If I were at the supermarket and I had to remember what to get, one thing that could happen would be that I got out of my pocket a list that G. had written out and given me for this purpose. If you asked me how I remembered and I told you about the list in my pocket, that would be genuinely explanatory: that would explain how I remembered the items. But if we try to use such an explanation for cognitive operations inside the head, this kind of explanation will not be explanatory. If the model claims that the brain has already stored information and "remembering" is a matter of accessing this database then the "explanation" assumes what needs to be explained, that is, how the nervous system "stores information" in the first place. In the case of the piece of paper with writing on it in my pocket this is not mysterious. Similarly with supposed explanations of dreaming, hallucinating, but most basically with theories of perception itself. As soon as perceiving something is modeled as forming a representation the problem is full-blown.
In class this week a student asked, "But then how do you explain perception, memory etc. if not with reference to mental content?" The point is that the concept of "mental content" itself fails to be explanatory, thus the question is loaded. It does no good to say that I remember my friend's face by mentally "inspecting" a mental "picture" of my friend.
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Anderson,
ReplyDeleteare you really talking about a metaphysical problem then, or a scientific one?
In your earlier post you stated, "But wait: if we opened up your head and poked around in there, we wouldn't find any little picture (or word)."
And in this post you stated, ".....how the nervous system "stores information" in the first place."
Could we have the same discussion about your PC? Sure enough you see words on the screen, characters and graphics, but if you opened it up you wouldn't see anything that resembled words or letters - just silicon chips, resistors, capacitors and the like, with 0 and 5 volts pulsing around here and there.
Then again I suspect you're talking about the bridge between consciousness and hardware? I suppose observing a mental state is different then "being" the mental state. It seems like you're saying, Yes, we can observe the mechanics of a mental state, which is meaningless as it is void of the experience of the mental state, (which is what has the meaning)? In other words, watching a computor tick away without the monitor is void of the meaning behind what it's doing...
The thing to see is that the PC is like your book, or your TV, or your blackboard, not so much like you. PCs, books etc. are prosthetic devices used by humans (conscious beings) to store, display etc. information and symbols of whatever kind. They are predicated on the preexistence of some conscious being or the other to use them for this purpose. "How does memory work?" "I have a photo album." "How does perception work?" "I look at a PC screen." Nonexplanatory. "Metaphysical" because the property of meaning thus far seems to be a non-physical kind of "property," although I'm not wedded to the idea that such problems can't be made to go away with the right kind of science ("elan vital").
ReplyDeleteSo I missed the answer to the question. How did you say that lists work?
ReplyDeleteYou just look at them, and they work?
Do you take the question, "How do lists work?" to be the same kind of question as "How does memory work?"
Yes, exactly. Nobody needs a philosopher to explain how words written on a piece of paper work. I look at the piece of paper, I see the symbols, "butter." "Oh yes, butter." And I go to the dairy section and get the butter. Completely straightforward, no philosophical problem that needs analysis whatsoever. Compare that to my standing in the aisle, putting my hand on my forehead, and saying, "Butter! That's what I need." Highly mysterious. No one on Earth, so far as I know, knows how that is possible. How does the brain work? That is my basic question.
ReplyDeletePerhaps a good question could be [then], "how does the brain not work?"
ReplyDeleteYes Andrew, if I knew how it worked I wouldn't be where I am (not that it's so bad), I'd be the toast of the town (that I am not). But alas, I only(think that I) know how it does not work. It doesn't work like a piece of paper. It doesn't work with any symbols. Symbols are things that exist outside of heads. Symbols are mere prosthetics, tools used by minds. Computers, books, blackboards, pieces of paper: just tools used by minds. Nothing mental about them. Anything with a symbol assumes that minds exist already. Symbols are no part of minds.
ReplyDeleteAnderson: "Yes, exactly. Nobody needs a philosopher to explain how words written on a piece of paper work. I look at the piece of paper, I see the symbols, "butter." "Oh yes, butter.""
