SHALLICE, T

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Commentary/Fuccetti & Dykes: Sensory cortex and the mind-brain problemHowever, the attack on reductionism comes from two quarters. One indeedis the misty idealism of the dualist position, which P & D refer to uneasily intheir conclusion. The second does not retreat from materialism buttranscends it; this is the method ignored by most western philosophy of mindover the past century: that of dialectical materialism. I do not argue that dia-lectics "solves" the mind/brain problem, or that its growth and developmenthas been without tremendous difficulties, both conceptual and political, inthe last fifty years, but I do claim that it provides a method for the develop-ment of a solution (see Lewontin and Levins 1976, for a clear statement ofwhat the dialectical method in biology involves). For dialectical materialismthe statement of identity offered by reductionism remains. Mind is brain, butat a different level of analysis and of discourse.To see how this slogan cashes in, in practice, consider the relationshipbetween the firing of particular hypothalamic cells and the experience ofanger. For the reductionist the firing of these cells causes the sensationcalled anger (in fact, it looks from their conclusion as if P & D's dualism canbe interpreted in this way too). For the dualist of the Penfield/Eccles ilk, themind, wishing to produce the manifestation of anger, causes thehypothalamic cells to fire, and the body responds according to automaticblind-pilot landing mechanisms.For the dialectical materialist (at least my sort of dialectical materialism)the firing of the hypothalamic cells is anger; that is, "anger" and the "firing ofparticular hypothalamic cells" are statements that describe the samephenomenon at different hierarchical levels of discourse. A description of thephenomenon is possible in either mind language or brain language. Eachlanguage system is valid and can be complete at its own level (the "cause"of the anger may be a perceived insult to the individual's experience; the"cause" of the hypothalamic cells' firing is the antecedent firing of certainother cells, inputs from the sensory systems, etc.). Mistakes emerge andconfusions arise when one tries to locate causes at one level in terms of con-sequences at another level. The task of neurobiology becomes the identifica-tion of the translation rules that map mind events onto brain events,psychology onto physiology-the discovery at each level of the necessary,sufficient, and exclusive correlates of events at the other. Such a task needsa cool conceptual head and a rigorous approach to experimentation in whichtheory and practice in the neurosciences become united.REFERENCESDelgado, J. M. R. & De Feudis, F. V. Behavioural N euro chemistry.Spectrum, New York, 1977.Lewontin, R. & Levins, R. In: H. A. Rose & S. P. R. Rose (eds.), The Radi-calisation of Science. Macmillan, London, pp. 32-65,1976.Rose, S. P. R. The Conscious Brain. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976.In: Ideology and Consciousness? (Forthcoming), 1978.& Rose, H. A. Cognition. 3:479-502,1974.by David M. BosenfhalDepartment of Philosophy, Graduate School and University Center of the CityUniversity of New York, New York, N.Y. 10036REFERENCENagel, Thomas. What is it like to be a bat?, The Philosophical Review.LXXXIII: 435-450,1974.by Tim ShaSIIcePsychology Department, The National Hospitals for Nervous Diseases, LondonWCIN3BG, EnglandAre the properties of cells relevant for understanding consciousness? Amaterialist can respond to the Puccetti & Dykes argument in two ways. A de-fensive approach is to counter their position on their own terrain, by showingthat the cellular anatomy of the brain is not incompatible with a materialistapproach. Arguments such as I, III, and V seem to me valid ones of this type.Yet it seems unlikely that a strong positive materialist argument on why con-sciousness should exist will be developed with this sort of approach.364 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1978), 3Text removed due to third party copyrightText removed due to third party copyrightCommentary/Puccetti & Dykes: Sensory cortex and the mind-brain problemHowever the argument by analogy from computer systems [VI] makes itclear that paradoxes, including that claimed by P & D, can arise because theproblem is being tackled at an inappropriate conceptual level. It is likely,though, that the hardware/software analogy over emphasizes the inde-pendence of the properties of the different knowledge systems relevant tounderstanding thought and the brain. As a generalization of the computeranalogy, consider the analogy between a map and a knowledge system (e.g.histology, phenomenology). If we take a broadly materialist position (and nota reductionist version of it such as that adopted by Armstrong 1970)the materialist/dualist debate can be mirrored in the problem of