Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind

Michel Weber, Anderson Weekes

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781438429427
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This collection opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies. Approaching consciousness from diverse disciplinary perspectives—philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, neuropathology, psychotherapy, biology, animal ethology, and physics—the contributors offer empirical and philosophical support for a model of consciousness inspired by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Whitehead's model is developed in ways he could not have anticipated to show how it can advance current debates beyond well-known sticking points. This has trenchant consequences for epistemology and suggests fresh and promising new perspectives on such topics as the mind-body problem, the neurobiology of consciousness, animal consciousness, the evolution of consciousness, panpsychism, the unity of consciousness, epiphenomenalism, free will, and causation.

Part I

Setting the Stage

Part I consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, we introduce the Whitehead Psychology Nexus (WPN) and its scholarly mission. We briefly illuminate the background, motivation, and orientation of the present volume of the WPN Studies before addressing ourselves to some fundamental questions of terminology and method that bear on the heuristic approach to be found in these pages. Consciousness, we claim, is a phenomenon that resists anything but an interdisciplinary approach, while Whitehead-inspired process thinking offers an integrative heuristic that can bring coherence to multidisciplinary studies. We situate our approach in relation to some recognizable coordinates: empiricism, radical empiricism (in James’ sense), Phenomenology (in Husserl's sense), empirical science (with special reference to neuropathology and abnormal psychology), and critical doxography (which remains relevant to the extent that early modern European philosophy defined the phenomenon that we still refer to as consciousness). These preliminary remarks we follow with three introductory chapters dealing with the background and context of Whitehead's philosophizing. These chapters form a whole, but can also be read and appreciated separately. In turn, these examine (a) Whitehead's place in twentieth-century philosophy, (b) the origin of our Western concept of consciousness and the history of “consciousness” as a topic of European philosophical reflection, and (c) Whitehead's renegade approach to this venerable topic.

1

Process Thought as a Heuristic for Investigating Consciousness

Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes

Background, Motivation, and Orientation of the Present Volume of WPN Studies

The Whitehead Psychology Nexus (WPN) is an international scholarly society that takes its immediate mandate from issues important to contemporary philosophy and psychology, but seeks creative (possibly daring) solutions, drawing its inspiration from the process-oriented thinking that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which includes the thought of Henri Bergson, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James, but is most closely associated with the organic philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).¹ WPN promotes dialogue and is not shy of controversy. The present volume of the WPN Studies places consciousness at the focus of disciplinary cross-elucidation. It taps leading researchers and theorists in the study of consciousness and Whitehead scholars to explore an interface between process thinking and the burgeoning field of consciousness studies. The rationale for such a project has at least two facets worth mentioning by way of introduction. They have to do with the state of an educated debate that seems, first, unproductive and peculiarly burdened by its deep modernist origins and, second, marked more by disciplinary rivalry than interdisciplinary synthesis.

A good part of what fuels the current boom in consciousness studies is the robust progress of cognitive psychology and neuroscience toward reaching consensus explanations of just about anything except consciousness. Psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence have produced many astonishing results and upset many old beliefs. Nevertheless, it remains controversial what implications these discoveries have for a general theory of consciousness. Despite hopes that empirical research and computational modeling would constrain theory, consciousness (to judge from a literature in which the most cited figure continues to be Descartes!) is a topic that still lies wide open to speculation. Indeed, the literature is fond of noticing that the contemporary discussion is defined by the same set of theoretical options that became established in early modern philosophy, ranging from materialism to epiphenomenalism to various forms of attribute or substance dualism. Even idealism remains on the table if we include the extreme forms of social and linguistic constructionism, where the world-creating subject of traditional modern philosophy is replaced by the world-creating language or social praxis. In short, it seems that scholarly debate has not so much reached an impasse as remained at one reached in the seventeenth century. Given the massive effort currently invested in research and debate, the lack of progress toward a general (and generally accepted) theory of consciousness begins to make consciousness look like a kind of twenty-first-century Philosopher's Stone, whose hidden nature seems to hold the key to the greatest mysteries, but continues to elude us.

