Dreamless Sleep, Embodied Cognition, and Consciousness: The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

cognitive science

A terrific talk (see abstract below) by Evan Thompson as a curtain raiser to his forthcoming book from Columbia University Press entitled Waking, Dreaming, Being: New Light on the Self and Consciousness from Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. In the meantime check out the expansive review of his Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind to be found in JMB.

One of the issues debated between the Advaita Vedānta and Nyāya schools in classical Indian philosophy is whether consciousness is present in dreamless sleep. Advaita Vedānta argues that the waking report “I slept well” is a memory report and hence requires previous experience, whereas Nyāya argues that the report expresses a retrospective inference. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning Advaita Vedānta uses to try to rebut the Nyāya view, calls into question the standard neuroscience way of operationally defining consciousness as that which disappears in dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or dream. The Indian debate also offers new resources for contemporary philosophical concern with the relationship between phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience) and access consciousness (accessibility to working memory and verbal report). At the same time, findings from cognitive neuroscience have important implications for the Indian debates about cognition during sleep, as well as for Indian and Western philosophical discussions of the nature of the self and its relationship to the body. Finally, considerations about sleep drawn from Advaita Vedānta, as well as the Yoga school and Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, suggest new experimental questions and protocols for the cognitive neuroscience of sleep and consciousness.

Jane Jacobs and New Orleans

urban studies

Jane Jacobs is a name us spontaneous order types like to invoke. Here she is referenced in connection with the new documentary by Jonathan Demme entitled  ‘I’m Carolyn Parker’, the protagonist being:

resident of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and the subject of Jonathan Demme’s marvelous new documentary, as an indispensable “public character.” With her stubborn attachment to place, her vigilant, sympathetic “eyes on the street” and her unsentimental civic-mindedness, Ms. Parker is the exactly the kind of person Jacobs identified as crucial to the life of great American cities.

Hayek, Connectionism, and Scientific Naturalism

hayek

Here’s is an extract from Joshua Rust’s prize-winning essay from this volume.

The above criticisms look at The Sensory Order through the lens of nearly 60 years of work in the philosophy of mind. And it must be emphasized that Hayek’s text appears remarkably neoteric, anticipating both questions and answers in the field that would come to be known as cognitive science. However, I want to conclude on a cautionary note.

However, exegetically fruitful it may be to compare The Sensory Order to contemporary theories of mind, I wish to claim that such comparisons ultimately misconstrue the nature of Hayek’s project. In the end, Hayek’s question is importantly different from Searle’s or Fodor’s; Hayek’s ontological and epistemological presuppositions are not those of most contemporary theorists of mind.

In the previous section, I had assumed that both Searle and Hayek agree that there is a really-real physical order of atomic and subatomic facts. And we have assumed that Searle and Hayek share the task of reconciling the mental order with that ontologically basic physical order. Indeed, according to Searle (2010, p. 4), all ‘‘persistent philosophical questions’’ have the same characteristic structure: How is it possible in a universe consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force that there can be such things as consciousness, intentionality, free will, language, society, ethics, aesthetics, and political obligations? Though many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers do not address it directly, I believe that this is the single overriding question in contemporary philosophy.

On Searle’s view, philosophy’s aim is to reconcile the manifest image with the scientific image (Sellars, 1962) in the sense that consciousness, free will, language, and so on must be explained in terms of or shown to be consistent with the real, observer-independent world of brute facts. And there are passages in The Sensory Order, which suggest that Hayek’s question is not that different from Searle’s, even if the answer is. For example Hayek says, ‘‘A precise statement of the problem raised by the existence of sensory qualities must start from the fact that the progress of the physical sciences has all but eliminated these qualities from our scientific picture of the external world’’ (1.6). It is easy, then, to assume that, like Searle, Hayek is trying to locate mental qualities within the world as construed by our scientific picture.

But, appearances aside, Searle’s and Hayek’s questions are in fact quite different.

Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi

The Bright Mississippi

The smooth, classy but and never bland maestro behind so many others here on top form and without (for the most part) his own dulcet vocals – only a genius can always squeeze something new from other geniuses. My personal favourites – the tracks that really swing! Get the album The Bright Mississippi (the track listing not in the order as I’ve posted them).

Herbert Simon as Behavioral Economist

Herbert Simon

Here is a draft of a co-authored entry for Real World Decision Making: An Encyclopedia of Behavioral Economics. Morris Altman, editor. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Aaron Neville’s My True Story

Aaron Neville

Coming very soon – Neville’s affectionate revisiting of the doo-wop music he grew up with. If you appreciate doo-wop then you’ll love Zappa’s self-penned tribute to doo-wop though of course it being Zappa it has a bit of gentle naughtiness. 

