The Philosopher's Zone - Mind the Brain

This is last week's episode of The Philosopher's Zone podcast, with guest Daivd Papineau, professor at King's College in London. Papineau has worked in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, mind, and mathematics. His overall stance is naturalist and realist. He is one of the originators of the teleosemantic theory of mental representation, a solution to the problem of intentionality which derives the intentional content of our beliefs from their biological purpose. He is also a defender of the a posteriori physicalist solution to the mind-body problem.

Here is a lengthy explanation of teleosemantic theories in philosophy from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

What all teleological (or “teleosemantic”) theories of mental content have in common is the idea that psycho-semantic norms are ultimately derivable from functional norms. Beyond saying this, it is hard to give a neat definition of the group of theories that qualify.

Consider, for instance, some theories that are clearly intended as alternatives to teleosemantics, such as Fodor's (1990b) asymmetric dependency theory or theories that appeal to convergence under ideal epistemic conditions (see Rey 1997 for an outline). Elaboration of these theories is beyond the scope of this entry but we can note that they both seem to need a notion of normal or proper functioning. Fodor's theory adverts to the “intact” perceiver and thinker. Presumably this is someone whose perceptual and cognitive systems are functioning properly (this is covered under the ceterus paribus part of the laws to which Fodor's theory refers). The idea of convergence under ideal epistemic conditions also involves a notion of normal functioning, for epistemic conditions are not ideal if perceivers and thinkers are abnormal in certain respects, such as if they are blind or psychotic. If normal or proper functioning is analyzed in terms of an etiological theory, which says that a system functions normally or properly only if all of its parts possess the dispositions for which they were selected, then these theories would qualify as teleological theories of mental content under the characterization provided in the first paragraph of this section. Those who propose these theories might reject an etiological theory of functions, but they need some analysis of them. There could anyway be etiological or teleological versions of theories of this sort.

An appeal to teleological functions can also be combined with a variety of other ideas about how content is determined. For example, there can be both isomorphic and informational versions of teleosemantics. In the former case, the proposal might be that the relevant isomorphism is one that cognitive systems were adapted to exploit. An alternative idea is that the isomorphism does not need to be specified given that the targets of representations are determined by teleological functions. This appears to be the view of Cummins (1996, see esp. p.120) although Cummins is generally critical of teleological functions in biology. A teleological version of an informational theory is given when content is said to depend on information carrying, storing or processing functions of mechanisms. The relevant notion of information is variously defined but (roughly speaking) a type of state (event, etc.) is said to carry natural information about some other state (event, etc.) when it is caused by it or corresponds to it. 

It is sometimes said that the role of functions in a teleological theory of content is to explain how error is possible, rather than to explain how content is determined, but the two go hand in hand. To see this, it helps to start with the crude causal theory of content and to see how the problem of error arises for it. According to the crude causal theory, a mental representation represents whatever causes representations of the type; Rs represent Cs if and only if Cs cause Rs. One problem with this simple proposal is its failure to provide for the possibility of misrepresentation, as Fodor (1987, 101–104) points out. To see the problem, recall the occasion on which crumpled paper is seen as a cat. The crude causal theory does not permit this characterization of the event because, if crumpled paper caused a tokening of CAT then crumpled paper is in the extension of CAT, according to the crude causal theory. Since cats also sometimes cause CATs, cats are in the extension too. However, the problem is that crumpled paper is included in the extension as soon as it causes a CAT to be tokened and so, on this theory, there is no logical space for the possibility of error since candidate errors are transformed into non-errors by their very occurrence. Note that the problem is simultaneously one of ruling in the right causes without also ruling in the wrong ones. CAT cannot have the content cat unless non-cats (including crumpled paper) are excluded from its content. So explaining how content is determined and how the possibility of error are accommodated are not separate tasks.

The error problem is an aspect of what (after Fodor) is often called “the disjunction problem.” With respect to the crude causal theory, the name applies because the theory entails disjunctive contents when it should not. For example, it entails that CATs have the content cats or crumpled paper in the case just considered. The disjunction problem is larger than the problem of error, however, because it is not only in cases of error that mental representations are caused by things that are not in their extensions (Fodor, 1990c). Suppose, for example, that Mick's talking about his childhood pet dog reminds Scott of his childhood pet cat. In this case no misrepresentation is involved but the crude causal theory again entails inappropriate disjunctive contents. Now it entails that Scott's CATs has a content along the lines of cats or talk of pet dogs. This last aspect of the disjunction problem might be called the problem of representation in absentia: how do we explain our capacity to think about absent things? How do mental representations retain or obtain their contents outside of perceptual contexts? 

