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Re: Book Review: The Creative Mind

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Mmm, indeed. I love Ramachandran's enthusiasm and the Reith lectures in general. And it is of course interesting that some people work in artistic ways and others do not. But I'm not sure the neuroscientists can help us with this one.

Whether Boden's theory is inappropriately speculative or not depends on a couple of things. The first is whether I am right in reading her as making an empirical claim about minds rather than just proposing a model for creativity. If she were just modelling, speculativeness would be irrelevant - only instrumental results from the model would matter.

I think it is reasonable to assume Boden is making a real claim in her book, bearing in mind her point about teaching heuristics. You wouldn't expect teaching the axioms of a model (say, the programming principles behind a computer program that models seasonal affective disorder in the North East) to help with that which is being modelled (chronic depression is rarely lifted by coding computer programs). So since Boden does believe that teaching the axioms of her position (such as heuristics) will help creativity, it seems she must be making a claim about what is inside creative cognizers.

So she could indeed be inappropriately speculative.

But is she? It is central to a lot of work, not just Boden's, that no detail of physical realisation (which bits of grey goo in the head do what) are needed for a theory of mental function. That's because, following Putnam et al from the 60s onwards, most modern philosophy of the mental sciences (cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology etc.) works within the functionalist stance.

If you haven't come across this before it's best understood against the Australian-school mind-body identity theorists of the 1950s. They said that to be in a mental state X (pain, happiness, retail-therapy-induced daze) is to have a brain state Y (hippocampus stimulated just so, frontal lobes reacting like this, etc.). And, vice versa, the meaning of the physical state Y is the mental state X.

The problem with this is usually illustrated with C-fibres. There was a theory for a while that pain is about having the C-fibres in your brain activated. And the meaning of having C-fibres in your brain firing is pain. If we take it as given that such a theory is true, what are the consequences? Well, it means you can take a philosopher of mind who believes in mind-brain identity, strip out his C-fibres, replace them with something that transmits electrical pulses in exactly the same way (fibre optics, nanotechnology, Z-fibres, strawberry-flavoured bootlaces, whatever you can get to work), and here's the great bit - when he wakes up you can give him as much of a kicking as you like. No matter how much he screams and begs you to stop, you don't need to. He doesn't have any C-fibres so he can't be in pain.

The point is that almost anything you care to mention in a specific brain can be done in many other ways, or using other materials - there are even prosthetic neurons in one guy's head in America, and there are vast differences in the way certain things appear to be wired between one human and another. So the idea is that the functions of mind could be made to run on many different types of hardware, and the same physical activation state in similar types of hardware can mean many different things. This is multiple realisability.

If it doesn't seem very likely, try a thought experiment (originally from Searle who thinks this is all very bad bananas, but nevermind). We can already prosthetically replace single neurons and the brain operates the same. How about we replace one at a time until all of them have been replaced. This is just a difference in extent, the technology is already proven. You would end up with a brain running on whatever you made the prosthetics from. Now imagine replacing the prosthetic neurons with something else that carried signals at exactly the same speed, with the same branching etc - say a microchip, or small bits of wood and wire. Replace them one at a time. You've now got a brain running on wood and wire. The moral? Hardware is irrelevant - only functional relation between components matters.

So that's functionalism. So that's why Boden doesn't go into any brain details. Whatever she said would be wrong for many, many possible mental apparatuses (or some other latin plural of apparatus apparatus, um, i, o, o, i, os, orum, is, is). But it is true Ramachandran and others (Demasio, I think, off the top of my head) have started to question this functionalist stance and the principle of multiple realisability. Maybe validly.

But you've got to ask yourself - what could somebody like Ramachandran, even if his research projects became wildly more successful than they have been so far, tell us about mind? He could tell you 'this bit of the brain lights up in these subjects when they do this...' but other than correlation, what would this ever give you? A US Army survey found that the best correlation between all the factors in an officer's career and his eventual rank (eduction, background, race, speciality, etc.) was actually found with the expression on his face in his graduation photograph. This correlated something like 66% from concentrated to relaxed with high eventual rank to low. There's no causal story, though, so the correlation is just one of those things. Correlation does not give causation, and correlation is all you can get from neuroscience where mental states are concerned.

Of course, Nagel reckons that this is because Ramachandran et al just have the wrong kind of tools to even approach mental content, so their attempts to get to mind through brains are a priori doomed. But that's a different argument...

So just because Boden does not do brain details does not mean she is being inappropriately speculative, as it is currently understood. Because what would an account with brain details give you about mind that hers does not already?

This is not a settled argument, though. I have the feeling you've raised a point that will become hotly contested in the next few years. There does intuitively seem to be something more than a little circular in saying 'to be in pain is to have something fulfilling that function (a.k.a. pain) in your mental apparatus'. Seems less of a meaning, more of a redescription...

Puzzling stuff, mind...

Rab.


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