mindcycle

I’m not quite sure where to date my decision to pursue an academic career — probably somewhere between winter 2006 when I started my bachelor’s and a year from now. The more time I spent in academic surroundings, the more I feel attracted to them, even home, if that’s possible.

The big issue for me then was — and still is — to choose between philosophy and the empirical sciences (especially neuroscience and psychology). There are plenty of reasons, I think, to make either decision. But why not go a third way? Why not combine the two? I would consider this ideal as neither philosophy nor neuroscience or psychology alone can answer the really interesting questions.

With a BSc. in Cognitive Science with a clear focus in Philosophy and an MSc. in Neuroscience I’m already sort of a hybrid. I realize this has advantages. For instance, my background enables me to see how (or at least that) researchers from different disciplines talk past each other. The downside is that I’m not a thoroughbred member of either community.

My decision is pending. Could one or the other provide a better prospect for my future? Well, the received view certainly is to better stay away from philosophy and go into science, go where the money is. But how about science? A friend just posted this link on facebook. Jonathan Katz describes a scientific career as exactly the nightmare scientist warn me about when I tell them about possibly going into philosophy.

What had I best do? Avoiding either path, and switching to engineering does not sound like a convincing alternative … maybe just carry on and hope Fortuna to be propitious?

But from this point of view, should I even bother making a choice between philosophy and neuroscience? Why would it be such a big deal to be a hybrid? As long as I’m doing research, it’ll be just fine as there are experts in either area I can collaborate with — and thanks to my hybrid-being I actually see their points.

The job market raises difficulties. Who is looking for someone with neither full competence in neuroscience nor philosophy? The only viable solution, it seems, is to pick one or the other for my PhD and subsequent academic future while leaving the rest for leisure time.

But can this be true? And does it bring me any closer to solving the really interesting questions? I doubt it. And in the end, would a clear cut decision make the perspective for an academic career so much better?

Amazing phenomena, indeed — but I wonder how serious I should actually take this …

* HEC = hypothesis of extended cognition

How do worlds build up inside our minds? – As an answer, I expect more than merely explaining how we visually perceive the scene in front of us, or reconstruct in front of our mind’s eye the object we are touching with our hands from the incoming tactile stimulation. My question is more complex.

Among the first things to find out, is, for sure, what it is that I call “world”. To give it a start, I might try describing it as “environments we experience”. When I go out, take my bike and ride to the grocery store, for instance, I do find myself within a world containing the house I live in, my family, the neighborhood I am riding through, the store I enter for shopping, so on and so forth. When I dream, I find myself in diverse situations, maybe on another planet or in another time. When I imagine future scenarios, vivid scenes are building up inside my head, I can watch them, manipulate them, act upon them. When I remember I recall—more or less accurately—past situations, past environments, and people I was in touch with around the time of memory. When I read a story about, say, wizards and witches, I can have them do magic, experience their joy and feel their pain. A similar thing holds for games and movies, though these worlds are not as much “inside my head” as the ones previously described (they are flickering on a screen instead). And, finally, worlds can be more abstracted away from our usual experience—e.g. if I try to solve a math problem and mentally rotate an n-dimensional sphere (not that I could).

All these are instances of what I take to be worlds; one thing special about the grocery shopping situation is this: we call it real. The major difference between the real world and other, so called imaginative, worlds is that it is thought of as a representation, an image, or a copy of the outer world, the environment we actually engage with. It perhaps deserves a special status in our minds since the real world is the one we all share. It is the one that can, contrary to all the others, be used as objective reference point (or at least we think so).

If we take the outer (real) world for granted (which I assume we should—but that discussion belongs elsewhere) then the question of how it makes its way inside our heads might be answered by investigating our perceptual apparatus. But, as already noted above, this is insufficient. What about all the other worlds? How do they come about? And, perhaps even more importantly, what distinguishes them—despite from having no currently externally present reference—from the mental copy of the real world? Is it even possible to make this distinction?

Related to these, further questions need to be considered. Among the most urgent ones are (1) What does such a world consist in? Can we talk about “images” or “representations” being “neurally coded” in brain tissue? If so, what makes our brains produce an imaginative world of trolls and wizards as opposed to one of dragons and unicorns? and (2) Once it is there, how does such a world change? How can I act within it? Why do things, say, move? This sort of change or manipulation of worlds might be what is commonly referred to as thinking. One might then ask further, are there, perhaps, necessary and sufficient conditions for thought? One difficulty is, however, to distinguish a merely observatory thought (e.g., seeing a squirrel run away or recalling the look of a person’s face) from one in which we actively engage with our environment (e.g., dreaming of climbing a rock). Both inevitably are cases of thought but only the latter obviously involves world-manipulation. Taking a closer look, I suspect, even cases of apparent observation will, after all, include some sort of manipulation.

Thus far, I have laid out some questions answering which—I hope—will be of help to eventually approach the big question. It is time then to ask who can provide answers. Scientist are researching in memory, visual processing, attention, conceptual schemes, empathy, the connection between mind and body, consciousness and a bunch of other phenomena. But how to put all this together? Will a philosophical, neuroscientific or psychological approach turn out most fertile? There is a lot more to be said here; for these paragraphs are only the gist of a giant puzzle.

From early childhood on, life bears riddles, miracles and secretes — some of which only wait to be discovered. An everlasting irresistible urge drives us to ask questions about them and explore possible solutions. Following a hidden path, we collect various clues and try to piece them together.