Asking how to alter the crude causal theory to allow for error is one place to begin looking for a more adequate proposal. One approach would be to try to describe certain situations in which only the right causes can produce the representation in question and to maintain that the content of the representation is whatever can cause the representation in such situations. This is sometimes referred to as a “type 1 theory.” A type 1 theory distinguishes between two types of situations, ones in which only the right causes can cause a representation and ones in which other things can too. A type-1 theory says that the first type of situation is content-determining. A type 1 teleological theory might state, for example, that the content of a perceptual representation is whatever can cause it when the perceptual system is performing its proper function, or when conditions are optimal for the proper performance of its function. The content of representations in abstract thought might then, it might be proposed, be derived from their role in perception. Not all teleological theories of content are type 1 theories, however. The theory described in the next section is arguably a variant of a type 1 theory but some of the theories described in later sections are not.

And here is a specific account of Papineau's teleosemantic model - this also comes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

A further way in which teleological theories of content can differ is with respect to the contents that they aim to explain. David Papineau's theory, developed at the same time as Millikan's, will help illustrate this point. Papineau (1984, 1987, 1990 and 1993) develops a theory that is top-down, or non-combinatorial, insofar as the representational states to which his theory most directly applies are whole propositional attitudes (e.g., beliefs and desires). In early writings, Millikan sometimes seems to hold a similar view and some objections initially raised against her theory are based on this interpretation of her view (see, e.g., Fodor 1990b, 64–69, where he raises some of the following points).

In Papineau's theory, the contents of desires are primary and those of beliefs are secondary in terms of their derivation. According to Papineau, a desire's “real satisfaction condition” is “… that effect which it is the desire's biological purpose to produce” (1993, 58–59), by which he means that “[s]ome past selection mechanism has favored that desire — or, more precisely, the ability to form that type of desire — in virtue of that desire producing that effect” (1993, 59). So desires have the function of causing us, in collaboration with our beliefs, to bring about certain conditions, conditions that enhanced the fitness of people in the past who had these desires. Desires, in general, were selected for causing us to bring about conditions that contributed to our fitness, and particular desires were selected for causing us to bring about particular conditions. These conditions are referred to as their satisfaction conditions and they are the contents of desires.

The “real truth condition” of a belief, Papineau tells us, is the condition that must obtain if the desire with which it collaborates in producing an action is to be satisfied by the condition brought about by that action. A desire that has the function of bringing it about that we have food has the content that we have food, since it was selected for bringing it about that we have food, and if this desire collaborates with a belief to cause us to go to the fridge, the content of the belief is that there is food in the fridge if our desire for food would only be satisfied by our doing so if it is true that there is food in the fridge (Papineau's example).

This seems to reject the Language of Thought hypothesis, according to which thought employs a combinatorial semantics. Language is combinatorial to the extent that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of the words in the sentence and their syntactic relations. “Rover attacked Fluff” has a combinatorial meaning if its meaning is a function of the meaning of “Rover”, the meaning of “attacked” and the meaning of “Fluff”, along with their syntactic relations (so that “Rover attacked Fluff” differs in meaning from “Fluff attacked Rover”). According to some philosophers (see esp. Fodor 1975) the content of propositional attitudes is combinatorial in an analogous sense. That is, for instance, the content of a belief is a function of the contents of the component concepts employed in the proposition believed, along with their syntactic relations. A teleological theory of content can be combinatorial, for it can maintain that the content of a representation that expresses a proposition is determined by the separate histories of the representations for the conceptual constituents of the proposition (and, perhaps, by the selection history of the syntactic rules that apply to their syntactic relations). Papineau's theory is not combinatorial, at least for some propositional attitudes. Instead, the proposal is that the contents of concepts are a function of their role in the beliefs and desires in which they participate.

Papineau's theory is a benefit-based theory, and some issues discussed in the previous sub-section are relevant to an assessment of it. For instance, it is unclear that what we desire is always what is beneficial to fitness. One might want sex, not babies or bonding, and yet it might be the babies and the bonding that are crucial for fitness. However, this section will not attempt an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of this theory but will focus on issues peculiar to non-combinatorial accounts.

Any non-combinatorial theory must face certain general objections to non-combinatorial theories, such as the objection that it cannot account for the productivity and systematicity of thought (Fodor 1981, 1987). This entry will not rehearse that argument (see the entry on the language of thought hypothesis) but special problems for a teleological version of a non-combinatorial theory need to be mentioned. Consider, for example, the desire to dance around a magnolia tree when the stars are bright, while wearing two carrots for horns and two half cabbages for breasts. Probably no-one has wanted to do this. But now suppose that someone does develop this desire (to prove Papineau wrong, say) so that it is desired for the first time. We cannot characterize the situation in this way, according to a non-combinatorial teleological theory. Since it has never been desired before, it has no history of selection and so no content on its first occurrence, on that style of theory. It is also a problem for this kind of theory that some desires do not or cannot contribute to their own satisfaction (e.g., the desire for rain tomorrow or the desire to be immortal) and that some desires that do contribute to their own satisfaction will not be selected for doing so (e.g., the desire to smoke or to kill one's children). In contrast, teleological theories that are combinatorial have no special problem with novel desires, desires that cannot contribute to bringing about their own satisfaction conditions or desires that have satisfaction conditions that do not enhance fitness, as long as their constitutive concepts have appropriate selection histories or are somehow built up from simpler concepts that have appropriate selection histories.