decidingwhether a collection of maps all represent the same part of the earth or dif-ferent parts. Even if the former, it is most unlikely that they could be placed ina linear string so that each map was "reduced" to the next; this would applyonly to maps that differed in scale alone. It could well be that one map (e.g. adetailed contour map) would show considerable similarities between tworegions that are represented very differently on another map (e.g. a vegeta-tion map). It would obviously be false to claim, after the fashion of P & D, thatthe maps represented different parts of the earth.Using this analogy, not only can a criticism of P & D be developed, butalso a model of how strong arguments for materialism could be formulated. Amore solid inference that such a collection of maps does represent the samepart of the earth could be obtained by finding a strong isomorphism betweencertain aspects of one map and another map, and so on, so as to construct anetwork of (partial) isomorphisms covering all maps. For any particular mapa crucial issue becomes whether there is any other map, already acceptedas part of the network, with which a (partial) isomorphism can be developed.The analogous question is whether, already within the domain of the ma-terialist approach, a (partial) isomorphism can be developed betweenphenomenology and any knowledge system.Strong candidates for the appropriate link system are the related dis-ciplines of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence [See Pylyshyn:"Computional models and empirical constraints" BBS 1(1) 1978; Haugeland:"The nature and plausibility of Cognitivism" BBS 1(2) 1978]. Cognitivepsychology is being increasingly given a materialist base through thedevelopment of the neuropsychology of memory, perception, and cognition.Over the last ten years there has been an extensive debate within cognitivepsychology on whether bridges can be built between some information-processing concepts and some phenomenological ones (see Mandler 1975op. cit. by Mandler; Shallice 1978). Four main positions have been ad-vocated. Some (e.g. Erdleyi 1974) have claimed that consciousness can beidentified with the contents of a short-term memory store. Others (e.g. Turvey1974) argue that it arises from active constructivist processes in perception.Posner and Klein (1973) have argued that it reflects the operation of a high-level limited-capacity system. Finally, I have claimed that consciousnessresults from the existence of system constraints necessary to ensure thecoherence of thought and action, and thus I attempted to explain, in addition,why consciousness should exist (Shallice 1972op. cit; 1978).The variety of theoretical positions adopted by cognitive psychologists onthis issue might suggest that no progress is being made. In fact a number ofthe differences between the positions may be removed by greater precisionin characterizing the phenomenological concepts being modelled. All thesetheories have in common, for instance, that visual experience does not"arise" in area 17. Given this, it follows that for all of them the paradox of P &D is immediately dissolved. Moreover, all these positions attempt to incorpo-rate a variety of nonintuitive empirical phenomena, so they are not merelytoken theories. Unless this sort of approach can be shown to be invalid, anyclaim for dualism will remain very inadequate.REFERENCESArmstrong, D. M. The nature of mind. In: C. V. Borst (ed.), The Mind -Brain Identity Theory. Macmillan, London, 1970.Erdelyi, M. H. A new look at the New Look: perceptual defence and vigi-lance. Psychological Review. 81:1-25,1974.Posner, M. I. & Klein, R. M. On the functions of consciousness. In: S.Kornblum (ed.), Attention and Performance Vol. 4 Academic Press,New York, 1973.Shallice, T. The dominant action-system: an information processing ap-proach to consciousness. In: K. S. Pope & J. L. Singer (eds.), TheStream of Consciousness: Scientific Investigations into the Flow ofHuman Experience. Plenum Press, New York, 1978.Turvey, M. T. Constructive theory, perceptual systems and tacitknowledge. In: W. B. Weimer & D. S. Palermo (eds.), Cognition andthe Symbolic Processes, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1974.by J. J. C. SmartDepartment of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, The AustralianNational University, Canberra, A.C.T. 2600, Australiaby Roger SperryDivision of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125Mentalist monism: consciousness as a causal emergent of brain processes.THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1978), 3 365Text removed due to third party copyrightText removed due to third party copyright

ARE THE PROPERTIES OF CELLS RELEVANT FOR UNDERSTANDING CONSCIOUSNESS

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ARE THE PROPERTIES OF CELLS RELEVANT FOR UNDERSTANDING CONSCIOUSNESS

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