow-up, would my sense of placement move in my head as my attention shifted from one eye to the other?
[SE]
[Alex Le]
Even though I have a cyclopean view on the world, the organs with which I sense it are still in undeniably different positions. The merging of the information from both these sensors into a single representation still needs to keep some sort of data from each eye so as to be able to triangulate the relative distance between my phenomenal self and objects in my visual field. Where does this merging take place? Presumably it would have to be at a relatively low level, since the representations are rerepresented in different resolutions. How much of the data from each individual eye is kept to determine the distance? Does the entire representation include the triangulated distances, or is the entire method of judging distance separate from the representation?
[SE]
[Brenda]
The discussion on monday begain with the transition between a medusa and a human under the basic understanding that a medusa does not experience consciousness. Can we ever prove that the medusa is not conscious? Through what method could we use our own conscious and intelligence to assess the conscious state or intelligence of any other species? Perhaps there is no transition of consciousness across species.
Or can we even really prove that we are conscious? (it seems like a proof that would sound something like 1 = 1 because 1 is 1). But in a farfetched way, perhaps we actually live in a 6 dimensional world and we did not evolve to be conscious of or to perceive/experience the other 3 dimensions, while still possibly acting in 6 dimensions). Then, if we are merely believing that we are fully conscious, are we conscious when we dream?
What does a giant squid see since its eyes are on either side of its head? a panaramic view?
[SE]
[Max]
Micro-stimulation studies in a bat have found certain stimulations of the superior colliculus to cause specific movements of the bat's head. The concept is fascinating since the bat was essentially controlled by stimulation, in other words, by remote. On a theoretical level, would it be possible to completely control an animal via remote control? If so, living creatures would become machines that are operational by an outsider. How ethical would such an idea be? Has it been discussed in the scientific community?
[SE]
[Jessica]
In class we discussed the fact that the Superior Colliculus is the spot at which aligned maps of the visual and motor space are found. There are some people who when they hear a tone experience color. These people are said to have synesthesia. It has been suggested that synesthesia might be caused by increased connections between different brain regions, perhaps resembling the connection between the visual and motor space. Whether or not there are advantages to synesthesia, at what point might the cross firing of neurons to different modalities become distracting rather than advantageous?
[SE]
[Ben M]
That's all well and good — if you're trying to get over an inflated ego, or a worldly disappointment. But if you're a scientist hoping to study the world, you might find yourself worrying about which of your other intuitions could be as fallacious as that of the imagined phenomenal self.
On the nonexistence of self, Alan Watts says that "the problem of 'what' the mind is can now be seen to be the same as the problem of 'what' the real world is." But redefining the problem does not eradicate it. How does the scientist know that he/she observes nature as it is "cut at the joints", as opposed to seeing some approximation of unobservable reality, created by his/her brain processes, which evolved not for scientific pursuits, but for survival and genetic fitness?
Is it via the scientific method? Scientific instruments? Logic? Need we presuppose the existence of a "true" nature out there in the world, waiting to be discovered? How much must be presupposed then, that we can know anything about the world?
[SE]
[Frank F]
When considering the phenomenal self at the representational level, we discussed the following quote by Metzinger:
I understand the idea that every experienced instant can be captured in a multi-dementional vector space but I wonder whether or not consciousness is continuous, discrete, or triggered on a need-to-know basis? How are these perceived "snapshots" of the world pieced together? Would the experience of consciousness be like a movie made of fast sequences of still pictures?
[SE]
[Stan]
Suppose a study is designed such that a video camera (of good quality) is attached to the back of the head of an individual and is feeding one of his eyes live footage from that direction. Let us assume it is shown on some goggle-like contraption that shuts out all other visual input except the image from the camera and said image is at a distance that would allow the eye to focus etc.) The other eye is looking forward as normal. Would the person be able to consolidate both images so he can virtually see in 360 degrees (well slightly less as one of the eyes is not looking forward anymore, thereby reducing frontal field of vision somewhat) or would he only be able to focus on one image at a time?
[SE]
[Michal]
We tend to take certain actions automatically. For example, if a ball is coming towards my face, I will cover my face. Why is it that when I observe another in a similar situation, I sometimes take the automatic action associated with it? To continue the example: if I see a ball coming towards my friend's face, I will instinctively cover my own. If agency, mineness, and perspectivalness contribute to a feeling of phenomenal self associated only with oneself, then why does one sometimes subconsciously or instinctively apply these features to another person?
[SE]
@article{BucknerCarroll07,
title="Self-projection and the brain",
author="R. L. Buckner and D. C. Carroll",
journal="Trends in Cognitive Sciences",
volume="11",
pages="49-57",
year="2007"
}
[Fabian]
If a subject were to wear eye-glasses to shift his visual field, his physical interactions with the would be misplaced due to the mismatch of incoming information. After some time, would an adult be able to compensate, and behave and interact with the world normally? I'll assume for the moment that that is the case. It does not seem that this would represent a re-wiring of the superior colliculus. What's going on?
[SE]
@article{HydeKnudsen02,
author="P. S. Hyde and E. I. Knudsen",
title="The optic tectum controls visually guided adaptive plasticity in the owl's auditory space map",
journal="Nature",
year="2002",
volume="415",
pages="73-76"
}
Regarding the research done on subliminal cues and the priming effect that it has on subjects, how does it reconcile with the (d) model of access consciousness in the change blindness experiment? Would subliminal stimuli be part of the phenomenal consciousness but is unattended to, but can be somehow "pulled" into access consciousness, or are subliminal stimuli within the unconscious and have some sort of separate mechanism for priming memories for access?
