Brave New World

So the Fall 2012 semester has ended, and the holiday break has begun. What new things await me for the new year? Some of these things have already started to dawn upon me as a paradigm shift in my way of thinking approaches, thanks to reading some criticisms of current paradigms in psychology by Patricia Churchland, Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, and others. I've also encountered a new theory called embodied cognition from a new book that I bought and plan to read soon called Louder than Words: The New Science of How The Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin K. Bergen. Some of these issues I hinted at in my last blog post, but only as I have sought new information have the ideas really been coming to light.

The current paradigm in cognitive psychology is that of the computational theory of mind, which has been with cognitive psychology from its conception in the 1950s. Although there have been other theories such as connectionism, computationalism has remained steadfast in its presence and is still advocated strongly by Steven Pinker.

In Consciousness Explained Daniel Dennett, inspired by philosopher Gilbert Ryle and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, criticizes the idea of a 'Cartesian theater', a place in the brain where all of consciousness comes together and is observed by some equivalent of a homunculus. Dennett instead proposes a multiple drafts model which lacks a central cartesian theater. Dennett views some of the trends in cognitive psychology and functionalist philosophy of mind as suffering from remnants of Cartesian Dualism, and in effect are Cartesian materialist theories. Indeed the (brilliant) cognitive psychologist and linguist Noam Chomsky even called one of his books Cartesian Linguistics. In chapter 9 of the book Neurophilosophy, Patricia Churchland argues against the same sort of issues as Dan Dennett; she claims the insistence of  cognitive psychology (the computatonal theory of mind) on the"hardware-software distinction
as applied to the brain is dualism in yet another disguise." (pg. 408)

In addition, some of the books I have read by V.S. Ramachandran, Antonio Damasio, and Joseph LeDoux have shown me how important the body and emotions are to cognition. In Descartes' Error, Damasio argues that just as it is a mistake to think of the mind and body as separate, so too is it an error to disconnect brain and body, emotion and reason. In The Emotional Brain, LeDoux demonstrates the failure of traditional cognitivism of capturing the essence and importance of emotions to cognition.

Okay, so there is no Cartesian theater in the brain, and emotions and bodily states are important to cognition. What could fill the gap? Embodied cognition, the thesis that our bodies are vital to the way that we think. At the current moment I do not know much about this theory, but I plan to learn more from the book that I bought and other reading material about it, because the philosophical criticisms from Dennett and Churchland and the neurological evidence from Damasio, Ramachandran, and LeDoux seem to be pointing this direction.

This also has some philosophical appeal to me. I am a Physicalist and a Naturalist, meaning that I believe the only things that exist are physical objects and the physical forces acting on them. As such, a concrete bodily explanation of the mind is very appealing to me. If emotions and cognition are both by definition certain states of the body, that ipso facto means that the idea of disembodied mental states -- that is, the mind as something immaterial -- is entirely senseless.

As I investigate these issues, I hope that I will find more information important to the puzzle that is consciousness, and I think that embodied cognition really might be the key. Next semester, I will be taking two neuroscience courses and also working in a personality psychology laboratory, so I will have much to learn and will be able to get some real research experience. This is a very exciting time for me, and in fact is the most excited I have been about my interests in a long time.  I truly look forward to exploring the paths that lie before me. I do not know for certain what lies ahead, but that is part of the fun of being a scientist; to paraphrase one of my professors, "One of the things you have to get used to being a scientist is dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty."

But the awakened one, the knowing one, says: "Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something about the body."  - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Chapter 1.4