ReplyDeleteKvond: This seems wrong to me, (and one does not have to assert that one has to be a Philosopher to figure out the problem). How do lists work? is not the same kind of question as How does memory work?, though they certainly are related.
One is a material device which serves as a mental aid, one is a biological function. The answers to the two would not necessarily be the same, or of the same kind.
How does a list work? might be aided by asking How does a list not work? A list that is illegiable, or written in another language, or that was incomplete would be a list that does not work. A list that works is one, apparently, that arrays the important information in a clear and somewhat ordered fashion. I think it confuses the issue to say that this kind of question is the same as "how does memory work?" Somethings can be said about how lists work that add to knowing how to make efficacious lists.
Anderson: "Compare that to my standing in the aisle, putting my hand on my forehead, and saying, "Butter! That's what I need." Highly mysterious."
Kvond: Putting one's hand on one's head is not really a mnemonic aid, (but if it were one that many people used, it would be worth while asking how they work). Using a list is not like using a hand to the head.
Given this, that there is something to how lists work, cognitive scientists might very well be able to look at how lists work (what makes good lists and what makes bad ones), and from this determine something about how the mind and perception works.
Take for instance other mnemonic devices such as picturing associated images with words, in order to remember them. If I have to remember 10 digits I might do so better if each digit were associated with objects pictured. A list using such mnemonic cues might "work" very well (allowing you to hold the information for a longer amount of time).
Anderson; "I only(think that I) know how it does not work. It doesn't work like a piece of paper. It doesn't work with any symbols. Symbols are things that exist outside of heads."
kvond: Symbols only exist outside of the head? This I find interesting and curoius. I wonder what you mean by "exist". Someone who uses symbols to improve their memory (makes up associations), is it your position that such "symbols" don't exist, or that they aren't really symbols? Perhaps if you define what a symbol is...
I am picturing right now the American Flag which for me symbolizes a kind of patriotism. In what way is this symbol "no part" of my mind?
Yeah you would! All hail Anderson!
ReplyDeleteI guess what I mean is, what's happening in a brain that isn't working vs. one that is?
Of course that just gets one back to "brain stuff".
Rorty comes to mind when he states:
"I conclude that we cannot make non-spaciality the criterion of mental states, if only because the notion of "state" is sufficiently obscure that neither the term "spatial state" nor the term "nonspacial state" seems usefull. The notion of mental entities as non-spacial and of physical entities as spacial, if it makes any sense at all, makes sense for particulars, for subjects of predication, rather then for the possesion of properties by such subjects......"
"We get a vague sense of explanatory power when we are told that human bodies move as they do because they are inhabited by ghosts, but none at all when we are told that persons have nonspacial states."
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So where do you go?
Andrew, Yes Rorty is good on philosophy of mind, I've wondered about the relationship between his phil. of mind and his (more outre-seeming) epistemology. I read him as a classical pragmatist, see my obit of him on this blog.
ReplyDeleteKevin, three things: 1) sorry, my language was sloppy, I meant that of course memory and lists DON'T work the same way, lists are prosthetic extensions of memory so modeling memory on lists (file cabinets, etc.) is a mistake. 2) "Hand on head," only figuratively illustrating that we don't know what is happening in the head (I was thinking of an anecdote when some physicists were discussing different methods, and someone asked "How would Feynman solve this problem?" and the reply was "He'd put his hand on his head for a few seconds and then write out the answer"). 3) Yes, my position is that internal symbols (representations is a more general term) don't exist, notwithstanding the mnemonic example (or the dreaming, imagining, and hallucinating examples). So "match-to-sample models of conceptualization are specious, for example, on my view.
Hi, internal symbols do exist (no?) because a symbol is a repeatably instantiable type associated with something else (its meaning). When we abstract something (we have not yet a name for it) from some things, by seeing something they have in common (this thing may later seem to be sufficiently similar to a word's meaning, of course) then we have grasped something, and labelled it internally as effectively (if not literally) that similarity between those things. If we don't do that, how do we do anything?