[SE]
[Max]
Many IQ and other intelligence tests require the test takers to recognize and memorize certain patterns. In class, we learned that attention is important in answering such pattern recognition questions. Does this mean that highly intelligent people are more attentive or have different types of attention? How do attention levels differ amongst people in different tiers of IQ levels?
[SE]
[David]
"access to information is the core computational issue in reflexive consciousness"
Our previous examples in class mainly dealt with information that could be directly inferred from the physical environment. For example, the lioness example is a matter of processing visual data in a way that makes one aware of the 3-dimentional, sharp-toothed lioness represented to one's consciousness as a siluette. However, humans seem to embed information far deeper into their external environment--in Blindness, Borges is faced with the irony of having available nearly a million books worth of words, compliled language representing countless experience over space and time. When studying Anglo-Saxon, he speaks of "recover[ing]...the world of my ancestors". We learn that despite his loss of access to parts of the visual world, what is left of his literary ability can still empower him enough to transport himself mentally to a different continent and century.
Essentially, the question is this--if human consciousness relies on access to information, to what extent does our ability to "unpack" and interpret representations of data expand our notions of consciousness? Another example--driving between Ithaca and Chicago, I can briefly shift my eyes to a GPS screen, with a slowly shifting array of pixels representing a top-down view of the road. But to think of it another way, this device serves as a perceptual middleman between my motor system controlling the car and dozens of satelites above the earth able to pin-point my location on the planet. In one case, language expands access, in this case, it is technology. How do we bring these considerations into the issue of access in humans?
[SE]
We're all realists here (right?), so there should be no dissent when Thomas Nagel, in his paper "What is it Like to Be a Bat," defends "the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts." He says, "certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend... But one might believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings... simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type."
This is compelling, and lines up nicely with Professor Edelman's example of what it feels like to be a representative democracy. (Hofstadter continues on this theme: "What is it like to be a molecule? A microbe? A mosquito? An ant? An ant colony?") Nagel reasons further that whatever the facts may be about what it is like to be an X, these facts "embody a particular point of view."
Recall our parting words on qualia: "the difference between first-person and third-person access to phenomenal states... is illusory, insofar as phenomenal states are virtual constructs."
At the risk of being a nagging Nagel, this reasoning seems to gloss over the fact that phenomenal states are abstract objects if they are not embodied in a system (perhaps even one which interprets the virtual constructs semantically!) Certainly the difference is not illusory if we take into account embodiment. Do abstract objects exist? (An affirmative answer here is significantly more controversial than run-of-the-mill scientific realism.)
Furthermore, insofar as the difference is real, what would count as sufficient embodiment? Does an ant colony have phenomenal states? What sort of computer might? How complex need it be?
[SE]
According to the Reuter's story, scientists in China have succeeded in manipulating pigeons to fly via direct neural activation. All moral considerations aside (those dastardly communists!), what would the pigeon under control feel or know when being commanded to fly in that certain direction? Do they recognize that even there is no target of interest (food) in that direction, they are still somehow "magically" compelled to move in that direction? What similarities does this bear, if any, to hypnotic suggestions?
Since trying to know how a pigeon feels is difficult to imagine, if this is implemented in humans, what would a human under such control report?
[SE]
This week we have discussed that a major component of what we refer to as the 'self' is the collection of conscious episodes or autographical memory. It has been demonstrated that these can be very unreliable in representing the actual state of personal events (e.g. split-brain studies, rationalization of choices, Korsakoff's syndrome, etc.) If our narratives are littered with so much fiction, how do we know that our life stories reflect our own lives in the first place. Why am I so sure that it is 'me' who is the main character of the story my brain creates?
[SE]
In class we discussed the effect that language has on memory. For instance when talking about an event in different languages, a person can be predisposed to discuss the event in a more individualistic or collectivist context. Working backwards, would it be possible to set a person up to experience an event differently through instructions in one of two languages?
If language is an integral part of memory, that implies that memory is in part a cultural phenomena. As different languages do not have translatable words. Using bilinguals and untranslatable words one could test how difficult it is to talk about memories that revolve around the untranslatable word in the alternate language. Culture has the ability to effect what memories are stored- as they will be the ones deemed important by that culture. How might the cultural definition of the self influence personal history and memories?
[SE]
The idea of "Mirror Self-Recognition" seems a bit controversial. In the experiment described on Section 9.5, the experimenter marks the child with a sticker and then shows the video to the child. If the child removes the sticker then he/she has successfully recognized the self. If the child fails to recognize the self in the video then we say that the child has delayed self recognition? What do these outcomes tell us about the child, besides a previous experience with videos/pictures? The subject might not know how videos work. A video captures a moment from a time in the past and brings it to the present. We should not expect that a toddler can understand this phenomenon without extensive experience and explanation.
[SE]
Naturally occurring neuronal cell death, or apoptosis, is a critical phase of early brain development in the embryonic stages. Without this deliberate pruning process of many (in some cases, even most) cells in the brain and spinal cord, the resultant overabundance of neurons in the developing nervous system can have have potentially devastating consequences. Reduction of dendritic extensions must likewise occur in order to limit the number of synaptic connections and essentially simplify and focus the neuronal network.
People with Autistic Spectrum Disorder have many more dendritic spines on their cortical neurons as well as smaller, more numerous neurons in the limbic regions, both of which suggest a failure of these developmental pruning processes. As a result, these individuals retain relatively high local neural connectivity and low long-range connectivity (in contrast to a normally developed cortex). This regional over-connectivity in particular may lead to heightened sensitivity to sensory stimuli and ultimately impaired integration of information.
Would an individual suffering from this disorder have a different than normal cortical map and small-world connectivity? Is there even such as thing as a standard connectivity scheme? Using the model of a decentered, extended self that we discuss in class, would this effect whether such an individual had a cohesive narrative self?