Sometimes, if not always, the puzzle remains essentially incomplete. People are kept from sleep thinking through a particular question again and again. Great figures of history as well as contemporary researchers have devoted their entire lives to a single such question.

Here is what keeps coming to my mind more and more often: How does the world get into our heads? Isn’t is fascinating that you can close your eyes and still see? You can see even things you could never see were your eyes open! Admittedly, this is only the cherry on the ice cream. We have a clear image or sense of our being there, of the outside world, maybe of space, … even though we have never been given a single proof for any of it.

How does this come about? What makes it happen? One might reply it’s all just neuronal fireworks. But then the same question arises at a lower level: why is that there? How does it make me, for instance, type these questions? And how does it relate to whatever might be “out there”?

What do you think? What gives rise to world inside your head?

This term, I attended a course entitled “Existential Feelings” where we read Matthew Ratcliffe’s manuscript of “Feelings of Being”. In this book, Matthew introduces a new notion, “existential feelings”, which refers to the background structure that determines how one finds oneself in the world.

Existential feelings are not an entity but rather a relation—a relation between the subject and the world surrounding it. Matthew describes these feelings, these relations, as—in essence—something bodily: the body is the object through which we can pick them up. When we, as situated agents, engage with the outer world, we perceive a space of different possibilities. The sense of these “possibilities out there” is what Matthew generally describes as feelings.

Those feelings that set up the context in which things matter, that constitute our sense of reality (our ability to distinguish real from non-real), are existential feelings. They are difficult to reflect upon since we usually take them for granted and cannot have any experience without them.

However, there are situations in which we can recognize existential feelings: they become apparent whenever our “being in the world” is transformed, i.e. when they are heavily changed.
To get the flavor, just think of finally feeling at home again when returning from a very long journey or literally loosing balance when a beloved person has died. Even more obvious are altered existential feelings in severe cases of depression: patients feel disconnected form the world, nothing appears real to them anymore, and everything is drained from meaning. There are no subjectively significant possibilities left to these patients. Their sense of being in the wolrd is diminished, the “background of belonging” has changed, is partly missing.

Once I was familiar with this idea, I recognized that I had acquired a new vocabulary to talk about what is going on and how things feel. It allows me to grasp more accurately the differences between writing at a desk and reading in the sun. Further, I realized that an experience as such can never be isolated. It is tied up with the person and the situation she is engaged with—it is fundamentally different from whatsoever object.

Of course, the mere term “existential feelings” does not introduce anything new into the phenomenological world. Nor does Matthew Ratcliffe offer a precise definition of what exactly they are supposed to be.
Nevertheless, I think, it is quite a plausible assumption to start with that there is something in the background, something that shapes all our experiences.

Last week I participated in a workshop trying to answer the above question. The initial proposal was that thoughts are not abstract but rather mental entities for which there is currently no definition available. However, most of my readers will agree that something is going on in our heads that we usually refer to as “thinking”, a process involving something called “thoughts”.

Well, what are they, thoughts? Usually people describe having emotions or imaginations, intentions and perceptions as something they “think about”. The same holds for beliefs, propositions and, maybe, mental representations. Thus, the entire collection can be seen as a set of instances described by the more general term “thought”—and still, we are far form a proper definition.

Can the notion of consciousness help us define a thought? Are thoughts and thinking—the manipulation of thoughts—necessary to make a being conscious? Or, on the reverse, it is necessary for having and manipulating thoughts to be conscious? What can phenomenology teach us about thought?

One approach to the problem might be to appeal to “reasoning” when talking about thinking. Reasoning seems to be closely connected to rationality, i.e. in order to reason a being must have a concept of what it is to be rational. But what is rationality? And would an explanation of thought that involves rationality presuppose thinkers to be rational?
I like the way Max Coltheart puts it with reference to delusions: Humans are not rational, they think and behave not rational, so why should their thoughts be? Where is a role to play for rationality?

Still, there might be one if we assume that thinking is the systematic manipulation of thoughts according to rules of logic. But in order to do so, we would have to take for granted that thoughts can be manipulated in this (the formal, logical)—and perhaps no other—way. Consequently, a thought is to be seen as some kind of coded proposition. The question to ask is then how to code a thought most appropriately. Is it language that we need for this purpose, as José Bermúdez suggests? By the way, I think it is not.

We can try to circumvent these matters if we find a way to define thinking without reasons and rationality. According to a proposal by John Campbell, thinking can be a motor-process:
Unconscious pre-conceptual motor-instructions are brought about by beliefs, memories, interests, and perhaps, a given task. They are monitored in a feed-forward control mechanism and finally cause a possibly personal-level, i.e. conscious, thought accessible to introspection. Introspection of a thought influences the monitoring mechanism and thereby has an impact on further thoughts—progressing this way some thinker can solve a task.

There are two things I would like to draw the reader’s attention to. First, in order to adopt the above account of thinking, we need a proper theory of causation. Since this is not the matter of debate here, let us take this as unproblematic. Second, we must clarify why a thought is caused by unconscious pre-conceptual motor intentions. This claim roots in the quasi-motor-thesis of thought according to which thoughts are not cognitive representations but motor representations. Thoughts thus carry features analogous to those of motor processes in the brain.

Does this mean that all our thought works the same way—or at least analogous to the way—our motor system does? How far does the analogy between motor performance and thinking take us? And how fruitful is it?