This situation explains one part of the rationale for the present volume. A philosophical intervention in the consciousness debate that does not take for granted the same assumptions that define and limit traditional approaches should not be unwelcome, especially if the goal is a more positive accommodation with empirical research than is achieved by many current models of consciousness. For example, an objection to functionalist models that will emerge from discussions in this volume is that they imply that consciousness per se has no evolutionary or even any cognitive value. If this assessment is correct, it is easy to see why empirical research in biology or psychology has had relatively little impact on the construction of theoretical models of consciousness and why the philosophical debate continues to be exercised by ideas that predate the very existence of psychology and biology as sciences. Because it provides ways to understand how consciousness has cognitive and evolutionary value, process thought has attracted the attention of a number of researchers whose work is featured or discussed in this volume.

Due to its continuing dominance within the discipline of cognitive psychology, functionalism looms largest over those who seek to reject it. In fairness, then, we should, here at the outset, give the reader some idea of the sorts of arguments and provocative suggestions she can expect from the later chapters of this book. How do our authors propose to deal with the vexed problem of the evolutionary value of consciousness, and why do we claim that this topic poses an insuperable problem for functionalism?

Consciousness could confer a selective advantage only if it enhanced an organism's ability to survive, allowing it to adapt better or more flexibly to its environment. But the computational paradigms of cognitive science have led us to the following impasse: any function, even biological ones, can in principle be executed mechanically; consequently, consciousness cannot be necessary to the performance of any function. In fact, any function consciousness appears to perform (unless perhaps it can do something “supernatural”) is superfluous since the underlying neural architecture is ipso facto already sufficient to enable this operation, leaving consciousness with no possible role to play. This conclusion follows directly from the computational understanding of a “function.” It is therefore impossible for conscious as such to have any function. What this finally means is that consciousness is not the sort of thing that could be selected for in the course of evolution: an evolutionary account of consciousness is impossible.

At the point where cognitive scientists arrive at the insight (as David Chalmers does; see 1996) that consciousness, whatever it is, cannot have any function or survival value—at this point we might want to step back and ask if we haven't taken a wrong turn. Since the conclusion follows inexorably from the computational paradigm according to which any function is by definition Turing machine computable, other ways of understanding neurocognitive function may prove to be well worth looking in to.

Neuropathology makes it clear that consciousness depends on the functional architecture of the brain, as damage to specific areas of the brain correlates with specific impairments of consciousness. But some of the phenomena of neuroplasticity adduced by Shields in his contribution (specifically, those that appear to result over time from the deliberate control of one's attention) suggest that the functional architecture of the brain is also, in part, dependent on consciousness! It is easy to see that neuroplasticity is something that could confer an evolutionary advantage, as it would allow for more adaptive behavior. But if, at least in some cases, neuroplasticity depends in part on consciousness, then these are cases where consciousness itself confers a selective advantage. It is certainly possible that the intervention of consciousness in the evolution of an individual brain's plastic infrastructure could turn out to be illusory—just a case of the brain affecting itself according to a predetermined neurofunctional program in which consciousness plays no causal role. But this is hardly a foregone conclusion.

Although it is often asserted as fact, it is by no means clear—and certainly not clear a priori—that any function the brain performs could indeed be achieved computationally (Putnam 1992). And even if a given function could be achieved computationally, it is not necessarily the case that it is achieved computationally. The role of quantum indeterminacy in synaptic activity (also discussed by Shields) and the peculiar causal role the “observer” plays in the collapse of the probability wave function (and hence in the calculation of further probabilities of synaptic activity) suggest a functional role for consciousness that does not fit neatly into the framework of computationalism, and this suggests one way that consciousness might confer a selective advantage.

Drawing on ideas of Karl Popper, David Griffin's contribution will suggest another way that consciousness might confer an evolutionary advantage: consciousness allows an organism to conduct thought experiments, that is, to try out possible strategies for survival without exposing itself to real risks, by imagining what their differential outcomes might be. The critical element here is counterfactual ideation. In effect, the organism poses the question: if I were to do such and such, then what? Behaviorism almost certainly cannot explain counterfactual ideation (it needs rather to deny its existence). What about cognitive science, behaviorism's heir to the mechanistic agenda in psychology? It seems unlikely that strictly computational functionalism, which is only interested in a program that generates real outputs from real inputs through real operations, could provide what Hilary Putnam (1992) calls a “perspicuous representation” of this peculiar process—the cognitive process of counterfactual ideation—and if it cannot, then we would have another good candidate for a neurocognitive function that confers an evolutionary advantage, but is not (and possibly cannot be) a computational function.

