CEP 2006 annual conference

Uziel Awret

Science and Consciousness Review, Editorial board

Much has been written about Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Palomino said of it that it was "truth, not painting", Luca Giordano defined it as "theology of painting" and Téophile Gautier, while in front of it, "wondered where the picture was". In the "Order of things" Michel Foucault devotes a whole chapter to Las Meninas as a critique and an exploration of what he felt was our obsolete ‘modern’ conception of subjectivity and a misguided form of self representation.

I will try and show that the puzzling Las Meninas is a profound depiction of the relationship between self and reality with all the tension, uncertainty and paradox that such a depiction entails. Las Meninas provides us with a rich collection of metaphors that explore the philosophy and the phenomenology of selfhood. It admits both post modern interpretations of subjectivity like Foucault’s and more modern cognitive approaches to the philosophy of mind .

Las Meninas lends itself to a heterogeneous constellation of interpretations without committing itself to any single interpretation. Arthur C. Danto, the noted philosopher cum art historian from Columbia University, declares that he is not sure that any of Velazquez' puzzles "are meant to be solved so much as merely felt"; yet, he continues to dwell on the puzzles that to this day defeat what he calls "learned interpreters".

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Consciousnesss and the Embodied Self

Andrew Bailey

Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph

This poster deals with the relationship between the embodied cognition paradigm and two sets of its implications: its implications for the ontology of selves, and its implications for the nature and extent of phenomenal consciousness. I lay out three relations: the implications of embodiment for consciousness; the implications of embodiment for the self; and the tension between these two. I argue that the embodiment paradigm introduces a radical split between consciousness and the self, and that it does so by deflating our pre-theoretical instincts about consciousness and self in two different directions; however, I claim, what both these theoretical movements have in common is a scepticism about the notion of a psychological container defining a boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’

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The Conscious Brain

Robert Bainbridge

Independent

The concept of mind and the subjective experience of conscious awareness are not usually differentiated. However, in this paper, the mind is shown to be a hypothetical entity and an artificial construct of our folk psychology. By contrast, the ‘elimination’ of the stream of consciousness [James] seems unlikely given the undeniable nature of the experience [Nagel]. An argument is made for the reduction of the folk psychology’s concept of mind to the physical act of processing information in the brain. In contrast to this reduction an argument is made for the brain’s subjective experience of the informational content within it.

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The Rise and Fall of the Conscious Self: A History of Western Concepts of Self and Personal Identity

John Barresi

Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University

I will trace the history of western conceptions of soul and self from the ancient Greeks to the present. The story line that I will present is based mainly on material covered in two books by Ray Martin and myself: The Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2000) and The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (Columbia University Press, 2006). The basic idea is that from Plato through the church fathers to Descartes there was a rise in the notion of an immaterial, immortal self that is a centre of consciousness and distinct from the material body. Since the eighteenth century, this notion of a separate encapsulated conscious self has increasingly come under attack: first, through empirical approaches to consciousness and the material brain; then through social and developmental approaches to the acquisition of self-concepts.

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The Boundaries of the Conceptual
Michael Beaton

Sussex University

Non-conceptualists argue that, to make room for consciousness in animals and pre-linguistic humans, and to do justice to our own introspected conscious experience, it is necessary to admit the existence of contents of experience (i.e. ‘ways things seem’) which cannot be described solely in terms of the concepts (if any) being employed by the animal or human having the experience. I will argue for the opposing view - conceptualism. Conceptualism can be summarized in the slogan: there is no experience without understanding. I will argue that conceptualism can allow for consciousness in non-linguistic agents, and can do justice to the richness and fine-grainedness of our experience. Any account of experience which is to be plausible needs to consider the nature of our access to our own experience. I will present a rationalist account of introspection which is fully compatible with conceptualism (this account is common to Wilfred Sellars, Gareth Evans and Sydney Shoemaker, amongst others). I will argue that, taken as a package, this rationalist-conceptualist account is a plausible contender as a physicalist account of consciousness which meets David Chalmers’ injunction to "take consciousness seriously".

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The Self in Pain: Permeable and Unstable Boundaries

Bryan Benham

Department of Philosophy, University of Utah; Pain Research Center, University of Utah

What does the experience of pain reveal about the sense of self? Pain is usually considered a noxious stimulus to be avoided, but it can also be experienced as a positive, life-affirming sensation. Thus, pain can be both alienating and self-identifying, threatening and integrating. In this paper I examine a handful of vignettes describing different pain experiences. What unites these vignettes is the notion that one’s sense of self is integral to understanding pain, and at the same time the experience of pain helps define the self. This observation has implications for various dimensions of self, such as the phenomenology of self-other boundaries, self-resilience, depth of self-agency, and the capacity for suffering. Whether one defines self as a stable knowledge structure that modulates experience and behavior, or as a fictional and transient context-dependent construction, the sense of self is deeply connected to the experience of pain, psychologically, socially and biologically.

