Thursday, May 7, 2009

Noë's new book, Out of Our Heads

I've been reading (and re-reading) Alva Noë's new book, Out of Our Heads this past week (as I'm sure many others will be in the future). It is a popular, accessible introduction to his version of embodied, extended theory of consciousness and cognition. It is a much easier, less technical read than was Action in Perception. Part of this ease lies in the fact that it is not a Darwinian “long argument,” but a series of short vignettes that illustrate one or another feature of his views. The little stories are great, though I, of course, disagree with many of the morals or conclusions Noë draws from them.

Some conclusions, however, I find just puzzling. Here is one example from Chapter 1. On the one hand, Noë tells us that

Consciousness is more like dancing than it is like digestion” (p. xii).

The phenomenon of consciousness … is a world-involving dynamic process (p. xiii).

we should be thinking about [consciousness] as something we do, as a kind of living activity” (p. 7)

On the other hand, after describing a patient in an apparent permanent vegetative state, he writes,

Obviously, the mere absence of the normal behavioral markers of consciousness does not entail the absence of consciousness” (p. 15).

The tension, to my mind, lies in his saying, essentially, that consciousness is a kind of bodily activity, but that it does not require bodily activity. How can Noë reconcile this idea of consciousness being constituted by bodily activity with his claim that behavior is a “marker” of consciousness? I'm kind of scratching my head about this one.


17 comments:

  1. I think Noe intends to imply a more limited version of consciousness in this case, later in the book he talks about the loss of a tool or a limb as resulting in a reduction in consciousness. Here habits must have been formed through bodily experience, without which locked in syndrome would result in meaningless sounds rather than hearing words etc. but the consciousness of the patient while not entirely removed is considerably reduced. There would still seem to be a tension here though.

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  2. I guess I don't have an objection to the idea that the less active one is, the more reduced is one's consciousness. (Though I also don't find it all that appealing as a view.)

    But, I don't think this will take Noe all that far. How about the following thought? On Noe's view, in the limit of complete inactivity, shouldn't one have a completely non-conscious being? Noe seems not to want to say this. Note the following:

    "She'd spent six years trapped inside an inert body, unable to communicate with the outside world in any way" (p. 15).

    "inert" sounds like completely inactive, but Noe appears to think this person is conscious.

    Then on p. 16, he mentions case of "total locked-in syndrome". Again, this sounds like complete inactivity yet with consciousness preserved.

    Things look bad if we have this limit assumption.

    If we stray a bit back to Action in Perception, Noe says,
    "Genuine perceptual experience depends not only on the character and quality of stimulation, but on our exercise of sensorimotor knowledge. The disruption of this knowledge does not leave us with experiences we are unable to put to use. It leaves us without experience." (p. 10).

    So, I'm not sure he would/could accept the idea that locked in syndrome would result in meaningless sounds. It looks like he is committed to the idea that in total locked in cases, one does not have experiences at all.

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  3. But what does sensorimotor knowledge consist in? Could it be the same as the "tacit understanding" mentioned in the following?:

    "Your perception of the tomato as voluminous depends on your tacit understanding of the ways its appearance (how it looks) depends on movement. You visually experience parts of the tomato that, strictly speaking, you do not see, because you understand, implicitly, that your sensory relations to those parts is mediated by familiar patterns of sensorimotor dependence." (_Action in Perception_, p77)

    There are several passages like this in _Action in Perception_ that seem to suggest that, for Noe, experience can supervene not just on present sensory activities but on (either) counterfactuals about present sensory activities (or) the history of one's sensory activities (I'm not sure which) as well.

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  4. I should add that I often stumble over passages like these because they don't seem quite in keeping with the overall thrust of the work. The work as a whole seems to suggest a much more radical and surprising view than passages like these allow for.

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  5. It seems to me that Noe vacillates or equivocates about whether it is possession of sensorimotor knowledge or exercise of sensorimotor knowledge (or both) that is required for perception.

    In the passage I cited, it is exercise, but in the one you cited it is more like possession.

    I agree with you that the exercise view is the one that is more radical and more in keeping with the polemical character of Noe's books.

    There are also times when Noe and O'Regan seem to me to take a loose interpretation of what it is to exercise a skill according to which exercising a skill is not supposed to be anything more than possessing the skill. Here:

    But ntoe that though we identify the sensation with a pattern of skillful activity, one can have the sensation even when one is, at the moment, inactive. ... We can exercise our mastery of the sensorimotor contingencies that signal the presence of redness without actually blinking, or moving our eyes or our bodies with respect to the red patch. This exercise consists in our practical understanding that if we were to move our eyes or bodies or blink, the resulting changes would be those that are typical of red, and not of green patches of light." (O'Regan & Noe, 2001, p. 84)

    In the last sentence, it sounds like "exercise" doesn't mean exercise, it means possess.

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  6. Too bad dreaming and hallucinations kills his pet theory.

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  7. Why would dreaming or hallucination be a problem here? Our knowledge that something is round, following 'action in perception' is not because a round image is projected on the retina, but because we can predict how our sensory contact with the round thing would change as we move a little this way or a little that way. This is the application of sensorimotor knowledge without requiring action, though to gain this knowledge in the first place did require action. This seems to allow for some kind of simulation hypothesis: I can imagine / predict the outcome of an action, and can use that outcome to simulate further action and so on, thus I can imagine walking the path from my house to my work or whatever. Similarly dreaming would not present a problem on this view as it remains embedded in the exercise of sensorimotor knowledge NOT the exercise of action itself.

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  8. Anthony, the example of exercising sensorimotor knowledge by simulating is a helpful example.

    I also see that this is a strategy for avoiding the problem of dreaming, hallucinations, and paralysis. But, there are times when Noe appears to require more than just the exercise of sensorimotor knowledge in this foregoing sense. How can one reconcile this idea with Noe's claim that

    "What perception is, however, is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity on the part of the animal as a whole." (Action in Perception, p. 2).

    It is passages like this, I think, that confuse me and, perhaps, Kris and Blue Devil Knight. Isn't the exercise of sensorimotor knowledge in simulation something that could be performed by the brain alone?

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  9. Here, I think Ken is exactly right.

    In my view, Noë wants to have his cake and eat it too. That is, he wants to claim that skillful action is partly constitutive of perceptual experience/content, while also maintaining that various forms of paralysis do not result in any perceptual deficiency. This results in an ambiguity over how SK is exercised, and this ambiguity manifests itself in some of Noë’s own examples (I think)…

    Held & Hein Kitten Experiment:
    “The passive kitten’s visual experience is abnormal; this is explained by the fact that, harnessed as it was, the kitten was unable to acquire certain sensorimotor knowledge. It is noteworthy, however, that this passive kitten was not blind. This is not surprising. There’s good reason to believe that it had sensorimotor knowledge in a substantial degree, for example, a skillful grip on the effects of eye and head movements” (p. 234, f. 9, AIP).

    • So is bodily skill necessary for the acquisition of SK?
    • If so, in which way is bodily skill also necessary for the exercise of SK?

    The Quadriplegic:
    “To experience a thing as being on the left is to experience it as occupying a relation to one defined by possibilities of movement. This is compatible with its being the case that someone who is incapable of movement could have perceptual experience as of something on the left. What is ruled out is the possibility of someone who lacked all sensorimotor comprehension having experiences with spatial content (or, for that matter, any content)” (pp. 90-91, AIP).

    • If bodily skill is necessary for the acquisition of SK, then how does the quadriplegic come to have the requisite body of knowledge for ordinarily robust visual experience?
    • Assuming this condition is congenital, why does the kitten suffer from abnormal vision, but not the quadriplegic?
    • Does this mean that SK can be exercised hypothetically, as a kind of expectation or simulation?

    The Pianist:
    “He [the pianist] may retain all sorts of cognate knowledge – relevant to the description, critical evaluation, or teaching of how to play a piece of music – but when he lost his arms, he lost his know-how. For the knowledge was, precisely, arm dependant” (p. 121, AIP).

    • So now the exercise of SK is somehow dependant on bodily movement?
    • If so, what principled difference is there between this case, and the cases of the kitten and the quadriplegic?

    From my reading, Noë’s application of SK seems to change depending on the concerns he is trying to address. Does anyone else agree, or am I missing something important here (a likely possibility)?

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  10. What is clear is that Noe's position is not clear.

    Ken: Isn't the exercise of sensorimotor knowledge in simulation something that could be performed by the brain alone?

    "dream experiences depend only on what is going on in the head. The further claim -that all consciousness arises out of the action of the brain alone- does not follow" (p. 178, OOOH)

    There is clearly a tension here, the brain is important and necessary and sufficient only for some aspects of consciousness.

    Anonymous: So is bodily skill necessary for the acquisition of SK?

    Yes, absolutely, and in the Held & Hein experiments the cats could move their eyes and so gained this experience. Further experiments by Buisseret and Imbert (1976) demonstrate the devastating effects of complete immobility on visual development.

    Anonymous: If so, in which way is bodily skill also necessary for the exercise of SK?

    I would interpret all bodily skill as the exercise of SK.

    Anonymous: If bodily skill is necessary for the acquisition of SK, then how does the quadriplegic come to have the requisite body of knowledge for ordinarily robust visual experience?
    • Assuming this condition is congenital, why does the kitten suffer from abnormal vision, but not the quadriplegic?
    • Does this mean that SK can be exercised hypothetically, as a kind of expectation or simulation?

    The quadriplegic, like the cat, is able to act in the world and so gain SK appropriate to quadriplegics own body, just as you gain SK appropriate to your own body. I would not expect the perception of the quadriplegic to match your perception, but then again I wouldn't expect my own perception to match yours either, we have different bodies and different histories, so we differ. The kitten does not suffer from abnormal vision in the Held and Hein example, the kitten can see just fine (as Noe indicates in the quote given). What the Kitten can't do is use that vision to guide it's walking behaviour, the two have been decoupled, which is not surprising as it has no experience of doing that.

    I would say that SK can be exercised hypothetically, as a kind of expectation or simulation. It seems Noe must grant this but also that he doesn't think all experience can be simulated in this way: "I reject the idea that all experience can occur in a dream" (p. 178, OOOH).

    Anonymous: So now the exercise of SK is somehow dependant on bodily movement?

    I think this relationship is complicated, I interpret Noe as saying something like Knowledge and skill are one and the same thing and so by removing the pianists arm thereby removing the ability to perform the skill, the knowledge is removed also. Now this might sound strange at first but we must understand that the pianist is not a novice playing the piano by following rules, the pianist has learnt not to play this note at that time, but rather that the hand flows in such a way. I'm sure the pianist could dream or imagine playing having already gained the SK, BUT the experience in dreaming is not the same and such SK will atrophy over time.

    At least thats my take on it

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  11. "dream experiences depend only on what is going on in the head. The further claim -that all consciousness arises out of the action of the brain alone- does not follow"

    That was the one and only section of the book I read, I must admit (I know, with these embodied perception folks, to go directly to dreams and hallucinations to see if I should waste more time on them). I was disappointed as usual.

    Sure, it doesn't follow that all experience is neural. But it follows that it could be. Why isn't waking perception basically like dreaming, but controlled by stimulation of sensory transducers? That seems to be a quite reasonable hypothesis.

    Anthony's ideas seem charitable and interesting, perhaps better thought out than Noe's on dreaming.

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  12. Hi Blue Devil Knight,
    It would be a shame to evaluate embodied perception on dreaming alone.

    Perhaps a weaker position than Noe's would suggest that just as passive dynamic walking demonstrates how complex computational tasks can be offloaded into the body, that the complex tasks involved in our perception of the world can also be partially offloaded into the world. Following this one might further suggest that biology has evolved to take advantage of this and actively bring about the conditions in which this can happen. From this perspective an understanding of how the brain works must include an understanding of our embodiment and our relation to the environment.

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  13. Anthony: excellent points. My main problem is with extreme views in which literally, to perceive at time t, you must be engaging in some skillful behavior. Other than that fairly extreme view (which Noe often seems to hold, and which Merleau Ponty often seemed to hold), there is a lot of good to be found. Clearly normal waking perception is an active process, and the implications of this fact haven't been sufficiently unpacked.

    As for the orthogonal extended mind thesis, I am agnostic and don't feel competent enough to have a strong opinion.

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  14. Anthony, BDK,

    If one holds the extreme view according to which, to perceive at time t, you must be engaged in some kind of skillful behavior, what do you say about cases where one is apparently sitting absent-mindedly and then a sudden short loud noise or short bright flash of light leads to an orientation behavior?

    It looks to me as though this is a clear case of having a perceptual experience in the absence of any kind of action. In sounds like a case of perceptual experience "in a flash". What do they say about this kind of case?

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  15. Hi Ken,

    As primitive as it may seem, I'd say any orientation behaviour is a case of skillfull application of SMK. Noe talkes about our perception of a visual scene being in contrast with evidence that we see in detail only a very small area (a thumb nail at arms lenth). We percieve sonething out of that area largely because we know what to expect if we looked over there. Similarly localising a sound or flash and orienting to it can be thought of in this way.

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  16. Hi Anthony,

    I am happy to count the orientation behavior as a case of skillful application of SMK. But, my worry is based on what happens just prior to that, on what triggers the orientation behavior. A bright flash of light seems to cause a perception that, in turn, leads to the exercise of SMK.

    How does this go on Noe's theory?

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  17. I find that Noe's position is more plausible if looked at through the lens of Hurley here:
    http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/S.L.Hurley/papers/Varieties_of_externalism.doc

    She anticipates some of the objections in these comments. I still don't agree with it, but the general dynamic sensorimotor approach to perceptual experience is more difficult to defeat after Hurley.

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