Papineau can respond by agreeing that some concessions to a combinatorial semantics have to be made. Once some desires and beliefs have content, the concepts involved acquire content from their role in these and they can be used to produce further novel, or self-destructive or causally impotent desires. However, it needs to be shown that such a concession is not ad hoc. The problem is to justify the claim that the desire to blow up a plane with a shoe explosive is combinatorial, whereas the belief that there is food in the fridge is not.

Here is a selection of his papers available online through his personal website.

Forthcoming

"Choking and the Yips" Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences forthcoming
"Sensory Experience and Representational Properties" Procedings of the Aristotelian Society forthcoming
"A Priori Philosophical Intuitions: Analytic or Synthetic?" in E Fischer and J Collins eds Philosophical Insights forthcoming
"Recanati On Mental Files" Disputatio forthcoming
"Can We Really See a Million Colours?" in P Coates (ed) Phenomenal Qualities forthcoming

2010-13

“What Is Wrong With Strong Necessities?” (with Philip Goff) Philosophical Studies 2013
"In The Zone" in A O'Hear (ed) Philosophy of Sport 2013
"The Poverty of Conceptual Analysis" in M Haug (ed) Philosophical Methodology 2013 (this is a revised version of "The Poverty of Analysis" 2009)
"Causation is Macroscopic but not Irreducible" in S Gibb and E Lowe (eds) The Ontology of Mental Causation 2013
"There Are No Norms of Belief" in T Chan (ed) The Aim of Belief 2013
"Phenomenal Concepts and the Private Language Argument" American Philosophical Quarterly 2011
"Realism, Ramsey Sentences and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction" Studies in History and Philosophy of Science  2011
"The Philosophical Insignificance of A Priori Knowledge" in M Shaffer and M Veber (eds) New Essays on the A Priori 2011
"What Exactly is the Explanatory Gap?" Philosophia 2010
"A Fair Deal for Everettians" in J Barrett, A Kent, S Saunders, and D Wallace (eds) Many Worlds? 2010
"Can any Sciences be Special?" in C Macdonald and G Macdonald (eds) Emergence in Mind 2010

Shorter Pieces Online

"Interview" in 3:AM Magazine 2013
"Can We be Harmed After We are Dead?" Journal of the Evaluation of Clinical Practice 2013
"What is X-Phi Good For?" The Philosophers' Magazine April 2010
“Five Philosophy of Science Answers” R. Rosenberger (ed) Philosophy of Science: Five Questions 2010
"Top Universities: Only the Rich Need Apply" The Times 13 August 2009
“The Causal Closure of the Physical and Naturalism” B. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann and S. Walter (eds) Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Mind 2009
“Reply to Lewis: Metaphysics versus Epistemology” (withVictor Durà-Vilà) Analysis 2009
"Explanatory Gaps and Dualist Intuitions" in L. Weiskrantz and M. Davies (eds) Frontiers of Consciousness 2008
 “Five Philosophy of Social Science Answers” in D. Rios and C. Schmidt-Petri (eds) Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Five Questions 2008
“A Thirder and an Everettian: Reply to Lewis’s ‘Quantum Sleeping Beauty" (with Victor Durà-Vilà) Analysis 2008
“Naturalism” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2007
“Three Scenes and a Moral: My Philosophical Development” The Philosopher’s Magazine 2007
"Review article of Gary Marcus's The Birth of the Mind" (with Matteo Mameli)  Biology and Philosophy 2006
“The Tyranny of Common Sense” The Philosopher’s Magazine 2006
“Naturalist Theories of Meaning” E. Lepore and B. Smith (eds) Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language 2006
"Reply to Robert Kirk's and Andrew Melnyk's comments on my Thinking about Consciousness" SWIF Online Philosophy Forum 2003

Wow, that is a LOT of information.

Enjoy!

Mind the brain

Sunday 8 June 2014

Listen now
Download audio


Consciousness in a material world: Putting the mind back into the brain (Don Farrall/Getty Images)
Neuroscience might have banished dualist notions of mind and body but it seems that M. Descartes’ 350 year-old hunch will not go away. What hasn’t helped is the log-jam of schemes trying to explain the dreaded ‘c’ word. The race is on to build a brain, but the deeper neuroscientists dig into the soggy grey matter the more elusive consciousness becomes. It needn’t be according to leading philosopher of mind David Papineau. If only we could accept some deceptively simple advice.

Guests 

Daivd Papineau - Professor of Philosophy of Science, King's College London

In this new opinion article from Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science, Marks and Mulvenna examine the definition of synesthesia and six types of cross-modal experiences that may fit the definition. The six they examine are cross-modal correspondence, cross-modal imagery, sensory (cross-modal) autobiographical memory, empathic perception, hallucination, and the Doppler illusion.