Now the question may be raised: what does that have to do with consciousness? Is there any reason why such a neurocognitive process must be conscious, seeing that most neurocognitive processes are not? Regardless of the conclusion one ultimately draws, here is a point where Whitehead's ideas could stimulate productive debate in contemporary cognitive science, for Whitehead claims—to a rough approximation—that counterfactual ideation is precisely what consciousness is. There is no need to add something to such a process to make it conscious, and nothing could be removed that would render it unconscious. If Whitehead is right about this, then Donald Redfield Griffin is entirely justified in his contribution to see evidence of counterfactual ideation in monkeys as evidence of consciousness.

For their part, Pachalska and MacQueen offer a comprehensive theory of brain function that is noncomputational. Consequently, in their account of consciousness as an activity or function of the brain, no conflict with evolutionary biology need arise. In fact, their account is altogether evolutionary. According to the model developed by Jason Brown, brain function in humans organizes progressively over three levels, corresponding to the evolutionary strata of the brain (brain stem, limbic system, and cortex, which correspond to the reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian brains). Activity occurs in a dense volley of overlapping waves that radiate from the phylogenetically oldest and anatomically deepest part of the brain, the brain stem, toward the youngest and outermost part, the neocortex. Consciousness is not so much the property of a system in a steady state, as something the brain brings about, moment by moment, through a microgenetic process (measured in milliseconds) that must unfold over all three levels. Continuity of phenomenal consciousness results from the overlapping waves of microgenesis.

Because this theory of brain activity is holistic, not modular, consciousness cannot occur at higher levels of activity without being implicated in some way at lower levels. Consciousness is only refined at higher levels; it does not arise de novo. This puts the question of the evolutionary value of consciousness in an entirely different light. Consciousness is not something purely cortical that attends to or even commandeers functions that are already executable unconsciously. Consciousness is integral to function because it is the overall unity of function that can be realized at one of three levels: wakefulness (facilitating globalized, essentially reflexive responses), emotion (facilitating more differentiated and purposeful responses), and articulated perception (facilitating separation of self from a world of enduring, independent objects).

A distinct kind of consciousness thus correlates with each level of activity, and its evolutionary value lies in the discriminating response to the organism's environment that it facilitates, with a higher, more adaptive degree of discrimination arising in the outer, more evolved strata. Most important, the higher functions do not supplant the lower ones: we do not cease to be awake because we feel emotion, or cease to feel emotion because we enjoy articulated perception. Rather, the higher functions build on the lower ones, incorporating them as more basic phases in their own genesis. Since microgeny recapitulates phylogeny, the value of consciousness is nothing less than the cumulative value of the organism's adaptive evolution.

As with the radical theory of consciousness advanced by Velmans in his contribution to this volume, so too with microgenetic theory: what needs explaining is not so much how or why consciousness arises at the highest levels of brain function, as why it appears largely absent from lower levels of functioning. According to Brown's model, primitive functions appear unconscious because they no longer occupy the terminal point in the moment-to-moment microgenesis of consciousness. They have been reduced (through a kind of neoteny of microgenesis) to early and incomplete phases in the genesis of a more complex and differentiated consciousness. They recede from foreground to background, becoming the global backdrop presupposed by the more sophisticated function. It follows that they remain present in higher consciousness vestigially, even if this is not obvious from the phenomenology of normal consciousness.

The crucial contribution of primitive brain functions to higher consciousness is precisely what breaks to the surface in the neuropathological symptom. Depending roughly on the depth of the brain lesion along the radius from brainstem to any point on the cortical surface, the genesis of normal conscious behavior is interrupted at a more or less primitive phase. Deeper lesions cause more global pathologies; more supercial lesions, closer to the brain's outer shell of gray matter, cause more specific and localized pathologies. What appears to be a deficit, however, is really the abnormally exposed competence of a more primitive level of information processing. Disturbed behavior does not replace normal behavior. Rather, the normal process through which conscious behavior comes about is derailed before completion, exposing a less differentiated competence than expected, but a competence nonetheless—one that informs normal consciousness and without which normal consciousness would be impossible.

For example, the patient sees the word cat, but reads it as dog. It is not by accident that the categorization is correct (four-legged domestic animal). The disrupted ability to fully differentiate meaning exposes the ability to categorize as a more primitive and independently functioning competence. What neuropathology show...

Table of contents

• Series Page
• Introduction
• Part I Setting the Stage
• Part II Psychology and Philosophy of Mind
• Part III From Metaphysics to (Neuro)Science …
• Part IV Clinical Applications …
• Part V History (and Future?) of Philosophy
• List of Contributors