[SE]
According to the lecture: "Cortical area connections are characterized by a 'small world' property. By virtue of this elementary cortico-cortical connectivity alone, cortex exhibits a staggered global connectivity with obligatory contextual organization."
Memories are wired according to a certain map. What happens if one of the points is corrupted or erased from memory? Are the memories that are connected to that point still stored in the brain? Are these memories accessible even though the original path to them is broken? If one point is corrupted, and not erased, are all the memories connected to it also skewed?
[SE]
The existence of a narrative self is closely linked to languages. My question relates to languages in memories of bilinguals (I myself am a bilingual). When telling a story about a particular even[t], I have found myself remembering that it happened in English when in reality it happened in Spanish. I wonder: is this because I was telling/recounting the story in English? Or is it because lately I use English significantly more than Spanish? It's interesting that two languages having one narrative self in common may lead to confusion between languages within memories.
[SE]
I think you mentioned in lecture that autobiographical memory emerges around age 4 in childhood, and it is language specific. Is it possible that autobiographical memory starts much earlier, but because we learn a language we are no longer able to access those memories?
[SE]
In an introductory psychology class, I remember learning about a theory that dreams are formed instantaneously right before people wake up. The idea stated that you do not really experience a dream through time, but upon awakening the dream is created almost instantaneously. Is there any validity to such a theory?
On a separate topic, every time I have a déjà vu, I usually believe that I had the particular vision in a dream. Are déjà vu occurrences and dreaming related?
[SE]
During sleep, active areas of the brain are systematically isolated so they do not exchange information with the rest of the body. This way, the body doesn't try to walk around or perform other actions during sleep. People with REM sleep behavior disorder act out their dreams because there body is still connected to the actions in the dream.
Normally, the active areas of the brain are also isolated from the logic centers in the brain. This is necessary so the mind does not try to analyze what is happening in the dream. Would failure to shut down the logic centers result in a catastrophic analysis of the inconsistent dream world?
We know it is possible to learn to have lucid dreams where the subject may have analytical ability. What parts of the brain are activated when the dream becomes lucid, and does their activation mean someone can consciously turn on an area of their brain?
[SE]
"The sensory-motor input-output blockade and the disrupted memory consolidation prevent the dream-state hallucinations from being acted out and, largely, from being remembered." p. 453 Fig 9.23
(this is shown in figure 1 of the Muzur 2002 paper on pg. 478)
So is somnambulism just the basal ganglia taking the "insubstantial pageant" too seriously? I guess normally, we are not supposed to act out the contents of our dream or walk around whilst dreaming- that's defeating the whole purpose! And also, in somnanbulism, is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex more active than normal? It is my understanding that during REM it is supressed by direct inhibitory mechanisms such as ACh release. However, sumnanbolics can sometimes perform complex actions while sleeping. How is this possible?
[SE]
One of the many facets of self-awareness — at least for human beings — is the state of being aware of the fact that one is aware (i.e. noting the difference between one's state of self-conscious and the phenomenal experience of, say, a slug). This perception, while a perfectly logical and perhaps even inevitable conclusion, statistically is not very often at the forefront of conscious thought.
During the rather rare state of lucid dreaming, one is similarly aware of being asleep, while asleep; in other words, one has the phenomenal experience of sleeping while maintaining a relatively cognizant sense of agency. In terms of classification, this phenomenon seems fall somewhere between the normally discrete categories of wakefulness and sleep.
On a neurological level, sleeping and dreaming are quite disparate from the phenomenal experience of a wakeful state, from areas of brain activation to propagation of different brainwaves. Purely in terms of consciousness (i.e. the engagement in a conscious state), however, can one say that lucid dreaming is qualitatively different from being awake?
[SE]
It seems to me that my dreams are by nature a patchwork construction — an attempt made by a not-quite-all-there system designed to create the illusion of a phenomenal self, trying to make some sense out of a cloud of erratically-firing neurons. For this reason I would not want to attribute to the 'self' that inhabits my dream the same degree of consciousness and agency I award my waking self (whether this latter attribution is in itself misled is a question of free will, not one I would attempt to tackle here).
But I think that this dream self is similar to the 'individuals' my waking self creates in response to other humans in my environment, in order to predict the actions of others. Their motives are underdetermined, their actions are sometimes inscrutable — much like what goes on in a dream. Our representations of others, it seems to me, must be a vague patchwork of a self just as we experience in dreams. How can we suppose that we are able to create other, nested selves (as has been suggested during previous classes — I recall a reference to a Turing machine pretending to be another Turing machines) that are anything remotely akin to the 'self' we call our own? We do not have the knowledge of our own inner workings to make this Turing-simulator suggestion feasible.
[SE]
While some lucid dreamers have gained the ability to control their dream characters others are only able to realize that they are in fact dreaming. This last circumstance has been my own experience. It is a very strange feeling to know at once that you are dreaming and cannot control your own dream actions nor wake yourself up. This provides a unique situation in which ones' conception of themself is "trapped" inside their own unresponsive body. How similiar this might be to a person who is completely paralyzed and unable to speak? How might our lucid sense of self differ?
[SE]
Is there a purpose to dreaming as Freud may suggest? or is dreaming merely the result of a biological response to sleeping? I've often heard claims about whether visual dream imagery occur in color or achromatically. Which is it? and how do we know? Is there a reason for one over the other?
(a more literary question) In Borges' story, The Circular Ruins, is the dreamer is not in control of his own dreams? Is Borges' implying that as a dreamer, you are not actively dreaming but merely passively watching as your dream unfolds (that perhaps your dream has its own consciousness apart from your own)?
