Friday, October 17, 2014

Is Bor a Metaphysicist?

This blog post will be split into two parts. First, I will present my view that Bor has not created a scientific argument in his book The Ravenous Brain, but a philosophical one. In the second part of my blog post I will connect Bor’s argument with an article written recently for The New York Times and show how they complement each other.
Firstly, when I say Bor’s main argument is philosophical and not scientific, I am not intending to insult him! Philosophy is a tool that we can use to help satiate curiosity when we are drawn to patterns that are not scientifically verifiable. It is my view that Bor is engaging in the field of philosophy known as metaphysics in order to explain the patterns he sees in neuroscience, psychology, and biology.
Let me first give a brief definition of metaphysics, then I will link this discipline to Bor’s work. Metaphysics is problematic to define because it has had different instantiations since it was first written by Aristotle, but for this blog post I will give a broad definition: Any theory dealing with patterns that apply universally and are abstract in nature (and so not empirically verifiable). Here is an example to illustrate this definition: Zoroastrianism holds that all existence is a struggle between good and evil. This is a metaphysical theory because (1.) the notions of good and evil apply to everything, even a particular hydrogen atom, and (2.) good an evil are abstractions and so impossible to discern based solely on the experience our five senses give us. Metaphysical systems are not guided by the trial and error of experiments coupled with reworked hypotheses, but by introspection and reason. It is true that Bor cites an ample amount of experiments in his book, but these experiments are only used to support his system in various ways, there are no experiments cited that test his central theory.
To the best of my knowledge, Bor’s central thesis proceeds as follows. He begins with the undeniable fact that different molecules possess different properties, and that these properties react differently to the same environment. He states that when these molecules are able to reproduce themselves with similar traits, this constitutes evolution[1]. But then he makes the leap to metaphysics. He links evolution to the selection among ‘ideas’:
 “From this schematic of how all life evolved on this planet, there is a hidden agenda, namely, the blind ‘need’ to accurately represent the relevant features of the world.”[2]
“Consciousness… evolved, like almost everything else in nature, in an incremental way, and is intimately linked to the universal blind biological enterprise of accurately capturing useful ideas.”[3]
There are a couple things to point out here. First, the representation of ideas applies to (“almost”) everything in nature (it is unclear why he uses the qualifier). Second, there was no empirical evidence cited to support either the claim that something as simple as molecules ‘represent’ features of the world, or the claim that evolution possesses this “need” (sic) essentially (the title of this section is The Essence of Evolution).
What does he mean when he talks about representations and ideas (he seems to use the terms synonymously) that “almost everything” in nature possesses? He informs the reader in a separate paragraph enclosed in parentheses.
“At this stage, I should stress, I’m not assuming any consciousness whatsoever in any organism except for humans-terms like ‘beliefs’ and ‘ideas’ are meant as a kind of shorthand to describe creatures that internally represent a certain informational perspective about the world, but without any requirement for awareness of those representations.”[4]
To sum up what we have gone through so far, evolution essentially possesses a hidden agenda that is present in almost all of nature to represent the world to itself. This representation occurs internally to the object, and does not assume an awareness of this representation (a representation that exists internally to an object of which that object has 0-awareness would be very difficult to test for). An example he gives of ideas is “a strong chemical bond to a rock wall”[5], to give you a sense of what he means. Ideas alone are not sufficient for evolution to occur, the best ones must also be selected for. The word for this process is ‘learning’[6]
Bor understands consciousness as a product of this evolutionary drive to represent ideas and learn from which ones work and which ones don’t. Consciousness has its own enhanced form of learning that non-conscious objects do not possess. Consciousness is a product of evolution because it provides an organism with a risk-free workspace to mold, attempt, and learn new ideas[7]. The rest of this paragraph will briefly summarize how Bor accounts for learning and information processing in consciousness. In our brains, neurons electronically compete with each other to decide which chunk of information should populate our attention[8]. This gives rise to our working memory, which Bor roughly defines as the chunks of our attention that are presented to us as conscious thinkers[9]. Bor admirably notes that although our working memory is limited to four objects, the complexity of each of these objects does not seem to have as strict a limit.