Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 1 - September 1, 2018
Neurocentrism is the combination of neuromania and Darwinitis, and thus the idea that we can understand ourselves as minded animals only if we investigate the brain while considering its evolutionary prehistory.
Perhaps, from a bad conscience toward the other animals (whom we gawk at in zoos and happily grill on warm, summer evenings with a bottle of beer in one hand), we wish to pretend that the human being is no exception in the animal realm but rather, simply by coincidence, also a living being with a very peculiar kind of mind – and, by the way, most likely the only animal worried about its position in the animal realm in light of the very idea of such a realm. This is one of the reasons why, as far as I know, we are the only animals that rip other animals to shreds with machines, pack their meat
...more
To deny human freedom on the basis of the claim that we are identical to our brain will never work, even if our brain unconsciously makes decisions for us. For one thing, on this model we are precisely still free, since the brain for its part is not supposed to depend on the unconscious decisions of another system.
If my brain controls me, but I am my brain, then my brain controls itself, or I control myself. Thus freedom is not imperiled but rather elucidated. If the brain is a self-determining system where the non-conscious parts bring about explicit and conscious decision-making, this does not undermine our freedom but is, rather, an account of it.
Also, why would free will require that I consciously create a conscious decision to do something? This view immediately runs into a vicious infinite regress, as I would have to pile up infinitely many conscious decisions in order to act in a conscious manner! I would have consciously to produce my consciousness of my consciousness, … , to act.
The human mind is irreducibly multifarious and ever-changing. What remains is the core invariant of self-production.
Philosophy of consciousness, then, corresponds to the mainstream discipline called “philosophy of mind” in the English-speaking world, and philosophy of mind, as in the title of this book, refers to an investigation into human mindedness, into the invariant capacity to produce self-conceptions and its differentiation into conceptual modules, such as consciousness, self-consciousness, thought, representation, will, etc.
Our subjective mind is formatted in an encounter not with brute physical objects but with embodied meaning and social interaction. We never merely face an objective physical reality which we take in perceptually. The idea that the human mind in its infant stages, as it were, looks at the physical world and tries to make sense of it, is completely mythical, a modern myth based on the denial of the fact that our first encounter with reality is an encounter with people who interact with an environment consisting both of physical objects and artifacts.
Hegel’s basic idea, that spirit first forms itself by way of self-images, also implies that spirit cannot be a thing among things. One does not come upon it as one comes upon mountain ridges, lakes or algae.
Existentialism is the view that the human being initially discovers itself as simply existing and must continually respond to this situation, and it is precisely this that distinguishes it from all other living beings. “Existence precedes essence.”7 This means that we are surprised by our own existence, by the fact that we find ourselves in this world. This fact as such does not give us the merest clue as to the meaning of it all, which is why Sartre takes the human mind to be a response to this predicament. The basic idea behind this thought was indeed already the guiding theme of Kant’s
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
A teleological action explanation postulates that someone does something because she is pursuing a goal.
It is a widespread assumption that modern science is so successful in making predictions and understanding nature in general because it gets by without teleology. On such a view, no sort of intention lies behind natural processes, and even the laws of nature are normally conceived of not as purposeful frameworks but as brute facts. There is no further reason why certain brute facts are as they are and, hence, no intention can lie behind them. According to this understanding of the sciences, one should not assume that anything happens in nature in order for something else to happen. Rather,
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But none of this means that mind and brain are identical or that everything there is can be studied and explained by the natural sciences. This is just another form of superstitious overextension of one model of explanation over the entirety of the cosmos, a modern form of mythology.
Let us speak here of the cosmological riddle of consciousness. It derives from the impression that consciousness adds something fundamental to nature precisely because, in consciousness, nature somehow begins to become aware of itself via one of its products. The cosmological riddle of consciousness should not be equated with what Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness, which I have already addressed above (p. 26).
A crucial point on which much hinges in his reflections is the thought experiment of the philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie is an exact physical replica of a human being – let us say, of Chalmers himself. Furthermore, this exact replica behaves exactly as he does – with one key difference, namely that it does not have a consciousness, and thus no one is home in this organism, as one might aptly put it. Chalmers considers philosophical zombies in purely logical terms and takes them to be metaphysically possible, though many others do not. In my view, all that matters is that
...more
We wake up in the morning and slowly come to consciousness. In the course of doing so, we sometimes recall our dreams, and thus the fact that we were also somehow conscious in our dream state. As we go about our daily business, various things, processes and persons continually come into focus and receive our attention: the coffee machine, the toothbrush, the commute to work, our boss. We feel somewhat tired in the morning, refreshed after a shower, angry when we feel that we are treated unfairly, delighted when someone delivers good news to us. We experience all of this consciously, while we
...more
Only a few of the impressions processed by our organism pass through the narrowness of consciousness, as psychologists called this around the turn of the twentieth century. Considered in terms of the whole organism, conscious processes, experiences, are only the tip of an iceberg that protrudes from the deep ocean of purely natural, unconscious processes.
As the philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch sums up this point in a discussion of the right to privacy in the digital age: “part of what makes your individual mind your mind is that you have a degree of privileged access to your mental states.”
Considered from the standpoint of the first person, it very quickly seems as if we are stuck in our consciousness, so to speak, each of us in our own one. In this context, the influential American philosopher of consciousness Daniel Dennett speaks of the Cartesian theater, by which he means, as the name suggests, that this idea ultimately dates back to Descartes.
At the very least, neuroscience has not been able to identify any brain area as the neural correlate of consciousness – that is, as the area which is always active whenever consciousness takes place. There are various hypotheses which try to explain the problem away by identifying consciousness with a different kind of structure realized by the brain – that is, not with one specific area. For instance, the global workspace model propounded by the neuroscientists Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux is roughly the idea that consciousness is more a firing-pattern which
...more
