Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor on the neuroscience of music
MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it.
Here is the intro to Teed’s article.
Those of us who defend the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC) get criticized from two different perspectives which, to use a political metaphor, could be called radical and conservative. Because HEC was born in the cognitive science community, most of the criticism comes from epistemological conservatives i. e. from those who want to conserve the idea that the mind is best described as being in some sense identified with the brain. These critics want to be assured that there is some place where the mind stops and the world begins, and believe that the brain is the best place to draw the line. Outside the orthodox cognitive science community, however, there are readers from the radical epistemological “left,” who welcome HEC as some version of the claim that we are “one with everything”. The most articulate and cautious of these radicals is David Skrbina, who argues that if I were to follow through with my own logic, I would accept “a kind of full-blown panpsychism” (Skrbina 2006). It is possible that I could be persuaded to agree with Skrbina about this, depending on how we define our terms, and what level of reality he is willing to grant to discrete individual minds. That, however, would be a topic for another time. In this paper, I will only concern myself with those who see my position (whether approvingly or disapprovingly) as a kind of muddled monistic mysticism. These causal readers serve an important function in the debate, by providing a reductio ad absurdum argument against HEC for the Conservatives. If HEC really required us to abandon all distinctions between mind and world, it could not be the next paradigm in Cognitive Science. On the contrary, it would require us to abandon cognitive science altogether. One reason that my version of HEC sometimes receives this radical interpretation is that I believe the mind is best described as a behavioral field, rather than a single item such as a brain or a body. There is also the fact that I occasionally describe this behavioral field with somewhat evocative language that might be appealing to the radicals, such as “Consciousness could be a pattern which, like a vibration started by throwing a stone in the water, ripples through the world even though there is a biological creature at its center” (Rockwell 2005, 103). However, it is my intention to position myself in a kind of “middle way” between these radical and conservative extremes, even though my position is more radical than some other HEC theorists. For example, Andy Clark’s version of HEC does try to give fairly hard and fast criteria for identifying the mind with certain kinds of external cognitive “scaffolding”, such as the note book that aides the memory of someone with Alzheimer’s disease. (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 17). Unlike Clark, however, I am inclined to believe that drawing a single line between the self and the world outside the brain is probably even more misleading than trying to draw the line at the brain. Consequently, I think we should abandon the idea that there is a single place where the line can always be drawn. This is what makes some of my readers accuse me of rejecting “the analytic distinctions of self and world.” (McCarthy 2006), and thus embracing the radical “we are one with everything” position. This is a misinterpretation, however, because I also insist that “To say that the mind emerges from the brain-body-world nexus does not mean that there is no world, only a mind. The line between the self and the world must always be drawn somewhere . . .That is what it means to live in a world.” (Rockwell 2005, 104) I do not identify the mind with the entire brain-body-world nexus, because I believe that the line between the self and world must be drawn somewhere at any given moment. But this does not necessarily imply that there is a single place that the line can be drawn for all conscious creatures, or for a single conscious creature throughout its history. A great deal of useful scientific work can be done by drawing the line at the skull, but the books that defend HEC describe scientific work that needs to draw the line in a variety of other places. I think the best way to account for both mainstream neuroscience and this other more problematic work is to see the boundary between self and world as flexible. That is why I feel the mind is best described as a behavioral field rather than as an organ in the skull.
Everytime I hear that song, it means something else to me. It started out as a simple good-bye song…. Probably just to a girl, but I see how it could be a goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don’t know. I think it’s sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.
Jim Morrison
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never look into your eyes…again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need…of some…stranger’s hand
In a…desperate land
Lost in a Roman…wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There’s danger on the edge of town
Ride the King’s highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake…he’s old, and his skin is cold
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we’ll do the rest
The blue bus is callin’ us
The blue bus is callin’ us
Driver, where you taken’ us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door…and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother…I want to…WAAAAAA
C’mon baby,——— No “take a chance with us”
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
C’mon, yeah
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
Here is the into to Raymond and Lynne’s paper:
Any extended analysis of everyday talk reveals the presence of stretches of language that convey metaphorical meaning. Consider, as one example, the following remarkable conversation between Jo Berry, whose father, Sir Anthony Berry, was killed by a bomb in 1984, and Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb on behalf on the Irish Republican Army during their conflict with the British government. Jo Berry had asked to meet Pat Magee in order to understand more about why the bombing happened, and they first met in 1999, after Pat Magee was released from prison under a peace agreement. Extract 1 comes from the first of the conversations and shows Jo explaining why she wanted to meet Pat. She refers to moment of the bombing in line 91 and to meeting Pat in lines 103 and 104.