[SE]
How and why (evolutionarily) do lucid dreams work? Can they be distinguished from ordinary dreams biologically? In other words, is there a difference in the type of brain activity that goes on during the two types of dreams? If so, how is this difference significant and can it give insight into the meaning/importance of lucid dreams?
[SE]
Decreased phenomenal consciousness when we sleep--resulting from a lack of sensory input--seems to result in the brain's need for a conscious self becoming obsolete. Thus the brain turns off the self, turning it on again only when it is again useful as a central organizing conceit (when we awaken). Dreaming seems to be a mere side-effect of this uncoupling between external sensory input and the self. The occurrence of lucid dreaming indicates that we have some ability to exert top-down control over our dreams, and the restoration of our selves after we awaken shows that the self is stored in some precise neural pattern of activation. So where does the self go, and how can it (and agency) exist without traditional modes of sensory stimulation?
[SE]
Is it computationally feasible for dreams to create new exemplars that are nonsensical or not possible during wakefulness with prefrontal dissociation and then solidify that exemplar by repeating it to yourself in waking?
Is that how the phenomenon of "sleeping over it" arises?
[SE]
Not the most scientifically plausible question, but hey, just for fun:
Suppose humans did not require sleep. Suppose our brains functioned much as they do now, but in a conscious state 24/7 (i.e. in the upper-back corner of the AIM model). Suppose that the necessary memory and executive function upkeep was taken care of while in our conscious state. What would life be like in a sleepless world?
Corollaries:
[SE]
Through a variety of methods, it is possible for a person to learn how to lucid dream. Looking on the internet I found several methods many of which involved increasing the ability to recall dreams. While many might be content with the experiencing the phenomena of lucid dreaming might there be other benefits? If you can subconsciously solve problems in your sleep, what could you do with lucid dreaming?
[SE]
Based on the "GPA and time spent alone" curve there is a clear relationship between solitude and academic performance. "Those that spent an intermediate amount of time alone are better adjusted than those who spent little or a lot of time alone." How does this relationship hold in terms of artistic ability and creativity? Some of the world's greatest artists have spent significant parts of their lives working on their masterpieces in solitude (i.e. Pablo Picasso).
[SE]
Long and Averill in Solitude: An Exploration of Benefits of Being Alone survey the study of solitude from a number of perspectives. Citing Koch (1994), the authors suggest that the creative freedom afforded by solitude is the freedom from the self-consciousness of being percieved by others. Given the varying privacy afforded to citizens of various countries, I wonder, could there be a correlation between creativity and spirituality of a given populace and the relative invasiveness of the governing power? In broadening their domestic surveillance programs, could the "right to privacy" slowly dwindling in the United States, UK, and other countries have a cognitively stifling effect?
[SE]
It has been demonstrated that the experience of pain associated with social exclusion engages the same brain structures (the anterior cingulate cortex) that mediate the affective responses to physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003). I wonder whether or not the negative emotions associated with being alone are present not because we are lacking social communion but because it is a conditioned fear response or fixed action pattern? (i.e. being away from the safety of the group may be a cue of impending danger).
[SE]
Recall from Long and Averill's article that "When levels of stimulation drop significantly below the optimum, the person may 'begin to generate (or perceive more sensitively) internal stimuli,' such as sensations, daydreams..." For obvious reasons, daydreams are very similar to REM sleep. It seems that every time the brain lacks input, it generates its own data. Do dreaming and daydreaming prevent our brains from becoming inactive and risking permanent dormancy?
[SE]
[Frank F]
Libet has suggested that a ~200-250 ms period between awareness of intention and the actual action is sufficient to permit a "veto" of the action if it was judged inappropriate. Primarily when we think of choice it is the decision to pursue a particular action. What about the choice to do nothing? It seems Libet's work allows room for the conscious ability restrain whatever the impending visceral/neural motives are to be. If this is so, how doe's what some consider "free won't" fit into our discussion on restructuring of our concept of volition?
[SE]
[Alex La]
If we don't hold criminals responsible for the physics in their brains and thus their actions, we should ask why it is acceptable to incarcerate them. Imprisonment is not only a punishment for misbehavior, but also a system used to quarantine individuals who are dangerous to others. Based on a behavioral record, dangerous conduct is predictable and avoided with imprisonment.
Although the randomness of quantum mechanics does not solve the problem of free will, it does show that the universe is not completely deterministic and that environment can change. It appears that the universal randomness of one's environment and the orderliness of one's physical makeup collaborate to compose the narrative self. Placing a criminal in a new environment causes neurological changes that can potentially correct their behavioral outputs. Is a facility with more criminal thinkers and criminal memes the best place for this social adjustment?
[SE]
[Ben M]
I remain unconvinced that moral culpability at the individual level is undamaged by our recent discoveries about the nature of the self, even though I agree with much of what was said last lecture about free will. Recall Dennett:
"[The boundaries of the mind are] far enough back to give my self enough spread in space and time so that there is a me for my decisions to be up to."
Dennett here seems to be advocating a kind of relativism about the mind, in which we are free to choose a vantage point that suggests the existence of a decision-making self. I see no reason to deny us the ability to define the mind as we please. It should be a relative decision where to draw the line that differentiates the mind from the ultra-complex-pinball-machine-like world. (As long as we understand the mind to be a part of that pinball machine world, and that its special place in our vocabulary is due to the fact that it is evolutionarily-convenient for us to talk about selves, decisions and the like.)
But given this sort of view of the mind, what is there to say about moral culpability? An ultra-complex-pinball machine is still a pinball machine, though its actions may be subjectively unpredictable. Why do we say that one particularly difficult-to-understand section of our pinball-machine world is "responsible" for its actions, but that other parts are not?
(For a real-world legal example, consider the Twinkie defense, or even your ordinary insanity plea.)
