Abstract
In this part, we presume a world which is much as our experience seems to reveal but which incorporates the resources of contemporary neurophysiology, where there are phenomenal colors splashed over things and neurons in our heads. Neurophysiological resources are deployed, along with phenomenal colors, in the coherently conceivable but not ultimately plausible account of the realization of our experience developed in Chapter Twelve. And they are the primary resources deployed in the apparently plausible account of the realization of thought beyond experience developed in Chapter Thirteen, an account which fits not only the coherently conceivable account of experience developed in Chapter Twelve, but also the more plausible accounts pursued in Part Three.
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Notes
Note that I say sensation and sensory input, not sensory experience. The point of this distinction will become evident.
The following exposition is standard, and underwritten by standard introductions to neurophysiology. Of special interest to philosophers are Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy, and Patricia Churchland and Terrence Sejnowski, The Computational Brain(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) is cheaper. See also Neil Carlson, Physiology of Behavior(Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1977), E.R. Kandel, J.H. Schwartz, and T.M Jessell (editors), Principles of Neural Science,third edition (Norwalk, CT: Appleton and Lange, 1991), and C. Koch and J.L. Davis (editors), Large-Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). The September 1992 issue of Scientific Americanis an interesting collection of popular essays by leading figures.
The scare quotes are motivated by the worry that it may be a mistake to think that the content of our thoughts, even of our experience, is to identified with any information we “process”.
See J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1988) and Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991) for discussion of ways in which this sort of mechanism may be important.
See Churchland and Sejnowski, The Computational Brain, 239–329, for a summary of recent work on neural plasticity.
D.O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949).
For a relevant discussion, see Robert Batterman, “Theories Between Theories”, Synthese 103, 1995, 171–201.
One excellent review of the history of association principles is Geo. Croom Robertson, “Association”, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume II (Chicago: The Werner Company, 1894), 730–734.Classic references include David Hartley, Observations on Man(Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966), and Sir William Hamilton, Note D** and Note D***, in The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D.(Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1852), 889.
It will be more efficient if for the moment I ignore the remarks in Chapter Three that certain metaphysical distinctions invoked by this claim are mere artifacts of the approach apparatus.
Except for the constraint that thoughts like ours must be rooted in the presence of experience.
Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality.
Someone might argue, collapsing quasi-experience of the sort we will discuss in the next chapter into experience, that we only have one of these at any moment. However, I think that we have at least some reason to cordon off quasi-experience from experience, in the way suggested in the next chapter, and also cordon off the words we hear in the mind’s ear from other sorts of “imaginings”.
Clearly, if all there was to everyone’s psychology was the same function from experience to behavior then thoughts wouldn’t be very interesting. Inner experience does differ from person to person depending on their history, even when they are in the “same” situation. We say different things to ourselves, and our hunger differs. But also people are often in intuitively different psychological states when there is no difference in what they are aware of. Occurrent thoughts do not take us all the way we need to go here. Virtual thoughts play, I think, a crucial role.
See for instance Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
One puzzle about this is how some of our imaginings are memory images and some mere fantasy. I think there are at least two elements of the difference. We can recognize certain images as memories of certain kinds. But memory images are also less arbitrary than fantasy, less at the command of an arbitrary will.
This ignores certain complexities to which we will return in Chapter Thirteen.
These primary thoughts are only potentially unstable because firing patterns may persist for long periods.
J.L. Mackie, “Causes and Conditions”, American Philosophical Quarterly 2, 1965, 245–264.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Mendola, J. (1997). Resources. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_11
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