| 90 | Jo | …I knew, |
| 91 | …(2.0) backin the moment, | |
| 92 | wh- what I wanted to do, | |
| 93 | … was bring as much – | |
| 94 | …(2.0) something – | |
| 95 | … as much positive out of it as I could. | |
| 96 | … you know, | |
| 97 | Pat | [hmh] |
| 98 | Jo | …(1.0) [and] I – |
| 99 | and I saw very clearly. | |
| 100 | …(1.0) that the – | |
| 101 | …the end of that journey, | |
| 102 | would be, | |
| 103 | …sitting down and, | |
| 104 | …talking to the people who did it. | |
| 105 | Pat | … hmh |
| 106 | Jo | … that just camein a moment, |
| 107 | and then went away, | |
| 108 | and then – | |
| 109 | … there’s been a longlong .. 16 years of [getting to this point]. | |
| 110 | Pat | [hmh hmh] |
There are several instances of metaphorically used words and phrases in this excerpt, which we have underlined. For instance, “back in” in line 91 conveys the idea of Jo’s remembering the bombing as if she were physically moving back into a specific spatial location. The idea of being able to “bring” “something” “out of it” refers to Jo’s mental reconstructing the bombing in terms of movement from one physical location to another, but this time in the possession of an important object (i.e., a new understanding). We also see in lines 99–101 that Jo conceives this process of reconciliation, and sitting down to talk with Pat, as the endpoint of a physical journey along some path where the psychological goal is understood as a destination (i.e., endpoint) on the path.
Why do speakers, like Jo, talk in these metaphorical ways, and what motivates them to utter the particular words they do to achieve different communicative effects? Is the use of metaphoric words and phrases idiosyncratic or can it be explained in some principled manner? The vast interdisciplinary research on metaphor use and understanding suggests that there are multiple reasons for why people speak metaphorically. Quite roughly, the possible reasons for speaking metaphorically refer to bodily, cognitive, linguistic, social, and cultural variables. For instance, people may employ certain metaphoric words and phrases because they typically think about particular, usually abstract, domains in metaphoric terms (cognitive), because there is no way to express specific meanings in a language without using metaphor (linguistic), because they wish to impress or persuade another person by the words used (social), and/or because their cultural beliefs and norms are conventionally encoded in specific metaphorical themes (cultural). Much of the contemporary scholarship in metaphor studies debates these, and other, possible reasons for why people use metaphorical language and how they interpret metaphors in discourse. This has led to a vast complex of alternative methods, empirical findings, and theories of metaphor use, with individual metaphor scholars exhibiting the strong tendency to focus on certain aspects of metaphor and adopt one perspective on metaphor use (e.g., cognitive or linguistic) while downplaying or ignoring others (e.g., social or cultural).
We believe that all these varying perspectives on metaphor have the potential to offer important insights into the use and understanding of metaphor in discourse. But the vast number of possible factors involved in metaphor use, and their complex interactions, makes it difficult to adjudicate between competing theories. Our aim is in this article is to suggest a different way of looking at metaphor by embracing a dynamical systems approach that better captures the total ecology of human behavior, and more specifically metaphor performance. The key to this idea is the recognition that metaphor performance is shaped by discourse processes that operate in a continual dynamic interaction between individual cognition and the social and physical environment. Dynamical approaches to human action attempt to describe how the body’s continuous interactions with the world, including other people, provide for coordinated patterns of adaptive behavior. Simple and complex behaviors are higher-order products of self-organization processes that emerge from both intra and interpersonal interactions. We argue that the complexities of metaphoric language use (i.e., how people coordinate with each other through metaphor) emerge from self-organizational processes that operate along a range of different time-scales, from the millisecond to the evolutionary, and across a range of scales of social group size, from the individual and dyad to the speech community. The phenomena of metaphor performance are, we suggest, best studied in terms of continuously dynamic discourse processes. This framework for studying metaphor recasts some traditional questions about metaphor use and understanding and suggests the need for a closer link in characterizing social and cognitive processes in human behavior.