76817baa88cb00a821b27162680cd6acAaron, Don and Keef, the latter turned me onto the Neville Brothers in ’81. Read an attenuated version of Keith Spera’s moving account of Aaron’s loss and gain that was to later appear in Keith’s wonderful Groove Interrupted.

Oakeshott on the History of Political Thought

oakeshott

Martyn’s essay opens the second half of the Companion.

The fact that nonhistorical elements were interwoven into the lecture course strongly suggests that Oakeshott was doing something other than offering his students an outline history of Western political thought. And this suggestion is in part confirmed by the fact that Oakeshott’s own title for the lectures did not mention “history.” They were simply lectures on “political thought.” Their purpose, Oakeshott noted, was to offer undergraduates “a study of political thought, or aids to the study of political thought.” To be sure, he went on immediately to say that in “the main” what he proposed to offer was a “historical study” (LHPT, 31). But the appropriate context for understanding what he meant by this is his clearly articulated view, part of his philosophy of education, of what is involved in the study of politics at a university. The “problems” of the lectures as history disappear, and an immensely important set of observations for understanding Oakeshott’s conception of the history of political thinking becomes clear when they are seen, as Oakeshott intended them to be, as “aids” to the study of politics at a university. So what are the main components of this more appropriate context?

In this view, to read a philosophical inquiry as a partisan political argument is simply to misread it. For Skinner, by contrast, philosophical accounts of politics are always, in part at least, polemical interventions in practical political controversies. They are “never above the battle.” In arriving at this conclusion, Skinner often invokes Wittgenstein’s observation that “words are also deeds” and that “concepts are not timeless entities with fixed meanings, but should rather be thought of as . . . tools (Wittgenstein’s term), the understanding of which is always in part a matter of seeing who is wielding them and for what purposes.” But these are observations entirely compatible with Oakeshott’s views.

What matters for Oakeshott’s understanding of the history of political thought is what Hobbes understood those relationships to be within the context of mid-seventeenth- century intellectual controversies. Given the fact of seventeenth-century controversies about whether or not philosophical reason could have any practical applicability, it seems an unnecessarily arbitrary move to reduce from the outset the history of early modern reflection on politics to a history solely of ideology, where ideology is understood, as it usually is, as a kind of practical political thinking. As I consider in a moment, it is unclear to me whether Skinner really needs to do this, although he often enough says he does. With respect to Hobbes, as Oakeshott would have argued, the point Skinner has been making is that Hobbes’s “general system of ideas” is related to seventeenth-century practical political arguments in ways historians have hitherto tended to overlook. But he has not shown that Hobbes’s general system can be reduced to nothing but polemics.

“Gatemouth” Brown

music

The amazing talent and character that is Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. See the excerpt on Gatemouth from Keith Spera’s lovely book.

Eric Clapton became an unabashed Brown booster on November 22, 1994, the second of Clapton’s three consecutive nights at the New Orleans House of Blues. During his encore, Clapton invited Brown to sit in. After warming up, Brown stepped to the microphone and announced, “For my next song …” He essentially hijacked the show as a grinning Clapton shrugged and slipped into his newly assigned role as sideman.
“How many people would get up onstage with Clapton and do that, and not even hesitate?” said Shepherd. “Only guys from that generation can do something like that and get away with it.”

Weeks later, Clapton invited Brown to join him at London’s Royal Albert Hall. He then asked Brown to open dozens of concerts across Europe and North America, exposing the old master to thousands of fresh ears. “I was doing damn good before Clapton,” Brown noted. “That just helped a little.”

Hayek and the “Use of Knowledge in Society”

philosophy of science, philosophy of social science

Here is an advance listing of the forthcoming volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences masterly edited by my chum Byron Kaldis. My contribution: Hayek and the “Use of Knowledge in Society”

Fats and Dave

"Fats" Domino

Here is the very excellent Keith Spera reporting on an event I’d have given my right/left (you name it) to have been able to attend. Keith by the way has written one of the most elegant, affectionate (warts and all) and informative books around featuring a chapter on Fats. Music journalism at its unpretentious best: a lovely read – get it now! Also, recalling Keith’s reference to Fats’ last Tipitina’s appearance check out this DVD and this CD,  the arguably the best tribute album I have come across (they typically tend to be rather uneven).

Below is a great shot by Erika Goldring of the ever ebullient Dave – the image above is one of my favourites of Fats. I have a large copy that will have pride of place in my envisioned bar/man cave someday.

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