ReplyDeleteJust because one does not notice one's balancing act as one pushes off, having learnt to ride a bike years ago - that does not mean that it is not still one (who else?) who is choosing where and how to put one's feet, of course.
Similarly, when talking we think of something (a sentence-meaning? an argument-form?) and the words flow. When writing it down later we may choose our words more carefully, but who chose the original words? Or was it really not a choosing? There was a lot of effort when we were young (or when writing now), if less later (when speaking), so surely we were choosing then. We may forget that we were, which may be why it seems that there are no internal symbols, no list of them being chosen from; and of course, we are usually just using them, not noticing them.
Anderson: "3) Yes, my position is that internal symbols (representations is a more general term) don't exist, notwithstanding the mnemonic example (or the dreaming, imagining, and hallucinating examples). So "match-to-sample models of conceptualization are specious, for example, on my view."
ReplyDeletekvond: I read here a vast conflation, but perhaps there are many aspects of your denial which you do not present. I have no idea why acknowledging that symbols exist, or that the mind can use symbols (but I do not equate symbols with representations...I can represent the lake by my house by picturing it, but this mental feat is not a symbol, and I can use the symbols of mathematics without representing objects), requires that a "match-to-sample" model, as you call it, be the case. One can grant the existence, or use of representations, or symbols by the mind, and still refuse a representationalist view of knowledge. This turns on the way that one reads the word "exist" or the word "use", and the way that you define knowledge.
It is useful in many cases to say that there are representations in my mind. I am picturing right now the lake I walked by today. I am inspecting the particular colors of a rock face at its edge which at the time I did not pay that much conscious attention to. I see the re-presentations of the patina of lime green moss there; it is that curious Bianca green. Now, I will assume that you agree that the use of this DESCRIPTION of picturing and representing is a useful one (you and many others will immediately understand what I mean), but you also want to claim that although I meaningfully can be said to be using such representations, you also want to assert, categorically, that such representations do not exist..I can be said to be using something that does not exist. The use exists, but what is used does not. This is the kind of trouble that philosophers get into.
(I thought you told me once that the one failing that Wittgenstein had was that he did not embrace a Platonic "metaphysics of math". If symbols do not exist, nor the mental use of symbols, what is the ontologial status of the metaphysics of math you find attractive in the Platonic line?)
Throughout all the psychology courses that I have taken since I started studying in “el colegio”, professors have always talked about the mental representations or archetypes as a way to memorize, analyze, associate and/or remember concepts, ideas, pictures, events, etc. And without much analyzing it, or better said, questioning it, I believed it worked, mainly because I have always felt, at least from my perspective and my cognitive processes, that that’s the way my mind functioned and remembered things. I even remember talking to you once about this, and I said that if you mention a horse, what comes to my mind is the image of the horse, and I think that happens because that’s the way I learned it, by the picture, not be the definition or the semantics of the horse.
ReplyDeleteSo, since this is the first time that I hear somebody say that they don’t believe mental representations exist, I have become very curious and intrigued about this topic which I naively thought wasn’t something to even have a discussion about. You say that “as soon as perceiving something is modeled as forming a representation the problem is full-blown”. I agree with you when you say that “symbols are no part of minds”, I don’t think there is a part of the brain called “symbol” like the hippocampus or the lobes (if this is what you mean in that phrase.) But I think that symbols are constantly growing depending on the conditions around us and the information we receive, we learn to create them progressively. So when you say that the mental content fails to be explanatory, I guess you mean that they need someone’s interpretation, they don’t say anything by themselves. But I think that if I am trying to remember a friend’s face, I will do it maybe “by inspecting a mental picture of him”, or re-creating it trough the combination of the elements that compose my mind and their functions, until I am able to evoke it.