I may have some valuable insights which may benefit my employer. Perhaps the experience can give my writing a new dimension. Being actively engaged in the system which I criticize will be an interesting irony in itself (p. 46).
Now available.
Photos from the conference: an unqualified success.
The only superstar of the 60s and 70s who never rested on his laurels and continues to explore his musical roots with authenticity and integrity, from blues to rock n’ roll, to country to gospel. He understands where the source is – NOLA, the delta from which all styles emanated and flowed back again. The interesting stuff is happening at that porous sweet spot where all different styles converge where one is never sure of the provenance. The Band never lost that knack; the Stones once were able to do that a long time ago . . .
3:AM Magazine: Dennett plugging his latest. See also Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments.
An extract from Lynne Rudder Baker’s paper:
Cognitive scientists have become increasingly enamored of the idea of extended minds. The extended-mind thesis (EM) is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain or even within the boundaries of the skin. EM is the modal claim that it is possible that the mind is not bound by skull or skin. EM is quite radical: A mind is a collection of processes
that easily extends to tools, programs, other minds, and language. Cognitive states may have all sorts of components—neural, bodily, environmental. The heart of the extended-mind thesis is that we biological creatures can “couple” with nonbiological entities or features of our environment and thereby expand the entities that we are. Some versions do away with enduring agents altogether; “extended selves” (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 18) are relatively transitory couplings of biological organisms and external resources. There is a huge and complex literature on the idea of an extended mind, both pro and con. I focus here on some of Andy Clark’s work, especially the article he wrote with David Chalmers in 1998, “The Extended Mind.”
Here is my plan for the article. First, I show how EM can be seen as an extension of traditional views of mind. Then, after voicing a few qualms about EM, I reject it in favor of a more modest hypothesis that recognizes enduring subjects of experience and agents with integrated bodies. Nonetheless, my modest hypothesis allows subpersonal states to have nonbiological parts that play essential roles in cognitive processing. I present empirical warrant for this hypothesis and show how it leaves room for science and religion to coexist.
FROM TRADITIONAL VIEWS TO THE EXTENDED MIND
One way to understand EM is to start with a traditional picture of mental states and then see how EM revises it. Here is one traditional picture: Many mental states have content—states of desire are satisfied or not, intentions are fulfilled or not, beliefs are true or false. Typically, contents are given by the that-clauses that follow psychological and linguistic verbs such as thinks, believes, desires, intends, says. Thoughts and other contentful states are said to have two kinds of properties: properties determined by the content and properties of the vehicles that carry content. (The distinction brings to mind Descartes’ distinction between representative, or objective, reality and formal reality.)
What makes a thought the very thought that it is is its content. That is, states that have content are individuated by their contents. The thought that snow is white differs from the thought that grass is green in virtue of the difference between snow’s being white and grass’s being green. The contents of thoughts (and other mental states)—that snow is white or that grass is green—are carried by vehicles, traditionally thought of as neural states. Neural states are internal states, “in the head.” Call this view vehicleinternalism.
Even if, as traditionally supposed, vehicles are internal to the thinker, the contents of thoughts may be determined by phenomena outside the thinker (or so many think). The view that the contents of our thoughts— and, hence, the identity of which thoughts we can have—are determined by features of the environment is called content-externalism. To take a well-worn example, Pam, who lives on Earth where there is H2O (water), may have the thought that water is wet. Now suppose that there is another world in which there is an abundant liquid that looks like water but is not water because it has a different chemical composition. Suppose also that people in that waterless world drink, brush their teeth with, and swim in the water look-alike. The inhabitants speak a language similar to English, but when they utter what sounds like “water” in English, they are not speaking of water but of the other stuff, the water look-alike. In that world, where there is no water (no H2O), a molecular duplicate of Pam—call her Cam—could not have the thought that water is wet. The duplicate’s thought can be reported in English as the thought that twater (the stuff in the other world) is wet, but it cannot be reported as the thought that water is wet. Cam’s thoughts that correspond to Pam’s water-thoughts are twater-thoughts. Cam cannot have any water-thoughts. Because Pam and Cam are molecular duplicates, their brain states are of identical types. But if content-externalism is true, their thoughts are not of identical types.
