I am my brain.

Now, doesn’t that sound strange? The relationship expressed in this sentence is  that of identity and that of ownership in the same instance. How can I own a brain and be a brain at the same time? More annoyingly, who is it then that owns the brain? If I am my brain, the relationship between me and brain is that of identity and thus, according to ‘Leibniz’s law’, me and my brain must share all properties.

Imagine you’re calling a friend on the phone and ask her to bring your pen to the rendezvous later. You tell her that it’s a blue pen with a red cap that has been chewed on. If she found a pen that was blue and had a red cap but lacked the bite-marks you remember, it could not be your pen. Unless you have really bad memory, but that isn’t the point. Leibniz’s law states that only indiscernible objects can be identical to themselves. That sounds trivial enough, although many philosophers like to argue about how true this principle is. And apparently it does not apply in the realm of quantum physics. Anyway, lets look at the properties of my brain. It is probably greyish-pink, wrinkled and feels like a hardboiled egg. We run into a problem here. Since you have most likely never met me in person you obviously wouldn’t know, but please take my word for it: I am not greyish-pink, wrinkled and feel like a hardboiled egg. I just look like any young woman. But that is not ‘me’ either, is it? That would be my body. So apparently, if we follow old Leibniz’s lead, I’m neither my brain, nor my body. For that matter, I’m not even body and brain combined.

If it’s so easy to see that I can’t be my brain, where does this ‘new’ intuition come from? Philosophers love thought experiments to probe their intuitions. Imagine I were to damage an organ, for instance my heart,  in a car accident and a new heart were transplanted into my chest. In this scenario I receive a new organ. No doubt about it. If I were to damage my brain and a donor brain were transplanted into may head, as absurd as this my sound, the intuition is quite different, though. Obviously, this time we think it is the brain donor who receives a new body and we don’t consider me to be the recipient of a new brain. Michael Gazzaniga wrote about what he concluded from a more abstract form of this thought experiment that “this simple fact makes it clear that you are your brain” ( as cited by Vidal. p. 6).

Now, I’m always really careful when things are too obvious. The thought experiment might truly illustrate our intuitions, or those of caucasian male scientists, as experimental philosophers rightly point out, but we don’t know why we have these intuitions. One could hold that our intuitions are the connections we have to some kind of spirit realm or disembodied ideas that reveal the truth in its purity. But I thought the same of ads for anti-acne face scrub as a teen, so lets ditch the unsexy naivety and get down and dirty. Here we’ll meet Fernando Vidal, who in is paper on brainhood presents the idea, that it is not science that has tought us the identity between me and my brain. Vidal coined the term brainhood to describe the “quality of being, rather than having a brain” (p.6). This he claims to be the main feature of the anthropological figure of modernity, the cerebral subject. Plainly stated, we are cerebral subjects because we exhibit brainhood. In the paper I draw from Vidal explains how the property denoted by his neologism is historically rooted and which role it plays in the ‘neurocultural discours’. To get down to the nitty-gritty of his paper already: He claims, that the ideology of brainhood, the idea that we are our brains, “has impelled neuroscientific investigation much more than it resulted from it” (p. 5). Aha, so? Well, scientific investigation does not occur in a conceptual vacuum. In his paper Vidal explains how philosophical Ideas about us and our minds have influenced how research is conducted, financed and interpreted. If you are interested in the historical account in Vidal’s paper and would like to read a great critical response by a fellow blogger, please head on to Stephen T. Caspers’ Blog The Neuro Times. He beautifully illustrates the shortcomings of Vidal’s argumentation without belittling the central claim or  Vidal’s person. Still, I find Vidal’s concept of us as cerebral subjects and the notion of brainhood pertinent and his fear we might be talking about our brains (and ourselves)  in the wrong way valid. I hope for some interesting discussions about this, maybe with Stephen? Anyhow, if the ideology of brainhood influenced how we ask the questions about our selves instead of being an answer to our questioning, stronger scepticism is called for. That is just what Paolo Fusar-Poli pointed out in a letter to the editor of Psychiatry Research Neuroimaging, the official publication of the International Society for Neuroimaging in Psychiatry.

He worries that the public does not understand how neuroimaging technology really contributes to research of the mind and is misinformed by journalists and medical opinion leaders. The way the results of studies employing fMRI are presented to the public invite misconceptions about our brains and what neuroscientists really conclude from such studies resulting in theories the autor describes as “folk-neuroimaging”. It is commonly believed that fMR images are proof for represented neural activity. However, neuroimaging involves an inference process utilizing statistical calculations and interpretative functions. The image is not a picture of the brain, but a representation and interpretation of the collected data. The author calls this common notion amongst people “neuro-realism”:

Neuro-realism reflects the uncritical way in which a fMRI investigation can be taken as validation or invalidation of our ordinary view of the world. Neuro-realism is, therefore, grounded in the belief that fMRI enables us to capture a ‘visual proof’ of specific and mentally relevant brain activity, despite the enormous complexities in data acquisition and image processing.

Related to this conception is “neuro-essentialism”. The way we talk about the brain implies that we ascribe properties to it that persons have.

The concept of ‘neuro-essentialism’ reflects how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain. In this sense, the brain is used implicitly as a shortcut for more global concepts such as the person, the individual or the self.