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Inserted Thought and Phenomenal Consciousness: Access Without Experience

Alexandre Billon

CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris

We argue for the fact that inserted thoughts (IT) are thought-like processes that are reflexively accessible to their subject but that are not phenomenally conscious. They are vehicles of thought, like words, images, and computational processes that underly thoughts. But unlike the first two, the subject can access them just like he accesses thoughts (IT are "in" the subject), and unlike the last one, they are not phenomenally conscious. One way to argue for that claim would be to argue that conscious processes are immune to error through misidentification (IEM) but that IT are not. But many philosophers have taken IT to threaten the validity of this immunity principle, so we should investigate the question further. By carefuly comparing the phenomenology of IT and of other well studied pathologies such as obsessive or intrusive thoughts, we show that all the interpretations of IT, whether they take IT to be consistent with IEM or not, fail because they do not take seriously the fact that patients report that the thought, although "in them", is not "their own".

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Presenting Realization Process: Embodiment as the Basis of Oneness with Others

Judith Blackstone

Esalen Institute; Institute of Transpersonal Psychology; State University of New York

This is an experiential workshop, presenting a series of original exercises, developed by Judith Blackstone, called Realization Process. These exercises facilitate direct attunement to nondual awareness, as well as the experience of being with another person in this dimension. Nondual awareness is the basis of one’s deepest contact with one’s own internal experience, as well as with the internal experience of other people. Inward contact with one’s own body is, at the same time, openness to the environment. When two people attune to nondual awareness together, they experience a single expanse of awareness pervading them both as a unity. However, this is not merging and loss of identity, but rather a concurrence of self-experience and intersubjectivity.

Biographical Notes

Judith Blackstone is author of The Enlightenment Process; Living Intimately; The Subtle Self; and the upcoming The Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic Process. She is on the faculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and the State University of New York.

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My Blackberry and Me: Forever One or Just Friends?

Andrew Brook

Chancellor's Professor of Philosophy and Director, Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Ottawa

The idea that something crucial to cognition lies outside the brain and even the skin is central to a number of significant recent developments in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Loosely grouped under the label ‘situated cognition’, all variants of the view hold that the context of cognition is crucial. However, there is a big division over in what way. Indeed, there are a number of divisions over what way, but the one on which I will focus is this: Are contexts just causally linked to cognition or are they actually part of cognition, some contexts anyway?

However important researchers of the first persuasion take contexts to be, they do not mess around with the traditional boundary between mind and world. Researchers of the second persuasion do challenge that boundary. They hold that in some respects cognition actually extends beyond the brain and skin, that something outside the body is part of cognition. This claim can take at least three forms:

(i) There is a normative and therefore a social dimension to cognition (the normativity of mind hypothesis),

(ii) Semantic and representational content consists of a relationship between representational vehicles and something else (externalism),

(iii) The hypothesis of the extended mind.*

After a survey of situated cognition and some comments on the normativity view, we will zero in on externalism and the extended mind hypothesis (EM). The internet and wireless appliances such as the BlackBerry are an interesting test case, especially for EM. On that view, my BlackBerry turns out to be a part of me, part of the mind that I am. Once a credible view of the boundaries of the mind is laid out, we will see that there is little to support such a claim.

* Clark, A. and D. Chalmers, The extended mind. Analysis 58, 1998, pp. 7-19

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Meaning in a Postmodern Universe

Josefina Burgos

California Institute of Integral Studies

Beyond psychological and phenomenological approaches to the understanding of meaning, this paper is an inquiry into the nature of meaning from within a postmodern, systematic, metaphysical vision of the universe.

Grounded in British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics, I will suggest that meaning is not peculiar to the human mind but is intrinsic to the universe; that it pervades being; that it is a structural component of reality and is archetypal in nature. Furthermore, that at the human level, consciousness - both in the features that we experience and in its activity - is meaning; that without meaning there is no consciousness, and that therefore any transformation of consciousness must be a transformation of meaning.

These conclusions, I will add, strongly substantiate the basic tenets of transpersonal psychology and participatory epistemologies placing them coherently within an encompassing, postmodern meta-narrative of reality which envisions the universe as an unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.