[SE]
Meanwhile, here's a quote from a paper titled For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything (Greene and Cohen, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 359, 1775-1785, 2004):
[Max]
People's actions are a product of their past experiences and their backgrounds. People are animals and operate as a very advanced machine. How would two identical twins who were isolated at birth, raised in the exact same conditions, separated from each other, and removed from any outside contact handle the same situations? For example, if such an experiment would be done, would the twins say no to smoking? How would they react towards situations requiring moral choices? Essentially, would their free wills differ?
[SE]
[Michal]
1. In class we addressed the question "do we have free will" and came to the conclusion that there is a middle way, but we do indeed have free will. The argument is a compelling one (based on evolution) but arguments could certainly be developed against free will. I wonder if perhaps our natural desire to have free will has skewed our reasoning. We tend to agree with the reasoning that leads to the desired outcome. Is it possible that this bias has skewed our reasoning? Perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to say that we have free will; perhaps we should factor in this bias while evaluating the truth of our conclusions regarding free will.
2. How does the role of free will change when considered in regards to other people? Our lives are so dependent on interaction with others. We don't have control over the actions of others, so how could we have control over our own destinies? On the other hand, perhaps we do control the actions of others to some extent (with our own actions). For example, I know that if I yell at my father he will react in a punishing way, etc. But in this case, imagine looking at the world from my father's perspective; he would think that he has control over the situation by manipulating his actions. It seems like the destiny of the situation is controlled in some part by each of us. Wouldn't this entail that neither person had complete individual free will?
[SE]
[Jessica]
In class we discussed the fact that one can not know for certain the decision they will make tomorrow because they have not experienced the events leading up to that decision. In fact the "me" now and the "me" in 24 hours are substantially different. However there are many decisions that we think about and correctly anticipate our decision. There are many things we know about our selves, like colors we like. If for example I need to by new clothing I can pretty accurately imagine what types of clothing I will buy. How accurate are we at anticipating our decisions? If our simulations of future decisions were constantly wrong wouldn't this cause something like an identity crisis?
[SE]
[Ben D]
We learned in Wegner's article that the principles of causal inference (thoughts occurring prior to and consistently and exclusively with action) don't define real causal relations. Perceptions of causality derived through these means, although often sensible, can nevertheless frequently diverge from reality. While the research cited in the article does not outright deny any causality between conscious thought and willful action, it certainly suggests at least several complications or mediating factors in this process.
Certainly, such evidence may have some rather startling implications about how free we really think we are, but on a pragmatic level, what does it matter? While it may be good (in the self-knowledge sense) to know the limitations of "free" will and recognize the farcical nature of the truly autonomous self, it seems that the perception of free will can actually be a beneficial (even while false) projection of reality. I wonder if the knowledge of an unconsciously determined will, and the disavowel of willful causation could eventually lead to a type of learned helplessness in humans.
[SE]
[Stan]
The story 'August 25, 1983' by Borges deals with the nature of prophetic dreams and in a similar vein, the determinism of certain events. Literature is replete with such examples where prophecies/dreams come true and for some of us, we have our own personal experiences. For example, in 5th grade, I once dreamt of finding money and later that week, I did indeed find a $5 note on the way to school. Perhaps it was pure chance. Anyway, if we were to look at this from a quntum physics perspective, there are a multitude of possible states (outcomes in the future) but only one happens. Now the crux of the problem is that like in the famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, each one of those possibilities coexists with the rest but because of the observer (i.e. us), only one is ever possible (excluding the scenario of parallel universes). So the question arises: Is the eventual option going to be the same no matter what (i.e. it is predetermined/fate/god, etc.) or, do we, through our actions, change the option ad hoc? I for one prefer the latter. This leads us to the ontology of actions. When ascribing causality to an action, the brain compares the intended action (thought) to the actual action itself and if they are closely matched and intention precedes the realization of the action in time, the brain ascribes causality; i.e. I thought of eating an apple and then I picked up an apple and ate it. If we go back a step, we see that intention itself is caused by what Libet termed "readiness potential"- an unconscious process that occurs even before intention (thought of an action). However, what causes that? According to Hume, it is our "situation and temper...complexion and disposition". In other words, our environment and genetic makeup shape our behavior (choice of actions). But doesn't that mean free will is an illusion and decisions are predetermined because in a given situation (all things being equal, i.e. our temperament, obviously our genetic makeup, etc.), we would always choose the same course of action? For example think of the phrase, "If only I could go back in time, I'd do things differently.." Obviously we cannot go back in time and change events based on our post hoc knowledge of their consequences. But, supposing we could hypothetically go back in time without the post hoc knowledge, we would still have done the same thing in that situation.
[SE]
[Brenda]
When we make a decision, we believe that it is our own choice. It could be argued that whenver we make a simple or complex decision, we are exhibiting free will under an externally constrained situation. That is, under the given circumstances we considered the relevant factors and made a decision that is best for us. But in this view, a machine or a robot could also be made to make a decision based on the current situation, and even past actions. Are they free to this extent?
Two things that separate us and machines are personality and emotion. It seems then that the significant form of free will that we consider in ourselves, involves making decisions based off of our own past, our personalities, motives, values, and beliefs. How do these personalities develop, and which one comes first- personality or free will?
When we are feeling sad, we cannot instantaneously stop the feeling of sadness whenever we want. We also do not consciously control our personality development. But if these are the factors that separate us from robots, and that really define our feeling of free will then why cant we feel like we control them?
[SE]
[Alex Le]
If an individual's decisions are indeed non-random and not uncaused, then in the end, there still is no free-will as we would think of it. All decisions are based on a web of extremely complicated causes and effects which are both in and outside the person making the decision. Even if the web is tangled and complex, one still cannot escape one's fate, it seems.