They ask if any or all of the six constitute forms of synesthesia? According to their analysis, he answer depends on the framework for characterizing synesthesia. From there they identify three frameworks that differ in how they characterize these phenomena relative to prototypical forms of synesthesia


Full Citation: 
Marks LE and Mulvenna CM. (2013, Sep 26). Synesthesia, at and near its borders. Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science; 4:651. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00651

Synesthesia, at and near its borders

Lawrence E. Marks [1,2] and Catherine M. Mulvenna [3]

1. John B. Pierce Laboratory, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA
2. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
3. Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA

Introduction

In synesthesia, experiences in one domain evoke additional experiences in another, as when musical notes or letters of the alphabet evoke colors. Both the domains and their pairings are diverse. Indeed, Day's (2013) recently tabulated 60 types of synesthesia, each referring to a different combination of inducing and induced domains. The domains conjoined through synesthesia may belong to different sense modalities, as in music-color synesthesia, but may also belong to the same modality: In grapheme-color synesthesia, seeing printed letters or numbers evokes color experiences.

In music-color and grapheme-color synesthesia, the inducing stimuli are perceptual, reflecting culture-specific categories (notes of the Western musical scale, letters of the alphabet) learned by synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike. Synesthesia may be triggered not only by sounds, tastes, smells, and pains, but also by more complex signals: words(e.g., Simner, 2007), emotional states (e.g., Ward, 2004), and even personalities (e.g., Novich et al., 2011). Analogously, the domains of synesthetic responses too can range widely. The composer Rimsky-Korsakoff “saw” the key of D-major as golden (Myers, 1914), while a grapheme-personification synesthete reported, “Ts are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures” (Calkins, 1893; p. 454). Other phenomena, however, such as cross-modally evoked images or memories, are not typically considered examples of synesthesia.

In this article, we briefly describe half a dozen illustrative cases that border on traditional forms of synesthesia: cross-modal correspondence, cross-modal imagery, sensory (cross-modal) autobiographical memory, empathic perception, hallucination, and the Doppler illusion. Do any or all of the six constitute forms of synesthesia? The answer depends, we suggest, on the framework for characterizing synesthesia. Consequently, after describing the six phenomena, we sketch three frameworks that differ in how they characterize these phenomena relative to prototypical forms of synesthesia. Several investigators, taking different perspectives and coming to different conclusions, have already considered possible relations to synesthesia in three of the six: cross-modal correspondence (Martino and Marks, 2001; Deroy and Spence, 2013); cross-modal imagery (Craver-Lemley and Reeves, 2013; Spence and Deroy, 2013); and empathic perception (Fitzgibbon et al., 2010; Rothen and Meier, 2013).

Six at the Borders: Synesthesia's Far and Near Kin?

Cross-Modal Correspondence

Cross-modal correspondences pervade not only several forms of traditional synesthesia but also, importantly, the experiences of individuals typically deemed non-synesthetic (Marks, 1975, 1978; Spence, 2011). Even non-synesthetes perceive high-pitched vs. low-pitched sounds to resemble bright vs. dark colors—the resemblances evident in various tasks of cross-modal comparison (Marks, 1975; Ward et al., 2006). Where music-color synesthetes see brighter colors in high-pitched notes (e.g., “gold, yellow and white moving … like a rippling stream”: Mulvenna and Walsh, 2005; p. 399), people lacking the induced qualia of synesthesia nevertheless recognize cross-modal similarities.

Cross-modal correspondences often reflect alignments between bipolar dimensions, such as higher pitch being associated with greater lightness, greater brightness, higher vertical location, and smaller size (e.g., Karwoski et al., 1942; Wicker, 1968; Marks, 1974, 1989; Ward et al., 2006). Several auditory-visual correspondences reveal themselves in young children (Marks et al., 1987; Mondloch and Maurer, 2004) and infants (Lewkowicz and Turkewitz, 1980; Walker et al., 2010; Haryu and Kajikawa, 2012), as well as in denizens of disparate cultures: Members of a remote, semi-nomadic, preliterate desert-tribe in southern Africa, having virtually no contact with Western culture, nevertheless overwhelmingly matched lighter gray colors to higher-pitched tones—thereby revealing pitch-lightness correspondence (Mulvenna, 2012).

The tendency for non-synesthetes to perceive similarities between experiences in different domains, despite the absence of secondary qualia, has been called “synesthetic thinking” (Karwoski et al., 1942) and “weak synesthesia” (Martino and Marks, 2001), consistent with the notion that cross-modal correspondence reflects general perceptual and cognitive processes. Further, by capitalizing on cross-modal correspondences, synesthesia too presumably capitalizes on these general processes of perception and cognition (e.g., Karwoski et al., 1942; Marks, 1978; Ward et al., 2006).

