The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric
Can evolution explain how minds work? by Johan J. Bolhuis and Clive D. L. Wynne
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is broadly accepted among biologists, but its implications for the study of cognition are far from clear. Few within the scientific pale would argue against the proposition that life on Earth has evolved and that this general principle can be extended to the process of thought. But in taking an evolutionary approach, biologists have tended to assume that species with shared ancestry will have similar cognitive abilities, and that the evolutionary history of traits can be used to reveal how we and other animals perform certain mental tasks. A closer analysis suggests things aren’t so simple. […]
Delivered in a Daydream: 7 Great Achievements That Arose from a Wandering Mind
Daydreaming and downtime can lead to solutions for difficult scientific problems and provide inspiration for creative works. Some of history’s best-known scientific and literary achievements grew out of such mental meandering […]
Self Comes To Mind
LEHRER: I think many readers will be surprised that, in your attempt to explain the mystery of consciousness, you begin with discussions of the body. Why, as you write, is “the body the foundation of the conscious mind”? And why does the brain stem, this most ancient of brain areas, play such an important role in consciousness?
DAMASIO: That is where having an evolutionary perspective comes in handy. Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body. And why do we, by now, have brains that make minds with selves — conscious minds? Because minds and selves increase the management power of brains; because they permit a better adaptation of a complex organism to complex environments. In other words, organisms equipped with brains, minds and self were selected by evolution because such organisms had better chances of survival, and, eventually, chances of survival with well-being.
Antonio Damasio is a well known neuroscientist. I didn’t have te opportunity to read his new book, but from what I remember of “Descarte’s Error” he is very good in explaining how what we call “emotion”, “reason”, “mind” spread from our body.
Here is a science fiction possibility discussed by philosophers: imagine that a human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain (your brain) has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person (you) is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. The computer is so clever that if the person tries to raise his hand, the feedback from the computer will cause him to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the hand being raised. Moreover, by varying the program, the evil scientist can cause the victim to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate) any situation or environment the evil scientist wishes. He can also obliterate the memory of the brain operation, so that the victim will seem to himself to have always been in this environment. It can even seem to the victim that he is sitting and reading these very words about the amusing but quite absurd supposition that there is an evil scientist who removes people’s brains from their bodies and places them in a vat of nutrients which keep the brains alive. The nerve endings are supposed to be connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that… […]
This time let us suppose that the automatic machinery is programmed to give us all a collective hallucination, rather than a number of separate unrelated hallucinations. Thus, when I seem to myself to be talking to you, you seem to yourself to be hearing my words. Of course, it is not the case that my words actually reach your ears — for you don’t have (real) ears, nor do I have a real mouth and tongue. Rather, when I produce my words, what happens is that the efferent impulses travel from my brain to the computer, which both causes me to ‘hear’ my own voice uttering those words and ‘feel’ my tongue moving, etc., and causes you to ‘hear’ my words, ‘see’ me speaking, etc. In this case, we are, in a sense, actually in communication. I am not mistaken about your real existence (only about the existence of your body and the ‘external world’, apart from brains). From a certain point of view, it doesn’t even matter that ‘the whole world’ is a collective hallucination; for you do, after all, really hear my words when I speak to you, even if the mechanism isn’t what we suppose it to be. (Of course, if we were two lovers making love, rather than just two people carrying on a conversation, then the suggestion that it was just two brains in a vat might be disturbing.)
I want now to ask a question which will seem very silly and obvious (at least to some people, including some very sophisticated philosophers), but which will take us to real philosophical depths rather quickly. Suppose this whole story were actually true. Could we, if we were brains in a vat in this way, say or think that we were? […]
"The famous philosophical experiment of “Brains in a vat”.
What Is Consciousness? A Hypothesis
Well, anyway, it’s not so obvious thinking about consciousness.
Guide to the Philosophy of Mind
The Extended Mind
Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words “just ain’t in the head”, and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. […]