Are we then slaves to circumstance, however unfathomable it may be? Does free will even make sense to talk about if all decisions I will have made I will already have made and am just now stepping through them unknowingly? Should we instead redefine free will to be what it looks like we're doing, ignoring the subtle intricacies behind it all?
[SE]
[Amir]
Though we know that in a deterministic and causal universe we can never make an action other than the ones we made/make/will make, this knowledge does not appreciably affect our exercise of our free will; the scale at which knowledege of the universe would interfere with our illusion of free will is extremely far removed from humanity. If we exist as beings whose actions are not wholly determined by the universe outside of ourselves (rather than by the universe WITH ourselves as a part of the system), but can instead potentially make actions to avoid external harm or pursue external gain, we are said to have free will. Nevertheless we can imagine that there is some lower limit to knowledge, a point at which an entity has no appreciable level of cognitive ability to predict the future (or even see current events) and react to them (will implies the ability to perform an action here.. see coercion). Is it possibly to physically reach a point where knowledge of the universe is so detailed that the illusion of free will becomes impossible? Doesn't this preclude even the limited notion of free will that humans have? Does more knowledge make is less free? Doesn't this deterministic, causal universe we've posited have even stranger results like self-repairing time?
[SE]
Given the nature of ethics and computational ethics as proposed by McCulloch, would it be ethical for humans to create robots of any ethical ability beyond being "hard-wired to obey the rules"? The crisis arises in Asimov's novels because a machine is given the ability to interpret the meaning beyond the literal meaning of the Three Laws. Are we morally more right to endow machines the ability to learn and follow rules (and possibly eventually pass moral judgment on humans) ot to keep machines at the level of mere children and humans their nannies? In short, is it more sinful to create new life or re-engage slavery?
For reference, the Three Laws run thus:
[SE]
As society progresses it is clear that people's ethics evolve. However, it seems that ethics on a group level lag behind the developments made in individual ethics. For example, many executives would never dump their car's oil in their town, yet their companies pollute the environment on a regular basis. As individuals, many would not cheat but in corporations, scandals such as stock option backdating, insider trading and illegal tax avoidance are rampant. Why are people more lax in terms of their ethics when they are in groups? Is there a scientific explanation for the connection between group mentality and a lack of ethical behavior?
[SE]
Looking over McCulloch's three rungs of computational virtue, I became curious about the possibility of a computer that cheats. Could there be such a thing? I am under the impression that once a computational system learns a rule it will continue to behave in such a way that adheres to its direction. How or why would artificial intelligence break the rules?
[SE]
For reference, I have copied the following from Monday's lecture:
In one of our assigned articles, Greene and Haidt assert that no specific component of the brain is solely responsible for moral reasoning (i.e. there is no specialized "moral processor" in the human brain). Many of the observations providing a foundation for this claim have come from research of subjects with damage to the ventromedial area of their prefrontal cortex; such findings explicitly cite the difficulties presented by various emotional barriers in these Phineas Gage-like individuals. In other words, some people are unable to engage in rational moral thinking (as defined by most of our daily experiences).
Options 1 and 3 are obviously horrendous ethical viewpoints, and, as we discussed option 2 seems to strip away one's humanity by imposing a demeaning and obnoxiously self-righteous morality on others. With regard to law and ethics, however, the issue seems to me to become much stickier. Greene and Cohen (quoted in lecture) sidestep the issue of free will by suggesting a consequentialist legal approach, penalizing the perpetrators of any misdemeanors on the basis of the act itself; punishment is, in this case, a means to an end (i.e. a safer environment for us all) rather than purely an end in itself (i.e. punishment to satisfy our retributionist bloodlust). This is all well and good until the punisher attempts to explain the nature of the punishment to the punishee. Warren McCulloch's third rung of computational virtue, "a machine that can learn the rules" is a very convenient ... but what do we do with a machine (or a souped-up monkey — one of us) that cannot learn the rules?
It seems that some version of the detestable "kindergarten ethics" (not necessarily one with religious undertones, but instead a firm and collective moral consensus) is the only available option in this rare yet real case. How else can one act toward a Phineas Gage, who lacks the physiological means to learn our societal rules? To put a different spin on it, what is the difference between telling someone you don't like their different lifestyle and telling someone you don't like their different (non-) morality? Punishment aside, it seems that one is forced to tell a morally befuddled person that they ought to be (or at least, retrospectively, should have been) ethical in the way we see fit.
[SE]
Is it in or against our human nature to be ethical? A related question: is it our human nature that is evolving as the moral zeitgeist improves or is it the cultural influence on development? Also, in reference to the moral zeitgeist: are morals improving only in theory? In other words, people are appalled to hear about wars or burning of cats but in terms of action, crimes and wars are still rampant. On the other hand, perhaps wars and crime rates have decreased over time.
[SE]
Is an individual's moral values an attempt to induce morals/altruism in other individuals for their own self benefit? but this moral standard seems just to be an attempt to be morally unselfish with the true purpose of being more thoroughly selfish (or self interested). Is there something aside from evolutionary interpretations of morality that explains why we care whether other people are moral or not?
[SE]
As mentioned in class the goal of Utilitarianism it to "maximize the well-being of all who may be affected by your actions". This implies that you must know what is best for everyone and also everyone who will be affected by your actions. Both seem to be impossible. While unlikely, suppose that a person can be sure that his decision will only affect himself and another. Choice A affects him positively and his friend negatively. Choice B works the opposite way. For a utilitarian is it ethical to choose A?