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Cognitive Provenence and the Boundaries of the Self

Ron Chrisley

Director, Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex

In "Memento's Revenge", Andy Clark responds to some of the criticisms of the Extended Mind thesis (that particular kinds of organism/environment coupling count as cognitive processes; cf Clark and Chalmers 1998), and further clarifies this claim. While sympathetic to the general thrust of the thesis of Active Externalism, I nonetheless argue the following:

1) The concessive remarks that Clark makes concerning the essential role that development may play in cognition suggest that we may need to add a further requirement, that of "proper developmental history" to the conditions (reliably available, typically invoked, automatically endorsed, and easily accessible) that must be met for an external process to qualify for equal treatment with respect to cognition.

2) A simple thought experiment, and reflection on the use of the concept of "organism" in stating the thesis, reveal that Active Externalism is not so much about location, but provenance. The thesis then amounts to claiming that items that were not selected to perform a cognitive function can nevertheless do so. Thus, there is a conflict between the Extended Mind view, in which ahistorical functionality is taken to trump all, and teleosemantic-cum-evolutionary theories of mind, in which history of selection is of ultimate importance. Arguments that defend the latter's historicism (against, e.g., Swamp Man objections) can be used to cast doubt on the support offered for the Extended Mind view. This is a special case of a more general conflict between the Extended Mind view (and related positions, such as virtual embodiment; cf "The Twisted Matrix: Dream, Simulation or Hybrid?", Clark forthcoming) on the one hand, and theories that place emphasis on actual embodiment, on the other.

3) Central to the Extended Mind view is The Parity Principle: "If... a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process." As Menary (forthcoming) has argued, this principle stands in need of clarification. I show that when considering the counterfactual in the Principle, one gets different results depending on what one does and does not keep fixed in the hypothetical move into the head. Without a prior motivated basis for selecting what aspects of the relevant part of the world will and will not remain constant, the Principle is of little assistance in supporting the Extended Mind thesis.

4) A principled distinction can be made between two kinds of components of cognitive processes: indirect components, that are part of the cognitive process by virtue of having been available as the object of an agent's awareness; and direct components, in which there is no such dependence on availability in awareness. It seems most compatible with our intuitions that only the direct components of cognitive processes can constitute states of the subject. A thought experiment is offered to support this intuition. It follows that Otto's beliefs cannot be located in his notebook, since the notebook's role in Otto's cognitions is indirect. I consider the Clark-esque response that Inga's ability to recall an address, like Otto's, is (or at least may be) by virtue of something being the object of her awareness (e.g. visual images of MOMA or the address in writing; aural images of someone speaking the address, etc.). Therefore, parity is preserved. I maintain that this reply trades on a disanalogy. The relevant processes in Inga are not mental images (even if present), but the neural processes that enable (or even constitute) her ability to recall the address. Inga is not aware of these processes; and even if she were (by self-examination in an FMRI scanner, say), it would not be by virtue of such awareness that she has the ability to recall the address. Thus, the intuitive view that Inga's memories are located in her head, while Otto's are not located in his notebook, is given a principled defense.

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Exploring the Inner Boundaries

Matthijs Cornelissen

Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education; Indian Psychology Institute

One can distinguish three boundaries to self and experience: physical, social and inner. Though the dialectic between these three poles of our being is extremely complex, it is unlikely that the riddle of human existence can be solved satisfactorily without taking all three dimensions fully into account. Science is exploring the physical and social dimensions, but somehow the explosion of knowledge in these two areas is not doing justice to all that we are. What is missing is a solid, rigorous technology to assess the deep inner states of consciousness that might well constitute the most challenging and promising frontiers of psychological research.

In this presentation I will attempt to show how these inner realms can be explored in an intellectually rigorous and coherent manner, and what the outcome of such an approach might be. For this I’ll base myself on the work of Sri Aurobindo.

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Not Two, Not One: Proprioception and the Mutuality of Self and World

Alan Costall

Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth

Modern psychology is still largely committed to a dualism of self and world. Consistent with this dualism, the senses have traditiionally been treated as either exteroceptive or proprioceptive. Yet, as Gibson rightly emphasized, vision, for example, is both exteroceptive and proprioceptive. Yet Gibson also attempted to objectify 'information' and treat it as separable from any particular animal. This paper will take specific examples of 'proprioceptive information' (the visible horizon, optic flow, the visible self, and the occluding self) to argue for the mutuality of self and world.

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The independent and the interdependent self concept related to happiness research: A critical comparison of flow and Taoism

Valérie De Prycker

Department of Philosophy, University of Ghent

The conception of the self and the boundaries between the self and others are determined to a significant extend by cultural values. Individualist cultures stimulate the development of an independent self while collectivist cultures stimulate a more relational and contextual self. These self concepts have been related to intercultural research on happiness. We will extend this line of research by critical comparison of the flow concept as it appears in Western theories and the Taoist attitude in East Asian mentality. We will discuss the indirect way (without conscious effort) of controlling behaviour that is associated with flow as well as with Taoism. This comparison will be used to put the Western intuition about the relation between control and happiness into perspective. Finally flow and Taoism will be contrasted in their emphasis on respectively internal and external harmony. This difference will be related to the cultural distinction between the independent and interdependent self concept.

