Neuroscience and Experience – History

Part 1

Concepts of mind and self in history
Reading: “Search for mind”, 2003, 11-26

Plato/Aristotle

Plato; Memory was like wax

Aristotle; the soul is what holds impressions
together. But what holds the soul together?
(The homunculus/binding problem)

Aristotle; the soul is the form of the body

Aquinas (1.5 millennia later): “man” is rational
by his soul

Part 2

The Catholic Church is ultimately oriented in a
“monist” rather than “dualist” direction, and
toward resurrection, not life after death

Descartes (see “Cartesian panic”)

Looked for ineluctable grounds for knowledge,
ultimately in his own consciousness

Logical errors could be made in everything,
including geometry. Reason was therefore
suspect

An evil disincarnate spirit could deceive him of
everything

Part 3

Descartes continued

Eventually, the only certainty is that d. could
construe himself to be something: “I (am) think
(ing), therefore I am”

Perhaps to placate the Church authorities, who
ironically are officially Aristotelians, Descartes
placed the soul outside res extensa

Sense impressions are served up to and
processed by a “Homunculus” which interacts
with the brain in the pineal gland.

Part 4

Certain tenets of cognitive science follow;
methodological solipsism, representationalism,
downplay of emotion and social factors.

A neo – Cartesian; John Eccles

“Self-conscious mind” , composed of
“psychons”, interacts with the brain through
“probability fields”

The problem of infinite regress of the
homunculus not addressed.

Nor are such issues as grounding of symbols,
and so on

Part 5

British empiricism

Locke versus Leibniz; does there exists a quasi- mathematical relationship between the “shape” of brain states and the felt experience (or “qualia”)?

Leibniz believed yes, Locke no.

Reformulated in the 1990’s as the “?hard”
problem

Part 6

In this case, Scottish

If we separate self from its contents, self seems
to disappear. Similarly, if we separate ourselves
into subject and object (nan yar), the regress is
infinite.

Berkeley’s “soul” is not introspectively available,
and does not exist

Mind is a flux of ideas and sensations
succeeding each other by similarity, contiguity,
and contrast.

The self is no more than a bundle of sensations

Part 7

In this case, Scottish

If we separate self from its contents, self seems
to disappear. Similarly, if we separate ourselves
into subject and object (nan yar), the regress is
infinite.

Berkeley’s “soul” is not introspectively available,
and does not exist

Mind is a flux of ideas and sensations
succeeding each other by similarity, contiguity,
and contrast.

The self is no more than a bundle of sensations

Part 8

Renaissance neuroscience

The certainty with which theories are asserted
is striking

Burton: the “Common sense” that judges
sensations is in the forebrain. Memory is at the
back of the brain, and fantasy in the middle

Dreams occur by vapors from the stomach
blocking the nerves

Part 9

Descartes; Tuileries robots

Le Cat (and other early moderns); the shape of
the cochlea determines which chords will be
heard as transcendent.

But are we really any wiser?

Part 10

Emphasised the unity of consciousness contra Hume

There are categories like quantity, and schemas
like number, that give links from subject to
object

Moderns; Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Chalmers,
Dennett, and so on