[SE]
[Alex La]
The census data from the Journal of Religion and Society shows that many national rates like homicide, child mortality, and teen abortion correlate positively with absolute belief in God. The United States and Japan proved to be the archetypes for the suggested correlations. Keeping in mind that correlation does not necessarily indicate causation, what factors might be hidden in the graphical model of cause and effect?
[SE]
It seems likely that moral views can be described as memes. It is my opinion that memes governing morality are no different than memes governing fashion or science. Perhaps there lies the solution to how the moral zeitgeist is changing so quickly. Silly fads, and scientific, and pseudo-scientific ideas seem to propagate increasingly fast, probably due to the changing available media. How much of a framework exists, through memes or otherwise, to analyze the spread of sociological phenomena? And why is it that Dawkins said he does not know how/why the moral zeitgeist is changing so fast? What might a sociologist say?
[SE]
My question, briefly: why are we dismissing utilitarianism?
From McCulloch we understand that a system that learns the rules of gameplay has greater potential for ethical/unethical behavior, but he is silent on what these rules are. It can be summed up in a word: survival.
But this is truly minimal altruism. It describes how animals act — as nicely as we must to promote survival of the genotype, but no nicer — but us humans have the ability to question these motives. Mill himself notices the fallacy in inferring "ought" from "is". This is called the naturalistic fallacy, and as (ostensibly) moral animals, we can do better.
I think Mill is a good alternative to "evolutionary altruism". If (as Robert Wright argues in Nonzero and The Moral Animal) altruism and non-zero-sum games are emergent properties of increasing complexity (at the biological and societal level), then we should want to maximize overall happiness. The extension here is that everyone should be thoroughly self-sacrificing. To quote Wright, we ought to "live life considering the welfare of everyone else exactly as important as your own welfare" (Moral Animal, p.336). Is this philosophy really so pragmatically troubling?
[SE]
[Alex Le]
Considering the high importance given to music by many considered wise (Confucius, Zhuang Zi, Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Plato, etc.), what research has there been to establish any relationship between music appreciation and "chronic happiness"? What is it about music that affects our affects so much, what does it entail cognitively, and what does it mean evolutionarily?
[SE]
И опять мне вспоминаются слова Саади, "употребившего жизнь свою на
то, чтобы обозреть Красоту Мира":
"Ты, который некогда пройдешь по могиле поэта, вспомяни поэта добрым
словом!
-- Он отдал сердце земле, хотя и кружился по свету, как ветер, который,
после смерти поэта, разнес по вселенной благоухание цветника его сердца.
-- Ибо он всходил на башни Маана, Созерцания, и слышал Симаа, Музыку
Мира, влекшую в халет, веселие.
-- Целый мир полон этим веселием, танцем -- ужели одни мы не чувствуем
его вина?
-- Хмельной верблюд легче несет свой вьюк. Он, при звуках арабской
песни, приходит в восторг. Как же назвать человека, не чувствующего этого
восторга?
-- Он осел, сухое полено".
And I recall again the words of Saadi, who "used his life to embrace
the Beauty of the World":
"You who stop by the poet's grave, think well of him!
-- He gave his heart to the earth, even though he had circled the world
like the wind that spread around the universe the perfume of his heart's garden.
-- For he had ascended the Towers of Maan, Contemplation, and heard Simaa,
the Music of the World, leading one into halet, joy.
-- The entire world is full with this joy and dance -- are we the only ones
who are oblivious to its wine?
-- A drunk camel makes light of his load. When hearing an Arab song, he becomes
joyous. How then would we call a man who does not feel this joy?
-- He is a donkey, a dry log."
[Alex La]
I've attached a Charlie Brown Comic that is kinda sorta maybe related to my question which follows:
[SE]
Abstract. This study investigates the relative likelihood of psychotherapists promoting altruism and forgiveness as therapeutic agents as compared with other techniques. One hundred and five therapists were asked to rate the relative likelihood of fostering altruism, forgiveness, direct expression of feelings, vicarious ventilation of feelings, and self-reinforcement in response to treating four presenting problems where a fictitious client had been hurt by another. Results indicated that, for the most part, altruism and forgiveness were likely to be promoted significantly less often than the other three therapeutic alternatives by the therapists sampled. The association of altruism and forgiveness with religious values and their disassociation from selftheory are posited as possible explanations for the findings.
[Max]
The studies we discussed regarding the connection between wisdom and life satisfaction were based on aging. What happens to elderly people who start moving down on the wisdom curve after reaching a certain age? Also, how do degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and dementia affect sufferers' actual happiness? It seems that as people get older because of sickness and age, they tend to have simpler, more ignorant lives which theoretically results in more happiness.
[SE]
[Stan]
In section 10.3 of the text is says, "individuals who are reputed to be wise possess a distinctive problem-solving style, which combines a sensitivity to the problem's complexity and potential lack of structure with reflection upon and awareness of their own limitations...especially effective in the social context".
Now it seems to me that individuals who are equipped with the above problem-solving skills (in other words, are wise) have a distinctive evolutionary advantage. There will be a positive selection for individuals who possess these traits as they'll have a higher chance of survival, reproduction, etc., especially since they're effective in the 'social context'. With time, people should get wiser because the unwise individuals (i.e. Darwin award types) would conveniently remove themselves from the gene pool. However, this is not apparently the case. I would safely assume there is a lot more unwise people in the world than wise individuals. This brings me to the next point, mainly, why is it that wise people tend to have fewer children? (I CANNOT back this up with data, but just pause and think- this is intuitive; there is definitely a negative correlation between wisdom and no. of children had. Perhaps somebody ought to do a study of this.) For example, individuals who we perceive as very wise (Jesus, Moahammed, Buddha, Aristotle, your favourite wise person, etc.) all tend to have either none or very few children. Assuming there is some genetic correlate of wisdom (as implied by the Ardel article, see below), it would seem that we would be doing society a big favor by encouraging wise people to procreate more (as for the Darwin award types... I don't want to be the next Himmler).
quote from Ardelt reading, "I argue that wisdom cannot exist independently of individuals. If this is true, then wisdom itself cannot be preserved outside of individuals. Its distribution in society depends on the personal development of the people who make up society and not on the development of a cultural ‘software.’"