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Externalism and the Neural Correlates of Consciousness

Marius Dumitru

Institut Jean Nicod, Paris

Recent debates on extending externalism to conscious experience via reducing its phenomenal character to its representational, externally individuated, content (inter alia, Lycan 2001, Dretske 1995, Tye 2000) or endorsing the sensorimotor contingency theory of perception (O’Regan & Noë 2001, Noë 2004) prima facie raise an important challenge to the search for NCC methodology, because conscious experience may not be seen as locally supervenient on neural processes in the brain (Noë & Thompson 2004, Hurley & Noë 2003). In this paper, I critically argue that the two strategies fail to jeopardize the search for NCC, because they do not succeed in establishing a sound external localization thesis for the vehicles of conscious experience. I also constructively argue that internalism about both the content and vehicles of consciousness is a satisfactory position, compatible with the search for NCC methodology, and I endorse a form of routine epistemic artifact-recruiting externalism with respect to cognitive architecture as the sole plausible form of externalism.

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Volition, Karma, Free Will and Determinism
Asaf Federman
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick
The Buddhist model of perception has proven inspirational for understanding colour vision and how the world and self emerges interdependently (Varela et al., 1991; Waldron, 2006). My presentation will suggest that a similar work can be done for theorizing intentionality. In short, a Buddhist view undermines the boundaries between the self and the world, and therefore between intention and action. It sees the belief that there are strong and clear boundaries between self and world as erroneous and inhibitory for happiness. It suggests that to overcome this erroneous notion requires seeing reality as a unified field in which, ultimately, there are no independent or separated agents. From a pragmatic point of view this theory has psychological advantages though some social-ethical downsides. I will address both.

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From the Minimal Self to the Narrative Other
Shaun Gallagher
University of Central Florida

Drawing on phenomenology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and narrative theory, I will map out a route that starts with a minimal sense of self and others in infancy, and leads to our fuller understanding of others based on our competency for self-narrative. Our earliest sense of self and others is tied to embodied proprioceptive, neural resonance, and perceptual processes that help to define what Trevarthan has called 'primary intersubjectivity'. By entering into the interactive pragmatic and social practices of everyday life (in 'secondary intersubjectivity' beginning around 1 year of age) we begin to develop an understanding of social context. This understanding is enhanced through a more objective sense of self, the acquisition of language, and the development of autobiographical memory. Before the age of 4 years, our competency for self-narrative helps to form the framework for our more mature understanding of others and the possibility of empathy. These accounts form a phenomenological alternative to the standard theory of mind approaches ('theory theory' and 'simulation theory'), and provide a more parsimonious approach to understanding self and intersubjectivity.

Biographical Notes
Shaun Gallagher is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Central Florida; he has been occasional Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen (2004-06) and Visiting Scientist at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University (1994). He is co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. His research interests include phenomenology and philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, hermeneutics, theories of the self and personal identity. His most recent book, How the Body Shapes the Mind, is published by Oxford University Press (2005). He is co-editor of the forthcoming Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition (MIT Press 2006).

He is currently working on several projects, including a co-authored book, The Phenomenological Mind: Contemporary Issues in Philosophy of Mind and the Cognitive Sciences (Routledge 2007). His previous books include: Hermeneutics and Education (1992) and The Inordinance of Time (1998). He has edited or co-edited volumes that include: Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity (2004); Models of the Self (1999); Hegel, History, and Interpretation (1997).

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A Moral Principle and the Self-model
Paul Garai
Independent
Honderich’s Principle of Humanity is morally undeniable yet continuously denied. Metzinger’s Self Model Theory (SMT) of Subjectivity is intellectually convincing yet phenomenally impossible to believe in. This paper seeks to evaluate whether SMT can shed light on the moral dilemma.

Memetics makes claims about the ontological nature of self similar to those proposed by Metzinger within a theory that is primarily geared towards cultural description. Memetics however leaves no room for the dilemma. An alternative means to extend Metzinger’s approach into the ethical arena is through self-organisation. The Benard cell an organised structure formed to dissipate energy provides a conceptual platform to consider the dilemma and is reconcilable with Metzinger’s principle theoretical elements.

