First up, EXPERIENCE WITHOUT THE HEAD by Alva Noë (May, 2004 draft) - Appears in Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford University Press.
This is the beginning.
Some cognitive states — e.g. states of thinking, calculating, navigating — may be partially external because, at least sometimes, these states depend on the use of symbols and artifacts that are outside the body. Maps, signs, writing implements may sometimes be as inextricably bound up with the workings of cognition as neural structures or internally realized symbols (if there are any). According to what Clark and Chalmers [1998] call active externalism, the environment can drive and so partially constitute cognitive processes. Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? If active externalism is right, then the boundary cannot be drawn at the skull. The mind reaches – or at least can reach --- beyond the limits of the body out into the world.Read more.
Can one extend active externalism to perceptual consciousness? There is a consensus that this question should be answered negatively.1 The fact that we dream, and that neuroscientists can produce sensations by direct stimulation of the brain, shows that consciousness is a matter of what is going on in the head alone.
Or does it? The fact that some experiences can be produced by neural activity alone does not show that all experiences could be. Nor would the supposition that some not-yet-invented technology might one day enable us to to produce any perceptual experience by direct neural intervention show that neural states were sufficient for experience. Just as the fact that one can manipulate a car’s behavior by manipulating its engine is not enough to show that the engine is alone sufficient for the car’s behavior, so the fact that one can manipulate experience by manipulating the brain is not enough to show that the brain is sufficient for experience. — We spend our lives in tight coupling with the environment (and other people). Why are we so confident that there could be a consciousness like ours independent of active exchange with the world? Why are we so certain consciousness depends only on what is going on inside us? Are we too hasty in dismissing externalism about perceptual experience?
These questions are not unmotivated. As of now, there is no account, even in roughest outline, of how the brain produces consciousness. This is widely admitted, even by leading proponents of the “consciousness is in the head” point of view, such as neurobiologists Frances Crick and Christof Koch. They write: “No one has produced any plausible explanation as to how the experience of the redness of red could arise from the action of the brain” (2003: 119). In light of this “explanatory gap,” talk of neural substrates of experience can seem empty. Beyond brute correlation, we lack any intelligible connection between neural substrate and experience, and so we lack, it seems, sufficient reason to believe, of any given neural structure, that it is or could be the substrate of an experience.
Whether or not neural activity is sufficient for an experience is, or at least ought to be regarded as, an empirical question. Hurley and I have recently proposed that the explanatory gap gives us a reason for thinking that we ought to consider expanding our account of the substrate in terms of which we hope to explain perceptual experience (Hurley and Noë 20003).
In this paper I pursue related themes. My focus, however, is not on neural substrates, but rather on the phenomenology of perceptual experience. The robust “consciousness is in the head” consensus rests, I suspect, on bad phenomenology. There is a tendency to think of perceptual experiences as like snapshots, and to suppose that what is experienced, like the content of a snapshot laid out on paper, is given all at once in the head. But experiences are not like snapshots. Experienced detail is not given all at once the way detail in a picture is. In ways that I will try to explain, what we experience visually (for example) may outstrip what we actually see. From this it follows not that experience could not be in the head. What follows, rather, is that it might not be, or rather, that some aspects of some experiences might not always be. A modest conclusion, but one that allows that, at least sometimes, the world itself may drive and so constitute perceptual experience. The world can enter into perceptual experience the way a partner joins us in a dance, or – to change the image slightly – the way the music itself guides us.
And then this article by B. Alan Wallace, from his site, "A Contemplative View of the Mind." Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1989.
When we inquire into our personal experience of physical and mental events, we find that we encounter two types of phenomena that bear distinct differences. Material objects characteristically have location and may have mass, velocity, and physical dimensions. Thus, they lend themselves to quantitative measurement and analysis. Some mental events, such as physical pain, may be located in specific areas in the body, but for others the notion of location seems inappropriate. Where, for example, is affection located; or where are the recollections of one's childhood? It is possible to locate neurophysiological processes that are associated with certain mental states, but science has in no way demonstrated that the two are equivalent. It is possible to trigger specific mental events by electrically stimulating areas of the brain and to trigger specific neurological events by subjectively stimulating the mind. This proves neither that the mental events can be reduced to the physical nor the opposite. It is just as reasonable to explain the evidence of introspection in its own subjective terms as it is to explain the findings of objective science in its terms.Read more.
The concepts of mass, velocity, and physical dimension are all inappropriate when discussing the whole range of mental events; nor do they lend themselves to precise quantitative measurement. Just as physical phenomena have their own unique attributes, so do mental events have theirs. The dominant property of mental states is awareness. To define consciousness, we need not engage in mental gymnastics, nor in abstract, philosophical speculation: it is that very event of knowing, with which we are all familiar. The mental gymnastics come in only when we try to define this firsthand event in terms of noncognitive physical processes, configurations of matter, abstract behavioral dispositions, emergent properties of the brain, and so on.
Mental events are modes of awareness, and it is this property that distinguishes them from physical entities. Unless we allow our introspective faculty to atrophy (for example, by subjecting ourselves to the dictates of physical reductionism, which takes us away from experience, not deeper into it) we must readily acknowledge that mental events are every bit as real as physical events. Our thoughts, intentions, and emotional states maneuver our bodies and thereby other physical objects; likewise, material things are constantly influencing our mental states. Subjective empirical examination of mental and physical events indicates that both types of phenomena are in a constant state of flux, both act as causal agents, and both are influenced by causes that are themselves physical and mental.
Adherents of mechanistic materialism, with their insistence on quantitative knowledge, may easily overlook these otherwise evident facts of our experience. We may recall Einstein's comment that it is the theory that determines what can be experienced. In the light of this insight, it is apparent that physical reductionism blinds its proponents to realms of experience that are easily available to those unafflicted by this view.
Just as the materialist is bent on expressing the evidence of introspection in terms of physical science and reducing all of existence to mass and energy, so does the idealist seek to reduce the physical world to an emanation of the mind. Idealists are not content to acknowledge the existence of objective physical events. Turning Francis Crick's admonition on its head, they might well state: "The evidence of objective science should never be accepted at face value. It should be explained in terms other than just its own, namely in terms of the one absolute reality - the mind."
Idealists may further claim that we have no empirical access to a physical world apart from the mind; therefore objective physical events cannot be explored or discussed in a truly scientific manner. Any scientific explanation of physical phenomena must be couched in terms of the one type of phenomenon that is immediately accessible to direct observation, namely mental events. Just as materialists deprive themselves of the possibility of profoundly exploring the mind and manifesting its deepest potentials, so do the idealists turn their backs on careful investigation of the physical world and the development of technology.
The Buddhist centrist view regards both materialism and idealism as extremes.
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