Alva Noë and Evan Thompson - Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?

Excellent article. Alva Noe believes consciousness is not something we have but, rather, something we do. So I am eager to look at his thinking throughout his career as a writer/philosopher, which he has made available through his website.

Here is some bio:

Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher at UC Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. For the last decade or so his philosophical practice has concerned perception and consciousness. His current research focus is art and human nature.

Alva is the author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang / Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009) and Action in Perception (The MIT Press, 2004). The central idea of these books is that consciousness is not something that happens inside us -- not in our brains, or anywhere else; it is something we do.

Before coming to Berkeley in 2003, Alva taught in the department of philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. He received a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1995; he has a BA from Columbia (1986) and a BPhil from Oxford Universiy (1986). He has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2007-2008). He is a research associate of the CNRS laboratory Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris. In the spring of 2003 he was a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and in the 1995-1996 academic year he was a research fellow of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

And here is the beginning of the article that is the reason for this post.

Alva Noë and Evan Thompson
Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?

In the past decade, the notion of a neural correlate of consciousness (or NCC) has become a focal point for scientific research on consciousness (Metzinger, 2000a). A growing number of investigators believe that the first step toward a science of consciousness is to discover the neural correlates of consciousness. Indeed, Francis Crick has gone so far as to proclaim that ‘we…need to discover the neural correlates of consciousness.… For this task the primate visual system seems especially attractive.… No longer need one spend time attempting … to endure the tedium of philosophers perpetually disagreeing with each other. Consciousness is now largely a scientific problem’ (Crick, 1996, p. 486). Yet the question of what it means to be a neural correlate of consciousness is actually far from straightforward, for it involves fundamental empirical, methodological, and philosophical issues about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the brain. Even if one assumes, as we do, that states of consciousness causally depend on states of the brain, one can nevertheless wonder in what sense there is, or could be, such a thing as a neural correlate of consciousness.

Our focus in this paper is one particular way of thinking about the neural correlates of visual consciousness that has become widespread among philosophers of mind and cognitive neuroscientists alike. According to this way of thinking, which we call the matching-content doctrine, the first task of the neuroscience of consciousness is to uncover the neural representational systems whose contents systematically match the contents of consciousness. We believe there are good empirical and philosophical reasons for being suspicious of this matching-content notion of neural correlates of consciousness. There is no reason to think that the neural states that have been shown experimentally to be correlated with conscious visual experiences match those experiences in content; therefore, the experiments to date do not support the matching-content doctrine. In addition, we argue below that there is reason to doubt that neural representational systems, at least as standardly conceived in much of the NCC literature, could match visual experiences in content, and therefore that the matching-content doctrine ought to be rejected. If we are right, then neuroscientists and philosophers ought to pursue a different approach to understanding the brain basis of consciousness from that of the matching-content doctrine.

I: From Isomorphism To The Matching-Content Doctrine

According to the matching-content doctrine, for every visual experience E, there is a neural representational system N, such that (i) N is the minimal neural representational system whose activation is sufficient for the occurrence of E, and (ii) there is a match between the content of E and the content of N (Chalmers, 2000).

As background to this doctrine, consider first that most neuroscientists believe that for every conscious state there is a minimal neural substrate that is nomically sufficient (as a matter of natural law) for its occurrence. Let us call this commitment the thesis of the minimally sufficient neural substrate (or ‘the minimal substrate thesis’ for short).3 As an example, consider a visual experience, E, as of two uniform regions of different brightness. According to the substrate thesis, there must be some minimal neural complex N that is sufficient for E. This minimal substrate thesis is a ground-level metaphysical and/or methodological commitment of many scientists and philosophers interested in the neural basis of consciousness.

The visual scientists Davida Y. Teller and E.N. Pugh, Jr. make this commitment explicit in their discussion of what they call the ‘bridge locus’:

Most visual scientists probably believe that there exists a set of neurons with visual system input, whose activities form the immediate substrate of visual perception. We single out this one particular neural stage, with a name: the bridge locus. The occurrence of a particular activity pattern in these bridge locus neurons is necessary for the occurrence of a particular perceptual state; neural activity elsewhere in the visual system is not necessary. The physical location of these neurons in the brain is of course unknown. However, we feel that most visual scientists would agree that they are certainly not in the retina. For if one could set up conditions for properly stimulating them in the absence of the retina, the correlated perceptual state would presumably occur (Teller and Pugh, 1983, p. 581).4

The suggestion at the end of this passage that a particular pattern of activity at the bridge locus would be sufficient for the occurrence of a particular perceptual state, despite the absence of the sort of activity elsewhere in the visual system (e.g., in the retina) that would normally give rise to such a perception, expresses what we are calling the minimal substrate thesis (see also Kanwisher, 2001, pp. 98–100; Rees et al., 2002). Teller and Pugh also assert, however, that the bridge locus activity pattern is necessary for the occurrence of the perceptual state. There is reason to think that this requirement of necessity is too strong, for it seems possible, given the complexity and plasticity of the brain, for there to be more than one bridge locus or minimal neural substrate of a given conscious visual state, either in one individual over time, or from one individual to the next (see Pessoa et al., 1998, pp. 742–3, 787-88; VanGulick, 1998; Chalmers, 2000, p. 24).

A second prominent commitment of investigators concerns the nature of the minimal neural substrate. It is widely believed that there will be — indeed, that there must be — a one–one mapping (under some description) from features of conscious experience onto features of theminimal neural substrate. For example, if N is sufficient for the occurrence of E, an experience as of two uniform regions with a brightness step, then N must consist (for example) at least in patterns of activity corresponding to the fields of uniform brightness and in a pattern of activity that explains the perceived step-wise difference in brightness (as well as perhaps other features of the percept). Let us call this second commitment the isomorphism constraint.

The isomorphism constraint is best understood as a criterion of explanatory adequacy. The thought is that if there is to be an explanatory link between the minimal neural substrate and the perceptual experience, then there must be some way to establish a relation of sameness of structure (at some appropriate level of description) between elements of the substrate and elements of the experience. To suppose that there were no isomorphism in this sense would make it an utter mystery how N could give rise to E (or how the pattern of activity at N could be E, according to one view). Put another way, the thought behind the constraint is that one would never have sufficient reason to believe, of any given neural substrate, that it is the minimally sufficient substrate of a given experience, unless one could establish such a one–one mapping from features of the experience onto features of the substrate. Thus, to suppose that there were no isomorphism would be tantamount to the supposition that there was no intelligible connection
(beyond brute correlation) between the experience and the neural locus in question.5

Read the whole essay.

Tags: Psychology, Philosophy, brain, consciousness, Alva Noë, Evan Thompson, Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?, neuroscience, Out of Our Heads, Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness, Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences