Noe gets around

First at Salon magazine here, then in a recent podcast on the Brain Science Podcast here. (The latter also has an interview with Patricia Churchland.)

Episode #36 here also has an interview with another of the EC folks, Arthur Glenberg.

Clark on Coupling-Constitution & Corporeal Consciousness

At the (very enjoyable) Metaphysics of Consciousness conference this past week at Edinburgh, Andy Clark gave a great talk, “Locating the Conscious Mind.” In it, he presented an interesting challenge to the thesis of the extended conscious mind (TXCM). Most striking to me was Clark’s willingness to invoke, first, something like a distinction between causation and constitution and, second, something like a “mark of the conscious”. This is a great development (from my perspective), since they are the kinds of ideas Adams and I have been pushing. It also represents a break from the kind of party line denial of the plausibility of a causation-constitution distinction one typically finds in the extended cognition literature. Clark also appreciates how these developments make his earlier views on extended cognition a bit less secure. (More good news from my perspective.) Alas, I was chairing the session, so I did not get to press Clark on these matters. But, readers of this blog will want to keep an eye out for Clark’s paper.

SPP & Extended Cognition Highlights

I'm still making my way home from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. The SPP had a good showing for extended cognition.

In a session on Embodied Cognition, Carlos Zedik of Indiana University, had a nice review of different sorts of dynamicist approaches to cognition in his “The Varieties of Dynamicism.” Such a review is helpful in breaking down the idea that there is just one moral one might draw from the application of the mathematics of dynamical systems in cognitive science.

David Michael Kaplan, WashU, tried to formulate a radical version of the embodied perception approach that does not rely on the claim that perception constitutively depends on action. I don’t think that he was entirely successful, but the problematic and its execution were clear. It begins as a way of trying to avoid the coupling-constitution fallacy.

Marcus Avran, U. British Columbia, presented a reply to Justin Fisher’s contention that everything mental is just in the head.

In a separate session, Rob Wilson discussed social cognition and extended cognition.

There were also two posters, one by Teed Rockwell, Sonoma State, and Shannon Spaulding, Wisconsin-Madison, taking Adams & Aizawa (and Rupert) to task. Zoe Drayson, Bristol, and George Theiner, Alberta, also had posters. (Alas, I didn’t get to talk with Zoe. I’m a conference slacker!)

So, SPP is extended cognition friendly and worth thinking about for presentations for next year.

Clark on the Mark of the Cognitive?

I started (once again) working through Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind. In Chapter 1, I was struck by the following:

The mathematics of a system of interlocking differential equations can (at least in simple cases) accurately capture the way two or more systems engage in a continuous, real-time, and effectively instantaneous dance of mutual codetermining interaction. But it is a burden insofar as it threatens to obscure the specifically intelligence-based route to evolutionary success. That route involves the ability to become apprised of information concerning our surroundings and to use that information as a guide to present and future action. As soon as we embrace the notion of the brain as the principal (though not the only) seat of information-processing activity, we area already seeing it as fundamentally different from, say, the flow of a river or the activity of a volcano.

This seems to me to point out that the dynamical systems approach to extended cognition needs to take into account a distinction between cognitive processes (which Clark here treats as information processing processes) and other non-cognitive causal processes. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, this is one way of making one of my favorite points, namely, that the advocates of ExCog in general need a plausible theory for distinguishing cognitive and non-cognitive processing. They need a mark of the cognitive.

Another Noe Question

Here is a simple Flash demo of amodal completion:

http://www.centenary.edu/philosophy/aizawa/amodal.

While the black square occludes the white thing, I do not, strictly speaking, see a circle, but I visually perceive a white circle. I think this is common ground.

Ok. Now, no matter how long I look at this demo-no matter how long I take in the sensorimotor contingencies this demo affords, (I’m assuming that) I will continue to visually perceive the white occluding thing as a circle. Contrary to what Noe seems to me to predict, we apparently have a case in which SMK does not influence my visual perception. Contrary to what Noe seems to me to predict, even though I expect that white thing to be revealed as a non-circle, I still visually perceive a circle during the maximal occlusion.

How about this?

Orig/Deriv pt 2nd: When I read, must the words I’m reading have meaning for me only derivedly?

When I read written text, I am using the representations in the text for their content. Could this content be original, as opposed to derived?

Different writers have made the distinction between original and derived content in different ways. For our purposes, it will serve to make the following two points about the distinction.

1. In general, a representation's content is supposed to be derived if it has that content by virtue of intentional agents' handling of the representation. In general, a representation's content is supposed to be original if it's not derived.
   
2. Whatever the distinction between original and derived content is, that which marks the distinction can be cast in terms of the present causal powers and dispositions of representations, and not just in terms of the histories of representations.
   