Although content-externalism is not altogether uncontroversial, it is well-entrenched enough to say that a version of the traditional view combines vehicle-internalism and content-externalism. We may see EM as an extension of the externalism of contents to an externalism of vehicles. With the combination of vehicle-internalism and content-externalism in the background, EM treats vehicles in a way analogous to the way that the (externalist) traditional view treats content. EM is a kind of extreme externalism in that not only the determinants of content but also the vehicles may be located outside the organism. Clark, an early proponent of EM, characterizes EM as “the view that the material vehicles of cognition can be spread out across brain, body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself ” (2005, 1). EM in effect extends content-externalism to vehicle-externalism (Hurley 1998). Until recently, vehicles were thought to be only brain states (vehicle-internalism). According to vehicle-externalism, however, not only is the content determinable by features of the environment, but the vehicle also may be spread out into the environment. Vehicle-externalism supposes that cognitive processes may have vehicles that include aspects of the environment.
For example, beliefs are normally embedded in memory, but they need not be. Consider Otto, who is impaired in such a way that he cannot form new memories. He writes down what he wants to remember in a notebook that he always carries. Suppose that Otto is on Fifth Avenue in New York City and is looking for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He knows that he cannot simply search his memory for the location of MoMA, so he automatically reaches for his trusty notebook and looks up the address: 53rd Street. The information in the notebook—just like the information stored in brain-based memory—“is reliably there when needed, available to consciousness and available to guide action, in just the way that we expect a belief to be” (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 13). Viewed from the lens of EM, the skin is seen as an artificial boundary.
In one of the most important early articles on EM, Clark and Chalmers state that “when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and skin. What makes some information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the relevant role can be played only from inside the body.” For some of Otto’s mental states—his extended beliefs—Otto and his notebook are coupled; they form a cognitive system, all components of which are causally active. The “relevant parts of the world are in the loop, not dangling at the other end of a long causal chain” (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 9). Hence, extended cognition is sometimes called “active externalism” (p. 8).
As Clark puts it later, “taken as a single, integrated system, Otto-andthe- notebook exhibit enough of the central features and dynamics of a normal agent having (amongst others) the dispositional belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street to warrant treating him as such.” He asks rhetorically, “If an inner mechanism with this functionality [passive aspects of memory] would intuitively count as cognitive, then (skin-based prejudices aside) why not an external one?” (Clark 2005, 7) The point of EM is that neither the organic brain nor the skin sets a boundary on the vehicles of cognition. Features of the environment may or may not be components of the vehicle.
In general, tools extend cognition. A tool, “even when temporarily in use, is rapidly assimilated into the brain’s body maps and is treated (temporarily) just like a somewhat less sensitive part of the body.” For example, the receptive visual field of a macaque using a rake for as little as thirty seconds becomes elongated as if the rake were part of the arm (Clark 2005, 8). Use of a tool, even temporarily, changes neural maps. Neural plasticity “makes it possible for new equipment to be factored deep into both our cognitive and physical problem-solving routines” (p. 9). So, we become physical and cognitive hybrids—part biological and part artifactual.
Not only is there physically extended cognition, there is socially extended cognition as well. As many have observed, their spouses are their external memory devices. My husband serves as part of a vehicle for many of my memories. For such memories (as well as in other ways), a proponent of EM may say that my husband and I are coupled. Coupling between agents is effected by language, among other things. Language “is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot” (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 18).
Clark emphasizes that hybridization (Otto-and-his-notebook) is quite normal. We routinely use “transparent technologies” such as pencils for calculating sums. We are just shifting combinations of biological and nonbiological elements.
manwithoutqualities 