Cross-Modal Imagery

Compared to cross-modal correspondence, which can lack induced qualia, cross-modal imagery is nearer, phenomenologicaly, to prototypical synesthesia. In cross-modal imagery, as in synesthesia, stimulation in one modality may arouse mental images in another, although cross-modal imagery exhibits greater voluntary control (e.g., Karwoski and Odbert, 1938). Synesthetic responses commonly arise automatically, without requiring effort and being under relatively little control (e.g., Mattingley et al., 2001). By comparison, some non-synesthetes can voluntarily conjure up images, for example, imagining colors while listening to music (Karwoski et al., 1942). In some instances, there may be an especially intimate connection between visual imagery and prototypical sound-color synesthesia. Karwoski and Odbert (1938) inferred that a small subset of their subjects experienced visual imagery that could be modulated by music—a phenomenon that seems more automatic (less voluntary) than typical visual imagery, albeit less automatic (more voluntary) than synesthesia. Perhaps music-modulated imagery bears an especially close connection to traditional music-color synesthesia.

Sensory Autobiographical Memory (Proust Phenomenon)

(Marcel Proust 1922) famously described the floods of detailed, sensory memories from childhood evoked by tasting a tea-soaked madeleine. Sensory, autobiographical memory of this sort has been dubbed the “Proust phenomenon” in honor of the eponymous author. In the Proust phenomenon, odors or flavors in particular evoke strong sensory-based memories of associated events experienced in childhood (Chu and Downes, 2000). Proustian memory resembles traditional synesthesia, but also differs from it—resembling synesthesia in the automatic manner in which sensory experiences evoke memory images, but differing in the episodic character of the memories. In this regard, the sensory qualia of traditional synesthesia seem more “semantic” than “episodic.”

Empathic Perception: Pain, Touch, Couvade Syndrome

In several respects, empathetic perception strongly resembles synesthesia. In empathic pain, seeing or hearing evidence of another person's pain or discomfort produces analogous pain or discomfort (e.g., Jackson et al., 2005). Similarly, seeing another person being touched may produce an analogous tactile sensation—often called “mirror touch” (e.g., Banissy and Ward, 2007). Although the inducing stimuli come from another modality—typically, vision or hearing—the mechanisms underlying empathic perception presumably rely on an underlying within-domain equivalence: where implicitly-recognized sensations evoke sensory experiences of the same or similar kind, perhaps through merging constructs of “self” and “other.”

Possibly related to empathic pain is the couvade syndrome, which refers to a set of empathic symptoms (such as nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain) reported by the partners of pregnant women. The couvade syndrome appears to be fairly common, having a reported prevalence of about 22% (Lipkin and Lamb, 1982), roughly five times that of traditional synesthesia (Simner et al., 2006).

A feature that distinguishes empathic perception from traditional forms of synesthesia is the very characteristic that makes empathy empathic—the intrinsic equivalence between the emotional qualities of the inducing and induced experiences. In traditional forms of synesthesia, however, as when sound evokes visual color or shape, the inducing and induced sensations not only reflect different domains but are also usually related more abstractly, even “metaphorically” (Rothen and Meier, 2013).

Hallucination

A hallucination is a “percept-like experience which (a) occurs in the absence of appropriate stimulus, (b) has the full force or impact of the corresponding (real) perception, and (c) is not amenable to direct and voluntary control by the experiencer” (Slade and Bentall, 1988; p. 23). Several of these attributes also characterize synesthesia. Hallucinations may involve any of the senses (Ohayon, 2000) and are easily distinguished as “perceptions not confirmed by others” (Ohayon, 2000; p. 154). Some types of hallucinations, though not all, may fall near the borders of synesthesia. Thus, synesthetic experiences commonly include colors and shapes (Day, 2013). Analogously, “simple hallucinations,” often triggered by migraines or hallucinogens (Ermentrout and Cowan, 1979), commonly include simple recurring shapes and patterns, or ‘form constants (Klüver, 1966), which apparently reflect patterns of neural activation in visual cortex (Ermentrout and Cowan, 1979).

No longer considered explicitly pathological, hallucinations are now generally treated as independent perceptual phenomena (Romme and Escher, 1989; see Strauss, 1969). Auditory verbal hallucinations (hearing voices), for instance, occur in about 13% of adults in the general population (Beavan et al., 2011), and their presence does not correlate significantly with psychopathology (Johns et al., 2002; Sommer et al., 2010). Although the strongest predictor of psychopathology in hallucinations is distress over their content or possible basis (Romme and Escher, 1989; Chadwick and Birchwood, 1994; Beavan et al., 2011), distress is rarely associated with synesthetic experience.