1), or something near enough, is true, I think, of all the original/derived distinctions that people have made over the years.

What about 2)? At least in the discussion over Extended Cognition, the original/derived distinction seems to be treated as what I'll call a technological distinction. Many people think that not all distinctions in Science need to be castable in terms only of present causal powers. (So, for example, many philosophers think that the distsinction between biologically functional and nonfunctional objects rests not on their present causal powers, but on their [for example, natural-selectional] histories. Two things could be causally identical, in causally identical environments, yet one be a heart, and the other fail to be a heart.) But if we are concerned to know what we can do now, what we can build, what we can do with this or that tool, then we are going to be concerned centrally about technological distinctions and not (directly) with scientific ones. I hope I've gestured sufficiently in the direction of "technological distinction" to give you an idea of what I mean by it. For a definition, I think it will do in a pinch to say that a technological distinction just is a distinction between kinds that can't be cast except in terms of present causal powers and dispositions.

As I said, in the discussion over Ex-Cog, it seems to me that the original/derived distinction is a technological one. On this very blog, for example, Adams began his response to my first orig/deriv post by making a claim about the significance of original intentionality for the project of building (my emphasis) a mind out of a machine.

But why have written texts been supposed to be paradigmatically derived in their intentionality and not original? One idea is that they have derived content because they have had their meanings assigned to them by a community of readers. But that is to mark a distinction based on history, not based on present causal powers or dispositions.

Another idea might be to claim that when we read, as we are reading, we are assigning meanings to symbols. But is this so? Possibly not. For though we must obviously represent words as symbols and choose which meanings to apply to them as we are learning to read, once we know how to read, it's not so clear that we are applying meanings to the text anymore. Rather, it may be that by learning how to read, we've made ourselves such that texts now simply trigger meanings, rather than our in any sense assigning those meanings as we read. The assignment happened in the past, as we were learning—but that in itself doesn't make the text's meaning "derived" in the sense relevant to the Ex-Cog discussion, relying as it does only on a consideration of the history of the habit of assigning that meaning to that symbol.

If a representation has meaning for an agent without that agent representing the representation as a representation and explicitly applying a meaning to that representation, then, I suspect, that representation has its meaning for that agent originally. And I also suspect that when we read texts in our native language with facility, the symbols in those texts have meaning for us without our representing those representations as representations or our explicitly applying meanings to those representations. I suspect these texts have their meaning for us "automatically" in a way which makes them, for us, original rather than derived meanings.

These posts always turn out longer than I expect. I want to invite discussion of what I've said so far, and in a few days, I'll follow up with reasons that I suspect that when we read written texts, they have their meaning for us without our representing them as representations and applying meanings to them.

Questions that could be discussed about the present post are the following. Am I right to insist that in the discussion about Ex-Cog, the original/derived distinction must be understood in terms of present causal powers? Am I right to suggest that what it means for something to have derived content for an agent in this sense is for the agent to be representing the representation as a representation to which it might apply any of a number of possible meanings? Can my use of terms like "trigger" and "assign" be sharpened in some way in order to make it clear whether I'm onto something or off my rocker? I've set up a dichotomy between representations having their meaning via representation as representation on the one hand, and on the other hand representations having their meaning "automatically" or by a simple "triggering" for an agent. Is this dichotomy valid? Or could there be other ways for representation to have their meaning, and which count as constituting a representation as having its content derivedly?

Noë and Norm

Since there has been so much interest and informed discussion of Noe, let me venture another post on this idea that perception depends on the possession, rather than exercise, of sensorimotor knowledge.

Here’s the opening move in an objection …

Consider, Norm, a normal college student who is familiar with the game of ping pong. Take two white ping pong balls and cut a ¼” hole in one of them Set the two ping pong balls side by side on a table and have the hole facing away from the door to an otherwise empty windowless room with standard incandescent lighting suspended from the middle of the ceiling. Let Norm enter the room at t0 and stand erect on a spot marked with an “X three feet from the ping pong balls. Given his past experience with ping pong balls, at t0 Norm believes that both ping pong balls are the same and that neither has a hole in it. Presumably at t0 the two ping pong balls look the same. They will give rise to the same ping pong ball like experience. One, of course, will be experienced as on the left and the other on the right, but they will be otherwise alike. But, how can this be on Noe’s theory? Norm possesses tacit sensorimotor knowledge of one of the balls, but possesses mere tacit sensorimotor beliefs about the other. Norm knows what will happen if he moves around to the other side of one ping pong ball, but does not know what will happen if he moves around to the other side of the other ping pong ball. Differences in one’s tacit sensorimotor knowledge should give rise to differences in experience (right?), but they presumably don’t. Call this the Problem of Naïve Norm.