Archive for the ‘psychology’ Category
Monday, January 16th, 2012
We are born into this world profoundly alone, our strange, unbounded minds trapped in our ordinary, earthwormy bodies—the condition that led Nietzche to refer to us, wonderingly, as “hybrids of plants and of ghosts.” We spend our lives trying to overcome this fundamental separation, but we can never entirely surmount it. Try as we might, we can’t gain direct access to other people’s inner worlds—to their thoughts and feelings, their private histories, their secret desires, their deepest beliefs. Nor can we grant them direct access to our own. [Schulz, 2010, p 252]
The feeling of separateness from other people, so eloquently expressed by Kathryn Schulz in her book, Being Wrong, is rooted in a theory which almost all of us learn at our mother’s knee between the ages of three and six—the theory of other minds.
Human beings are self-conscious creatures. Your brain supports a model of the world, part of which is a model of yourself. When you were around four, your self-model became sophisticated enough to support a secondary, higher-level model—a model of your model of the world, and within that, a model of your model of yourself. You began to draw the subjective-objective distinction. Or to put it more simply, as Kathryn Schulz has, you realized you could be wrong about things. Reality was not always the way you perceived and believed it to be. (more…)
Tags: Kathryn Schulz, privacy, Theory of Other Minds
Posted in consciousness, Damasio, Dennett, Gallese, Kathryn Schulz, Keysers, mirror neurons, other minds, Perner, psychology, Rizzolatti, Wimmer | No Comments »
Friday, December 30th, 2011
Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons began, “Many of us want to know what we have most reason to do.” He aimed to establish a foundation for ethics, a project which required addressing the conflicts between morality and self-interest. In asking what the claims of self-interest really are, Parfit came to grips with the question of whether or not there is a rational basis for the special concern that persons feel for themselves. Although Reasons and Persons did not answer that question, Parfit tried to show that the Self-Interest Theory—which claims that each person has the “supremely rational ultimate aim: that his life go, for him, as well as possible”—is false.
Parfit went on to write On What Matters, following an honoured tradition of searching for a kind of Unified Field Theory of ethics—one law, from the correct application of which all moral precepts can be derived. Reasons and Persons famously argued that personal identity is not what matters in survival; and it is surely not coincidental that the phrase “what matters” recurred in the title of Parfit’s new book. Normative ethics consists of giving reasons for action; and reasons for action matter. Because the survival of persons is very important, what matters in survival can be presumed to be a significant part of what matters.
On What Matters says little about personal identity. Parfit’s primary interest is in discovering reasons for action—a rational basis for decision-making. My primary interest is in gaining a better understanding of human nature—of what we are. Parfit’s work is driven by prescriptive aims, mine by descriptive ones. Parfit and I would probably agree that reasons for action are rooted in values. But where he asks what has value, I ask what people actually value, and—a more interesting question—why they value what they do. (more…)
Tags: rationality, self-interest, what matters
Posted in Dennett, egoism, John Perry, morality, On What Matters, Parfit, prudential concern, rationality, Reasons and Persons, self interest, self-concern, The Extreme Claim | No Comments »
Friday, December 9th, 2011
In t
he war of ideas, the philosophy of personal identity is gradually giving way to the science of human motivation. As we come to a fuller understanding of how and why we tick, from neurological, evolutionary, and ethological perspectives, the puzzles of personal identity that have perplexed thinkers since Locke’s day become less puzzling. In this journey from paradox to plain understanding, perhaps the most important single step is to abandon the idea that anticipation of experience is rationally required.
Giving up that idea is like giving up geocentrism—the belief that motion is defined with reference to the unmoving earth. When people started to see the earth as just another moving object, man was displaced from the centre of the universe. Many were unsettled and alarmed by this idea. Those with a vested interest in the status quo actively suppressed the Copernican revolution. But the idea has proven itself. We now find it liberating and empowering, no longer a threat. It has given us a better understanding of the real world, and has helped enable useful technologies.