The Doppler Illusion

Day's (2013) table listing 60 types of synesthesia includes only one type that is explicitly intra-modal, namely, grapheme-color synesthesia. We note here another phenomenon in which sensory experiences in one domain induce experiences in the same modality, the “Doppler illusion,” reported by Neuhoff and McBeath (1996): When a tone increases continuously in intensity over time (as though a sound-emitting source were approaching at constant velocity) but maintains a constant sound frequency, observers nevertheless report hearing the tone's pitch to increase as loudness increases. Neuhoff and McBeath dubbed the illusory increase in pitch the “Doppler illusion” because a sound source approaching at constant velocity will produce, at the observer's location, an elevated, albeit constant, sound frequency (the physical Doppler effect). But might we not also call the Doppler illusion a case of intra-modal (loudness-pitch) synesthesia?

Synesthesia: Continuous, Discrete, Pluralistic?

If, as the term implies, synesthesia is first and foremost a “conjoining of experiences,” then one might construe several or perhaps all six of our cases as examples of synesthesia. If, on the other hand, synesthesia is defined more narrowly, for example, by requiring it to include qualia and to arise automatically and consistently, then fewer cases would make the cut. Recently, the first author outlined three theoretical frameworks—monism, dualism, and pluralism—that, in different ways, characterize how synesthesia could relate to borderline perceptual and conceptual phenomena like the six just described (Marks, 2011, 2012).

Synesthetic monism refers to the notion that synesthesia may appropriately be considered a spectrum or continuum. Using this framework, traditional forms of synesthesia, such as music-color and grapheme-color, serve as prototypes, residing at the high end of the continuum, with weaker forms, such as cross-modal correspondence, residing toward the low end. In the present examples, music-modulated imagery, hallucinations, empathic perceptions, Proustian evoked memories, and the Doppler illusion might lie at various loci between the ends of the synesthetic spectrum—although the differences amongst them suggest that the hypothesized spectrum is multidimensional.

The other two frameworks both distinguish sharply between synesthesia and non-synesthetic forms of perception and conception. Dualism posits a simple dichotomy between the two categories, with synesthesia incorporating both traditional forms (e.g., sound-color, grapheme-color, word-flavor, taste-shape) and others (e.g., grapheme-personification, ordinal sequence-spatial sequence), and non-synesthesia incorporating cross-modal correspondence, cross-modal imagery, and hallucination. How to categorize other borderline examples, such as empathic perception, Proustian memory, and the Doppler illusion, however, is less clear.

Like dualism, the third framework, pluralism, explicitly distinguishes synesthetic from non-synesthetic experiences, but rests on the additional assumption that synesthesia is well characterized as (appropriating James's, 1890; p. 224, expression) “a teeming multiplicity.” Like monism, synesthetic pluralism recognizes that some forms of synesthesia, such as music-color, are better exemplars than are others, such as empathic perception and the Doppler illusion. In the pluralistic view, however, the broad category of synesthesia itself contains a cornucopia of distinct sub-categories, lacking common denominators but perhaps linked one to another along the lines suggested by (Wittgenstein's 1953) notion of family resemblance.

Critical, in our view, to choosing amongst frameworks is characterizing the role of phenomenal experience in defining synesthesia; many investigators judge this role to be significant (see, e.g., the exchange among Cohen Kadosh and Terhune, 2012; Eagleman, 2012; Simner, 2012a, b). Monism in particular relies substantially on the notion that phenomenal experience plays a central, and ineluctable, role in characterizing synesthesia. Alternatively, jettisoning phenomenology may be conducive to pluralistic frameworks that rely on mechanism-based distinctions amongst multiple forms of synesthesia. And jettisoning phenomenology may be especially conducive to dualistic frameworks that rely on a mechanism-based distinction between synesthesia and borderline phenomena—perhaps akin to distinguishing mechanistically between rhinovirus-induced sniffles and pollen-induced seasonal nasal allergies.

But we ask, Are phenomenal experiences (qualia) analogous to sneezes?

References available at the Frontiers site

Neuropsychologist Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy Dismantles Deepak Chopra's Latest Argument for Dualism

More and more, Deepak Chopra is venturing into realms where he is in waaay over his head - and actual scientists are kicking his New Age arse around the internets. When Chopra and Jean Houston went up against Michael Shermer and Sam Harris on ABC's Nightline Faceoff (Does God Have a Future?) it was a bloodbath.

This morning, Chopra published an article at Huffington Post arguing for a dualist understanding of mind and brain and a neuropsychologist dismantled his argument with ease.

First up, the whole Chopra article.

Good News: You Are Not Your Brain

Posted: 03/27/2012

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, and Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy, Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School Director, Genetics and Aging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

Like a personal computer, science needs a recycle bin for ideas that didn't work out as planned. In this bin would go commuter trains riding on frictionless rails using superconductivity, along with interferon, the last AIDS vaccine, and most genetic therapies. These failed promises have two things in common: They looked like the wave of the future but then reality proved too complex to fit the simple model that was being offered.