[SE]
[Frank]
During class you presented us with a graph that plotted a county's freedom against their perceived happiness. For the most part, a person's liberty seemed to be positively correlated with their sense of well being. Does this mean that a person who is constrained cannot feel happiness? Where does one limit the pursuit of happiness exist in order to prevent the encroachment on the freedoms of others? Assuming A.I. could have the capacity to be happy, what would its pursuit of happiness be like?
[SE]
[Ben D]
I don't mean to beat this already dead and decaying ethics horse anymore, but I had an afterthought from last week/this past Monday. We have looked at several correlations between belief in God and various negative societal characteristics, including violence. I wonder if any studies have been conducted exploring the opposite end of the spectrum (i.e. looking at kindness instead of violence); this question arises from my observation that there are many charitable religious organizations.
In the case that a factor like belief in God also correlated positively with benevolent actions, is it possible that believing in a higher moral authority could simply drive religious people further toward the extremes of conduct — instead of merely causing one type of action — on both positive and negative ends of the spectrum?
[SE]
[Jessica]
In an article in Forbes, it states that, "Lottery winners return to their previous level of happiness after five years." Although we can doubt the legitimacy of the number of years,this idea seems to correspond with the notion of an hedonic treadmill. According to the principles listed in class (Stopping the hedonic treadmill, Practicing virtue, Taking care of small things, etc) how could a person get the most long term happiness out of any one happy situation?
[SE]
[Brenda]
Why is it that even though we realize the paradox in pursuing happiness... do many people still pursue it [happiness] as such a worthy goal? If we believe that having an idea of what happiness is impairs our ability to attain it and that the little things do make us happy even as we are not actively pursuing happiness, then why can't we just be content with our state of happiness. This desire for more happiness, is it a conscious desire or fear of losing our current happiness? or an instinctual drive that is inherent (programmed?) in us, perhaps as a motivator or as a source of internal stimulation or a defined purpose?
[SE]
[David]
Lyubomirsky et al seems to cover a good deal of modern research into the realm of happiness, reasserting positive psychology's goal of finding empirically sound ways of promoting it. But something in the characterization of happiness seems to elude me--where is any mention of fulfillment? The authors suggest that the 50 percent of our subjective well-being that is in our control may be open to certain strategies for augmenting one's happiness. Happiness seems to broadly encompass a number of different experiences; the hedonic treadmill sufficiently explains the more transient and less permanent forms of happiness that one can associate with consumerism and addictive or risky behavior in general--all potentially self-destructive forces if one utilizes novel hedonic experiences to create happiness. But if a sustained, healthy increase in the baseline level is happiness, then it would seem that the more long-term solutions are what positive psychology is seeking. Daily reflections and acts of good will seem to promote positive intentional behaviors over the short term, but are these really life-long sorts of changes one can make and expect true happiness? In Man's Search For Meaning, author Viktor E. Frankl seems to suggest that the very meaning of life and key to happiness is finding a sense of purpose, defining a long-term meaning of life that allows one to transcend suffering from situational factors and can drive one's intentional activities, creating a true sense of well-being in fulfilling one's purpose. Searching Lyubomirsky's paper, however, this concept is suggested but not explicitly mentioned. What gives?
[SE]
[Amir]
In The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Le Guin makes it clear that she does not expect us to believe in the unblemished happiness of Omelas. She says: "I wish I could convince you." and "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." Proceeding thereafter to describe the terrible cost the people of Omelas willingly pay for their happiness. My question is: what makes the happiness so unbelievable? What makes our beliefs about happiness incompatible with her descriptions early in the tale? Does the hedonistic treadmill--our happiness homeostat--prevent us from believing in her initial descriptions? As in "The Matrix" movie, is a world of complete happiness incompatible with our views of the world?
[SE]
[Ben M]
Wisdom, we heard Monday, is "what a person is like rather than what a person knows." Given what we have learned about the mind (that it is what the brain does, that consciousness is "merely" distributed processes creating a virtual perception of a self, etc.), what is the difference? I'd reject the statement that general intelligence, as opposed to wisdom, is a mere piece of abstract knowledge (p. 479). Whatever differences there may be between intelligence and wisdom, both have causal efficacy and are embodied in our daily actions. (In fact, one could argue that there's nothing more to intelligence or wisdom than that which is found to be intelligent or wise in our actions.)
[SE]
[Michal]
As I talked about in class, memories not only evolve naturally over time, but can be modified each time they are remembered. In one experiment, protein synthesis inhibitors (which interfere with memory formation via stopping long-term synapse changes) were given to animals at the time that they're reminded of a certain event/environment. Control animals were not given the protein synthesis inhibitor. A day later, control animals remembered the original environment but animals with the protein synthesis inhibitor cannot remember the environment at all. In this case, could we potentially use this type of treatment to erase undesirable memories from our past? Would it be possible to remove traumatic events from peoples' memories? If so, would some of the other side-effects associated with going through a traumatic event (such as speechlessness, antisocial behavior, extreme paranoia or fear, etc) be eliminated as well?
[SE]
[Max]
In the study done by Schacter & Addis, people suffering from amnesia and dementia had worse recognition than those in the control group. Do people that have better memory have a better sense of planning and mapping out the future? If so, would developing memory using medicine and exercises increase a person's ability to manage time? Do peopl