Giving up the idea that one’s relationship to oneself is privileged—that self-interested action is sanctioned by a special class of prudential reasons which have no application to one’s actions on behalf of other people—boots the self from its central position in the rational arena. When we see how things are, that anticipation of future experience is just something we do—not justified by any special relation between us and our future selves, because the relations we have to our future selves are the same kinds of relations we have to other people—then our strongly-motivating self-concern no longer has the whip hand. We can take charge of our own motivation. (more…)
Tags: anticipation, evolution, sympathy
Posted in anticipation, evolution, self-concern, sympathy | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
The Apparent Rationality of Prudential Concern
Consider the following apparently straightforward inference:
I do not expect to die soon. Therefore I expect to be alive in the future. I expect I will have experiences in the future. I anticipate having experiences in the future. Because experiences can be pleasant or unpleasant, I have reason to care about the quality of those experiences.
Notice the flow of argument: from a straightforward prediction of fact—that my death is not imminent—and the seemingly innocuous observations that persons persist through time, that persons have experiences, and that experiences vary in quality, to the conclusion that I have a reason to care about the quality of my future experiences. The steps in the argument seem innocent and deeply familiar. These ideas are so closely linked as to seem inseparable.
I suggest they seem inseparable because the core concept of a person is that of a subject of experience that persists through time. Because experiences can be pleasant or unpleasant, we think a subject has reason to care about their quality in the future.
By “subject of experience” I just mean whatever has experiences. I am not claiming that the concept of a person is that of a Cartesian ego, or a spiritual substance, or a biological organism, or its brain, or any sort of psychological entity. I claim only that the concept of a person is of something that has experiences. This claim is uncontroversial.
The above argument illustrates how a motivational idea—having a reason to care about something—can be embedded in what appears to be a straightforward factual description. (more…)
Tags: anticipation, Parfit, The Extreme Claim
Posted in anticipation, Cartesian ego, David Lewis, human replication, motivation, Parfit, prudential concern, Raymond Martin, Reasons and Persons, self interest, self-concern, subject of experience, teleportation, The Extreme Claim, unselfishness, Williams | 1 Comment »
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Paradigm Shift
I do not expect a theory of personhood to match all our pre-reflective philosophical intuitions, even if deeply considered and strongly felt (especially if strongly felt!) for two reasons: (1) our best intuitions on this subject are demonstrably unreliable, and (2) billions of otherwise sane and competent people hold beliefs about personal identity which are unsupported by empirical evidence, but to which they have strong emotional attachment. These two facts strongly suggest that there is something wrong with what we are naively inclined to believe about our identity. Hence we should not be surprised to find that a satisfactory solution, when it is found, will at first seem counter-intuitive. (more…)
Tags: evolution, Kuhn, neuroscience, paradigm, personal identity
Posted in Capgras, Cotard's, evolution, Kuhn, Metzinger, motivation, neuroscience, Open Individualism, Parfit, personal identity, psychology, Ramachandran, Reasons and Persons, self-concern | No Comments »
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
We cannot understand the self by examining people in isolation. Too many important aspects of personhood only appear in a social context.
Thomas Metzinger’s work describes the self-model in which our ideas about ourselves are rooted. The model is (usually) transparent, in that we operate through it without (usually) any awareness of a distinction between the model and the underlying reality. It is a model to which we have a profound emotional attachment—most of us care, deeply, about ourselves in the past, present, and future. As a result, our self-models are motivational. They spur and shape our actions. We evaluate possible courses of action by putting our self-models through various simulations, and responding emotionally to the different outcomes we imagine. The research of Antonio Damasio has begun to show how our emotions must inform our executive decision-making processes in order for us to make what are commonly recognized as ‘rational’ decisions.
Most of what Metzinger and Damasio have to say about the self is as true of isolated individuals as of human beings immersed in society. But a case can be made that the concept of the self could only have emerged in a social context. I have argued that our concepts, particularly the entities recognized by our ontology, reflect what is important to us. The spatio-temporal boundaries between ‘things’ are artificial, not natural; they do not exist in nature, but are imposed upon nature by human beings. A person is an entity whose boundaries roughly coincide with those of a human biological organism. A person is commonly considered to begin sometime around birth; sooner in some traditions, later in others. The person is usually thought to persist until biological death; but many people believe that it continues much longer than that; and some believe that if the organism is sufficiently damaged, then the person may cease to exist before its organism dies.