The next thing to go into the recycle bin might be the brain. We are living in a golden age of brain research, thanks largely to vast improvements in brain scans. Now that functional MRIs can give snapshots of the brain in real time, researchers can see specific areas of the brain light up, indicating increased activity. On the other hand, dark spots in the brain indicate minimal activity or none at all. Thus, we arrive at those familiar maps that compare a normal brain with one that has deviated from the norm. This is obviously a great boon where disease is concerned. Doctors can see precisely where epilepsy or Parkinsonism or a brain tumor has created damage, and with this knowledge new drugs and more precise surgery can target the problem.

But then overreach crept in. We are shown brain scans of repeat felons with pointers to the defective areas of their brains. The same holds for Buddhist monks, only in their case, brain activity is heightened and improved, especially in the prefrontal lobes associated with compassion. By now there is no condition, good or bad, that hasn't been linked to a brain pattern that either "proves" that there is a link between the brain and a certain behavior or exhibits the "cause" of a certain trait. The whole assumption, shared by 99 percent of neuroscientists, is that we are our brains.

In this scheme, the brain is in charge, having evolved to control certain fixed behaviors. Why do men see other men as rivals for a desirable woman? Why do people seek God? Why does snacking in front of the TV become a habit? We are flooded with articles and books reinforcing the same assumption: The brain is using you, not the other way around. Yet it's clear that a faulty premise is leading to gross overreach.

The flaws in current reasoning can be summarized with devastating force:

1. Brain activity isn't the same as thinking, feeling, or seeing.
2. No one has remotely shown how molecules acquire the qualities of the mind.
3. It is impossible to construct a theory of the mind based on material objects that somehow became conscious.
4. When the brain lights up, its activity is like a radio lighting up when music is played. It is an obvious fallacy to say that the radio composed the music. What is being viewed is only a physical correlation, not a cause.

It's a massive struggle to get neuroscientists to see these flaws. They are king of the hill right now, and so long as new discoveries are being made every day, a sense of triumph pervades the field. "Of course" we will solve everything from depression to overeating, crime to religious fanaticism, by tinkering with neurons and the kinks thrown into normal, desirable brain activity. But that's like hearing a really bad performance of "Rhapsody in Blue" and trying to turn it into a good performance by kicking the radio.

We've become excited by a flawless 2008 article published by Donald D. Hoffman, professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California Irvine. It's called "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem," and its aim is to show, using logic, philosophy, and neuroscience, that we are not our brains. We are "conscious agents" -- Hoffman's term for minds that shape reality, including the reality of the brain. Hoffman is optimistic that the thorny problem of consciousness can be solved, and science can find a testable model for the mind. But future progress depends on researchers abandoning their current premise, that the brain is the mind. We urge you to read the article in its entirety, but for us, the good news is that Hoffman's ideas show that the tide may be turning.

It is degrading to human potential when the brain uses us instead of vice versa. There is no doubt that we can become trapped by faulty wiring in the brain -- this happens in depression, addictions, and phobias, for example. Neural circuits can seemingly take control, and there is much talk of "hard wiring" by which some activity is fixed and preset by nature, such as the fight-or-flight response. But what about people who break bad habits, kick their addictions, or overcome depression? It would be absurd to say that the brain, being stuck in faulty wiring, suddenly and spontaneously fixed the wiring. What actually happens, as anyone knows who has achieved success in these areas, is that the mind takes control. Mind shapes the brain, and when you make up your mind to do something, you return to the natural state of using your brain instead of the other way around.

It's very good news that you are not your brain, because when your mind finds its true power, the result is healing, inspiration, insight, self-awareness, discovery, curiosity, and quantum leaps in personal growth. The brain is totally incapable of such things. After all, if it is a hard-wired machine, there is no room for sudden leaps and renewed inspiration. The machine simply does what it does. A depressed brain can no more heal itself than a car can suddenly decide to fly. Right now the golden age of brain research is brilliantly decoding neural circuitry, and thanks to neuroplasticity, we know that the brain's neural pathways can be changed. The marvels of brain activity grow more astonishing every day. Yet in our astonishment it would be a grave mistake, and a disservice to our humanity, to forget that the real glory of human existence is the mind, not the brain that serves it.

Deepak Chopra and Rudy Tanzi are co-authors of their forthcoming book Superbrain: New Breakthroughs for Maximizing Health, Happiness and Spiritual Well-Being by Harmony Books.

In response to this, Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, PhD & neuropsychologist, who blogs at Brain Ethics, posted a cogent rebuttal at his blog, since it was too long to serve as a comment.

Here is a part of his reply - go read the whole thing.