[10] Bor then develops a concept he calls chunking. There are basically two stages[11]: the first where “attention is spread wide and thin”[12]. In this stage we don’t really understand something as much as we intuit it. We are overwhelmed by a multiplicity of stars, to borrow his example[13], but we have not yet understood something about them. Understanding comes in the next stage, where we focus on a subset of the multiplicity, stars in this instance, and create a ‘chunk’ that represents a pattern of the subset in question. When we do this, many of the aspects of what we were originally presented with fade away, having been deemed superfluous by our attention. Bor proceeds from this to eventually describe humans as the only animals with access to “pyramids of meaning”[14], which refers to how we are able to build complex meaningful structures by chunking together bits of information, and then chunking together those chunks.
               This is how I understand the central theory to the book The Ravenous Brain. I would now like to show why I think this argument is metaphysical. Bor, by my reading, is suggesting that all of nature has an ideal dimension to it, and that evolution is essentially a competition for reproduction between these ideas. Our conscious minds lie with the rest of nature on an evolutionary continuum of learning, and so the entirety of our mental lives follows the formula of pattern seeking. Working memory, skepticism, pyramids of meaning; these are evolutionary tools we use in our conscious workplace to forge ideas. Let’s return to the two requirements for a metaphysical argument which I outlined at the beginning of this post. First: does this theory apply universally?[15] The answer is yes, this theory asserts that (almost) all of nature is ideal and possesses an internal representation of the outside world (I will say again, it is unclear to me what Bor meant by ‘almost’. He later describes how simple molecules are ‘ideas’, so what would be excluded?) The second requirement: is this theory empirically verifiable? Or does it refer to patterns beyond our five senses? The answer to this is that this theory is not empirically verifiable. Bor’s theory posits an idea corresponding to every object. Every object is supposed to possess an idea internally, but not necessarily be aware of this idea[16]. Bor cites a great number of studies that help support a number of claims he makes, but none will be able to verify his central thesis: that consciousness evolved to be pattern seeking because evolution is a battle of ideas. Metaphysical systems are useful if they help us understand something we do not yet have a firm grasp of, but they cannot correctly be thought of as possessing the rigor of science.
The second part of my blog post will deal with an article from the New York Times entitled Are We Conscious?[17]In this article, professor of psychology and neuroscience Micheal Graziano outlines his theory about attention and awareness. Recall that for Bor, attention is the neuronal war of electronic excitations, and awareness is the base level of conscioussnes corresponding to the strongest neuron signals[18]. Professor Graziano holds the same definitions of attention and awareness, and we shall see that his theory can be used to complement Bor’s. Graziano argues that a self, or subjective impression, is not a real thing, but an illusion created by the relation between attention and awareness. He starts by saying that we possess receptor organs that gather information about physical phenomena. This information is then sent to our neurons causing our neurons to fire (this corresponds to our attention). Our awareness reconstructs these physical phenomena into intuition of a presentation of the world. So we do not only process wavelengths, we also see color. Bor’s theory can be used to complement Graziano’s to help answer the question, why is it we see color and process wavelengths like a computer? Bor might say this: our brain evolved so that is can recognize and chunk patterns and then make pyramids of meaning out of them. Our awareness converts the neuron signals corresponding to physical wavelengths into the colorful world we are familiar with so that we can better deal with the information presented to us. Our awareness streamlines information. If we were presented with too much detail we would be overwhelmed and be unable to recognize patterns that might aid us. This falls in line with Bor’s discussion about chaos and structure in Chapter 1. Our awareness is a mediator between the chaos of too much information and the structure of too little, leaving our consciousness with enough information to recognize new patterns, and filtering out the information that threatens to overwhelm our faculties.    



[1] Pg. 38
[2] Pg. 37
[3] pg. 36-37
[4] Pg.39
[5] Pg.39
[6] Pg.62
[7] Pg.194
[8] Pg. 124
[9] Pg. 135-136
[10] Pg. 138
[11] Pg. 144
[12] Pg. 143
[13] Pg. 143
[14] Pg. 219
[15] To put that in more traditional philosophical terms, does this theory deal with Being?
[16] Extrapolating a bit, I suppose that ideas as we are conscious of them are of the same kind as ideas that nothing is conscious of, as Bor would have it.
[17] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html?_r=0
[18] Pg.125

No comments:

Post a Comment