Among other things, a person is a unit of moral and legal responsibility—a bearer of enduring rights and privileges, duties and obligations, merits and demerits, assets and liabilities, debts and credits. Those attributes of individual persons result from, and depend on, the fact that individuals are members of a larger society. If a human being is isolated for a long time from other human beings, legal obligation disappears from his life, and moral obligation, if it does not entirely disappear, is vastly curtailed. I would not go so far as to say that an isolated human being ceases to be a person; only that certain central and important aspects of personhood simply disappear from his or her life. Having moral and legal rights and obligations is a central and important aspect of personhood. (more…)
Posted in Damasio, death, human replication, life insurance, Metzinger, morality, motivation, Parfit, personal identity, Reasons and Persons, self interest, self-concern, teleportation | 1 Comment »
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011
In the last chapter of Being No One, Thomas Metzinger addresses the questions with which he introduced the book, a list that includes:
What is phenomenal selfhood? What, precisely, is the nonconceptual sense of ownership going along with the phenomenal experience of selfhood, or of “being someone”?
In the discussion, he makes a striking comment related to the reality of the self. If the phenomenal self-model (PSM) is “of a nonhallucinatory kind”:
…the system then represents certain aspects of reality as being parts of itself, and it does so correctly. What it achieves is not only self-experience but self-knowledge. (Metzinger 2004, p 607)
In reading this passage, I wondered how Metzinger can reconcile it with his claim that ‘no such things as selves exist in the world.’ Here he says that the system represents itself to itself by means of its PSM, and that it does so “correctly.” Metzinger certainly admits that systems exist. Are we not, then, such systems? (more…)
Posted in dissolution of self, Metzinger, morality, phantom limb, phenomenal self-model, PSM, Ramachandran, rubber hand illusion, self interest, self-concern, Self-Model Theory | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
O
ur brains represent ourselves, to ourselves, by means of a Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM). According to Thomas Metzinger, the PSM is characterized by transparency, and a phenomenal quality of ‘mineness.’ Its transparency consists in our unawareness of it as a model. We look and act ‘right through it’ – we take our models for our real selves. ‘Mineness’ is a quality that infuses all of our experience which we take to be experience of ourselves. Although Metzinger uses the terms “mineness” and “ownership,” it is more than an experience of ownership. I think “me-ness” aptly captures what Metzinger is after. (more…)
Posted in anarchic hand, blindsight, consciousness, Cotard's, Dennett, dissolution of self, evolution, Hume, Metzinger, neuroscience, personal identity, phenomenal self-model, PMIR, PSM, Ramachandran, rubber hand illusion, self-concern | 5 Comments »
Saturday, March 5th, 2011
Being No One is a substantial work by German philosopher Thomas Metzinger about “consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective.” Its main thesis “is that no such things as selves exist in the world. Nobody ever was or had a self.”
I have spent some time with the book, making, from its 634 densely-printed pages, 104 pages of notes. After all that, I still question Metzinger’s ‘main thesis.’ But I have no doubts about the value of the book. It irrevocably raises the standard for what philosophy of mind must explain. In its early pages, Metzinger echoes Paul Churchland’s complaint, that “theoretical approaches to the mental, still intuitively rooted in folk psychology, have generated very little growth of knowledge in the last twenty-five centuries.” Being No One goes a long way towards burying that era. (more…)
Posted in consciousness, Cotard's, evolution, Metzinger, neuroscience, personal identity, phenomenal self-model, philosophy, PMIR, PSM, self, Trivers | 2 Comments »
Monday, January 31st, 2011
Rationality depends on emotion. A.R. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error – Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain reveals how the human ability to make rational, prudent choices fails unless it is supported by normal emotional responses. His findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom which portrays emotions as enemies to reason – impulsive forces which urge us to make poor choices, and which must be held in check by cool logic and deduction.
Damasio shows that rational behaviour results from a bottom-up process that begins with subconsciously learned emotional responses that can be detected in galvanic skin responses (GSR’s), and other physical signs. This unconscious learning preceeds, and helps to facilitate, cognitive learning.
Moreover, people require these learned emotional responses to make rational, self-interested choices, even after they have cognitively ‘figured out’ what choices are in their interests.
Both results seem counterintuitive, the latter most strikingly. Most people who consider themselves sane think that if they know what is in their best interests, they will choose accordingly. They won’t, says Damasio, unless that knowledge is supported by feeling. (more…)
Posted in Bechara, consciousness, Damasio, evolution, Libet, motivation, neuroscience, Ramachandran, self interest | No Comments »