Mr. Chopra,

 

The level of BS in this assertion is so high that I don’t even know where to start! We now have a whole century (actually, much more, but let’s leave it at that) of evidence providing a very close link between the mind and the brain. I am utterly puzzled at how one can even make such claims as you do, and feel compelled to do some debugging of your text:

• The starter dish fallacy: The brain does not “light up” – what you see is a statistical representation of the change in signal intensity that (for fMRI scans) represent changes in oxygenated blood, which is an indirect measure of brain activation. Dark regions are still active, but not particularly for the task we have chosen to focus on (or rather, the tasks that researchers have decided to compare). This is a non-trivial distinction, because the link suggested by Chopra to a radio tuning in is simply erroneous. See more below.
• The big leap of reason is the semantic trick of saying that neuroscientists (including myself) believe that the brain is in charge, and not you… I thought Chopra just agreed that neuroscientists believed that the brain IS you? Actually, most scientists I know believe that the brain and you are indeed the same! What happens in the brain is part of you as an organism, as a person, and often as a sentient being. The activation of hypothalamic nuclei can help control hunger, thermoregulation etc.; the response of the amygdala can help you become aware of specific events; the activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex does indeed reflect quite closely how much you enjoy reading this paragraph, the taste of that chocolate you’re having (lucky you) or the music you have playing in the background.
• The great news is: this takes NOTHING away from the wonderful richness of your conscious life! But we understand so much better now HOW it is that the mysterious wet matter of the brain can even produce such magic. And the best part is…no supernatural explanations are yet needed. No need to evoke additional dimensions, pseudoscientific explanations or altogether magical mental bypasses.

Philosophy Now - Philosophy of Mind: An Overview

Philosophy Now offers a nice overview of the current Philosophy of Mind, written by Laura Weed. Essentially, it's an examination of the "hard problem," as David Chalmers calls it, of the brain/mind issue of how to account for the subjective experience of consciousness.

Here is the beginning of the paper - she goes into detail about the current variations of each of the three major models - the first shots in the battle against Cartesian Dualism - that she introduces in this section.

Philosophy of Mind: An Overview

Laura Weed takes us on a tour of the mind/brain controversy.

In the twentieth century philosophy of mind became one of the central areas of philosophy in the English-speaking world, and so it remains. Questions such as the relationship between mind and brain, the nature of consciousness, and how we perceive the world, have come to be seen as crucial in understanding the world. These days, the predominant position in philosophy of mind aims at equating mental phenomena with operations of the brain, and explaining them all in scientific terms. Sometimes this project is called ‘cognitive science’, and it carries the implicit assumption that cognition occurs in computers as well as in human and animal brains, and can be studied equally well in each of these three forms.

Before the mid-twentieth century, for a long time the dominant philosophical view of the mind was that put forward by René Descartes (1596-1650). According to Descartes, each of us consists of a material body subject to the normal laws of physics, and an immaterial mind, which is not. This dual nature gives Descartes’ theory its name: Cartesian Dualism. Although immaterial, the mind causes actions of the body, through the brain, and perceptions are fed to the mind from the body. Descartes thought this interaction between mind and body takes place in the part of the brain we call the pineal gland. However, he didn’t clarify how a completely non-physical mind could have a causal effect on the physical brain, or vice versa, and this was one of the problems that eventually led to dissatisfaction with his theory.

In the early twentieth century three strands of thought arose out of developments in psychology and philosophy which would come together to lead to Cartesian Dualism being challenged, then abandoned. These were Behaviorism, Scientific Reductionism and Vienna Circle Verificationism. I will begin with a very brief summary of each of those positions before I describe various contemporary views that have evolved from them:

Behaviorism: Behaviorists accept psychologist B.F. Skinner’s claims that mental events can be reduced to stimulus-response pairs, and that descriptions of observable behavior are the only adequate, scientific way to describe mental behavior. So, for behaviorists, all talk about mental events – images, feelings, dreams, desires, and so on – is really either a reference to a behavioral disposition or it is meaningless. Behaviorists claim that only descriptions of objectively observable behavior can be scientific. Introspection is a meaningless process that cannot yield anything, much less a ‘mind’ as a product, and all human ‘mental’ life that is worth counting as real occurs as an objectively observable form of behavior. Head-scratching is objectively observable. Incestuous desire is not; nor is universal doubt, apprehension of infinity, or Cartesian introspection. Philosophers like Carl Hempel and Gilbert Ryle shared the view that all genuine problems are scientific problems.

Verificationism was a criterion of meaning for language formulated by the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, who argued that any proposition that was not an a logical truth or which could not be tested was literally meaningless. For example, a mother’s claim that the cat will bite Jimmy if he doesn’t stop teasing her is testable, but a theologian’s claim that the Infinite Absolute is invisibly bestowing grace in the world is not.

Scientific Reductionism is the claim that explanations in terms of ordinary language, or sciences such as psychology, physiology, biology, or chemistry, are reducible to explanations at a simpler level – ultimately to explanations at the level of physics. Some (but not all) mental terms can be ‘operationalized’, or reduced to testable and measurable descriptions. Only these ones will rate as real mental events to the scientific reductionist. There will be no Cartesian or Platonic ‘mind’ left over to be something different from a body.

Read the whole article.