Within the self-organisational context Honderich’s principle is undeniable since an organisational form is only one potential dissipative structure. It is deniable since the transparent background assumptions that generate the dissipative organisation or self-modelling process can only interpret such potential as a threat to established life.

The Boundaries of Experience and Meaning Between Nature and Culture
Brian Goodwin
Schumacher College

The natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology are generally regarded as providing a window onto nature, while the arts, humanities and psychology present and describe aspects of the realm called culture.These two areas of learning have been sharply separated in modern thought. A major reason for this is the belief that during the course of evolution properties such as consciousness, language and ethics have emerged in humans but not, with possibly minor exceptions, in other species, and certainly not in the objects studied by the physical sciences. Furthermore, meaning is a term that is used in the context of human language, communication and writing, but is considered to make no sense in describing the processes involved in the development and evolution of species of organism belonging to lower taxonomic levels.

However, recent biological studies on molecular and genetic organisation within cells are leading to a new perspective on how organisms make themselves that involves a radical rethinking of the distinction between culture and nature, knowing self and other. It appears that when developing organisms read their genomes and make sense of them by constructing themselves as coherent, functional wholes appropriate to their history and environmental contexts, whether they be sea urchins or willow trees or humans, they are engaged in making meaning through the use of self-referential networks of relationships that have deep affinities with spoken language. The evidence for this, its implications for how we see evolution, and the consequences for our view of nature and culture will be explored.

Biographical Notes

Brian Goodwin was born in 1931 in Canada where he studied biology. He then took a mathematics degree at Oxford and a PhD involving biology and mathematics at Edinburgh University. He has held research and teaching positions at MIT, at the University of Sussex, and the Open University, UK, where he was Professor of Biology. He was connected with the Santa Fe Institute for a number of years in the 80s and 90s. He now teaches Holistic Science at Schumacher College in England.

His interests are in developing a science of qualities that can address issues of health and quality of life in diverse areas, in promoting holistic patterns of living, and in the reunion of the arts and humanities with the sciences.

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Violence, Autonomy, and the Self
Valerie Gray Hardcastle
Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech
One of the fundamental assumptions underlying modern Western society is that people are autonomous. We believe that most people can reflect critically upon themselves and then use that critical reflection to change their values, their behavior, their beliefs, or their intellectual commitments, if they want to. The self that our liberal traditions assume to exist is rational, reflective, individualistic, and free. I argue that these essentially political values have infected hypothesis construction in the mind/brain sciences. In particular, the larger theoretical frameworks regarding self into which brain data become integrated assume individual autonomy. I present one example in which theory blithely accepts personal autonomy as foundational. This example exemplifies the trend in the mind/brain sciences to accept first and without argument prevailing popular assumptions regarding how humans work and then to try to force experimental data fit to into these background suppositions.

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Morals, Minds and Consciousness
Edward Hazelton
Visiting Lecturer, Department of Psychiatry, Meharry Medical College
Recent research by Joshua Greene and co-workers have interpreted their results to show that 'morals' and 'ought' are involved by biological factors affected by cultural differences. It follows that beliefs are derived from innate brain systems which are concerned with both the unconscious and conscious neural activities of individual persons and social development. The assumption is that morals are acquired from social tradition. It follows that moral judgments in the decisions in everyday life are facilitated by the brain. The cultural upbringing at the home will be more effective than neighbors, co-workers et cetera. 'he 'ought' and 'moral' tradition on beliefs and attitudes could be very disturbed with possible implications in research development. Strokes and other brain damages and the impact to patients, relatives and friends will be discussed. Genetic factors in differences between people on 'morals' will be explored to help personal problems and social interpersonal relations. Factors such as criminality perversions will be investigated. The material will be reviewed toward goals and current conclusions on consciousness, 'ought' and 'morals'.

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Truth, Narrative and Metaphor
Christopher Holvenstot
Independent
The concept of truth, the construction of narrative and the use of metaphor are tools used in the development and reinforcement of reality concepts. I explore the basic functions of these tools and the imperatives which inform their use. We tend to think of truth as something innate or inherent about our world when in fact even a very brief look at the history of humanity reveals truth as consistently changing to support changing criteria, contexts, needs and uses. As a concept it functions best if we agree to overlook its ever-changing nature. Whatever current ‘truth’ we are entertaining is always to be considered the ultimate and final version. By committing in this way we can fully institute and enjoy the benefits of our beliefs. We only find, by virtue of a full ideological commitment, the wanted psychological, spiritual and emotional comfort in the concept of a permanent, fixed and dependable reality.

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Do Dreams Change When Selves Change?
Caroline Horton, Martin Conway and Chris Moulin
Leeds Memory Group, Institute of Psychological Sciences, University