Re: Quantum thought?

["A Nother" <unheardtune@hotmail.com>]

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Hey, you asked for some stuff to read that might be relevant to your 
question and interesting so....


The ideas you are interested in reminded me of a couple things you might 
want to read. The first is Andy Clark's Being There. The book looks at 
alternative ways of modelling the things the mind is capable of doing. 
Rather than thinking of it as some system which is 'run' by a central 
processor (one's rationality or conscious thought) it considers the 
plausibility of the idea that the appearance of such a thing is a property 
which emerges out of a dynamic system. Here's an example to illustrate the 
kind of thought (you may have heard this before, but then you should more 
readily take the point):

You may look at an ant, see it bump into a food pile, and then bring it back 
to the colony. Moments later, a large part of the colony has taken up the 
task of helping this one ant heaving the food back to the colony as a group. 
You may look at this and think, wow, they're communicating, they're 
exhibiting intelligence.

But this would be wrong. The discoverer any really just automatically 
dropped a chemical trail from the food source back to the colony - no 
consciousness or thought required. Then when other ants stumble upon the 
trail, they follow it back to the food source and do the same as the first 
ant - again, no consciousness, thought or deliberate organisation is 
required. The system is created out of things which are not represented at 
any higher level. The appearance of intelligence is an emergent property of 
the system as a whole.

The point of this is not 'holism'. It is the idea that out of processes 
which are not coordinated by some central planner (a leading ant, or a 
central part of the brain), the system can be set up so that it is self 
maintaining. Another example of the same idea is that of a virtual governor. 
But I won't go into that example. You can look it up if you're interested.

The reason why this might be of interest to the person who posed the 
question is that most of what goes on in one's mind one isn't aware of. And 
the idea expresed by Andy Clark (broadly called, 'dynamic systems theory') 
is to drop the conception of the mind as run by our conscious deliberations. 
This would tie in with what you were saying about our thoughts about our own 
thoughts effecting our thoughts. One could imagine such a process as an 
instance of a dynamic system - self maintaining. Clark even suggests this at 
one point when he asks the reader to think of written language not as some 
code of thoughts, but as an extension of one's working memory that orders 
thoughts as much as it records them. There's even an idea in psychology 
(although I should say, it's one that is doubted, although I can't remember 
why) that memories are not just accessed, but are recreated by the faculty 
of the mind that is used for imagination/conjecture. I.e. we're not just 
accessing 'files' but creating them out of sparse pieces of information.

And the  second thing that you might want to read is a paper by Patricia 
Churchland called, Language, thought and Information Processing. In the 
paper she questions the methods used by philosophers of language on the 
basis that most of what occurs in the mind cannot be characterised in terms 
of sentential operations. Very quickly in the mind, as we look at what 
underlies our natural linguistic capabilities we run not into more language 
(as say, Fodor might have it) but into causal processes that cannot and 
should not be characterised in terms of language (and thus conscious 
thought). You can get the paper off of jstor.

Alex

> From: Keith Wilson <kw503@york.ac.uk>
> To: BUPS-DIS@bups.org
> Subject: Re: Quantum thought?
> Date: 29 Nov 2005 11:30:27 +0000
>
> To reply to this message or start a new topic please email: 
> BUPS-DIS@bups.org
>
>
> It's an interesting thought...
>
> As I understand it, the reason why quantum mechanics exhibits these 
> characteristics (or at least one interpretation of it) is that it is 
> impossible to isolate a particular aspect of the universe (e.g. an 
> electron) from the rest of its environment, so the measuring equipment you 
> use to perform the experiment becomes part of the overall system being 
> tested and there is no longer any distinction between the observer and the 
> phenomena being observed. This implies that the universe cannot be analysed 
> into multiple independent parts, like a machine, but instead behaves as a 
> single unified whole, with each part affecting all of the others to a 
> greater or lesser extent. If this is true, it has some fairly fundamental 
> implications for metaphysics, not to mention the rest of philosophy, as it 
> challenges the very idea of an independent 'object' both at the macro- and 
> microscopic levels. (David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order is a 
> good and very readable introduction to these topics.)
>
> I'm not sure how much evidence there is that the brain (or at least the 
> parts that are involved in conscious thought) behave in a similarly 
> holistic way, but it wouldn't surprise me, and this would certainly explain 
> why limited progress has been made in identifying the various structures 
> and processes that are responsible. A good book I read on the subject 
> recently is Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by G Edelman and 
> G Tononi, and also How Brains Think by William Calvin, which has some 
> interesting stuff about the role of Darwinian processes in thinking and 
> consciousness (not sure if this is directly relevant, but it's interesting 
> stuff anyway...)
>
> Your post hits on another important point, which is that in studying the 
> mind in general, and consciousness in particular, philosophers have a 
> tendency to focus on logical or rational thought and language, often using 
> themselves as a model for study. To some extent this is inevitable when you 
> use rational thought and language as a tool for analysis, but it seems to 
> me that most of the action in the brain takes place at a sub- or 
> semi-conscious level, and so any philosophical account must also take these 
> into account (I'm thinking here of the ability to recognise complex 
> patterns, i.e. perception, and to associate thoughts and events with past 
> experience, i.e. memory and imagination). In a sense, conscious thought and 
> rationality may just be the 'froth on top of the waves' that cannot be 
> accounted for independently of the rest of the mind, and is again a part of 
> a single integrated whole. There seems to be an implicit assumption in some 
> philosophy, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence, that you 
> can somehow 'disconnect' rationality from the rest of mental life and model 
> it independently, but perhaps this view is just mistaken. In this case, we 
> don't need a theory of consciousness but a theory of mind in the broadest 
> sense that can explain conscious thought as just one of a range of mental 
> phenomena. What we are doing when we are thinking may indeed be very 
> different from what we are doing when we aren't, and so trying to give an 
> account of consciousness in isolation from other mental phenomena may be 
> the wrong place to start.
>
> OK, that's enough waffly speculation for one e-mail... Good topic for 
> discussion though. What do other people think about this?
>
> Cheers,
> Keith.
>
>
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