A CNN article on a study by famous love-scientist Helen Fisher illustrates this well; the title “Loving with all your… brain”. Another example would be the New York Times article Watching New Love as it Sears the Brain. Though the title is obviously inviting to neuro-essentialism, the author at least mentions the fact that neuroimaging is not a form of mindreading. But also self-help literature like The Brain in Love by Daniel G. Amen M.D. (yes, M.D. as in medical doctor) contribute to public misconceptions. Let me quote from a Los Angeles Times article called Brains in Love- When you’re attracted to someone, is your gray matter talking sense — or just hooked? Scientists take a rational look. Notice how the title implies scientific accuracy… very sad. Here goes:

HER front brain is telling her he’s trouble. Look at the facts, it says. He’s never made a commitment, he drinks too much, he can’t hold down a job. But her middle brain won’t listen. Man, it swoons, he looks great in those jeans, his black hair curls onto his forehead so adorably, and when he drags on a cigarette, he’s so bad he’s good.

Describing experimental setups to laypeople is hard and giving an accurate account of what a specific study implies is even harder. However, it is clear from the following account that the journalist does not even understand what functional magnetic resonance images are herself and does not understand how they figure in the work of scientists.

It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science’s first pictures of the brain in love.

The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.

The brain is playing tricks? Even if this is just rhetoric, the goal of such an article should be to educate, which it plainly fails to do. I think this quotation illustrates neuro-essentialism and neuro-realism in the media. But why is that a problem? Why can’t the brain fall in love or trick us into love? The brain does not have intentions or goals. Ti does not have feelings and therefore can not fall in love. People fall in love. The brain is an organ and is only part of a human being.

Attributing properties  of a whole to one of its parts is called a mereological fallacy. This term, introduced by Bennett and Hacker in 2003, should disclose a grave conceptual problem in the way neuroscientists talk about the brain. Taken literally, brainlove doesn’t make any sense. I am not my brain, my brain is a part of me.

Now, since I’ve discussed what we are not, let me broach the issue of what we are. Intuitively I would ask myself whether I can tell what I am by looking at how it feels to be. Or even how it feels to be me. Well, I wouldn’t be the first person to do so, though maybe the first female of mixed race to do so in the world wide web. But, who knows, the net’s been around ;-) However, I think Descartes cognito-Argument “I think therefore I am” in an oven was more earthshaking. I’ve mentioned my reservation towards Intuition and I might dedicate a future post to explaining why this is so, however, I want to be introspective for now and see where it goes. Well, it feels like I have a soul. (Again, am I a soul or do I own a soul, tricky.) But since no philosopher or scientist seriously claims to be a cartesian dualist and really thinks of himself as consisting of res extensa (body stuff) and res cogitans (soul stuff) we’ll have to drop that notion. Interestingly though, everyone reading this probably understands what is meant by soul. Not in the cognitive sense of understanding but in the way you can introspect how it feels to be. Somehow, it seems to us as if were souls. If you would like to read a scientifically informed, philosophical account about why we have this naive realistic phenomenology (why we feel like we are souls) I  recommend ‘The Ego Tunnel’ by Thomas Metzinger [find the twitter feed in the sidebar and here].

References:

Fusar-Poli P., & Broome MR (2007). Love and brain: from mereological fallacy to “folk” neuroimaging. Psychiatry research, 154 (3), 285-6 PMID: 17350234

Vidal, F. (2009). Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity History of the Human Sciences, 22 (1), 5-36 DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099133

First, relativity. Einstein’s famous breakthrough was the realization that because the speed of light is constant, measures of space and time are relative. Thus, relativity theory. Yet Einstein’s initial focus was of the first part of that equation. The real “outside the box” thinking was this: while all other motion carries a relative speed (relative to the observer), the speed of light does not! It is always the same, it never varies. And so Einstein used the word “invariance” to describe his great theoretical advance.

If Einstein’s theory were know today as the theory of invariance or invariance theory, I wonder what the worldview-implications would be. Rather than, “well, it’s all relative,” would people today be saying, “well, it’s all invariant”?

But I guess, it’s all just relative ;-)

This is a tag-cloud I created with wordle (click on image to get there) to show my readers what the course on Neuroethics and International Biolaw at Peer 2 Peer University have been writing about in our first week. You can subscribe to an RSS-feed of the reading material for this course I put together at Mendeley.

Like Mohammed, I believe this can only be determined in retrospect. Strikingly, Generations of humans before us didn’t even know what the brain was for. Aristotle for example thought the brain’s function was to cool the blood. Considering how little was known about the seat of the mind until fairly recently, it doesn’t sound wrong to talk about a “neuroaware” age.

neurocentrism

The reason I might think of this age as neurocentric is probably because I love to think about neuroscience, philosophy of mind and philosophy of neuroscience. I am neurocentric. In other words, interpreting the zeitgeist is always biased by the way the interpreter thinks. Could it be that few really interested people project their neurocentrism on others? Maybe the ones curious about the mind and brain are the ones more vocal about their interest.

I always thought that psychology, how the brain works and all related issues interested every human being. But if that were the case everyone would want to study subjects related to brain and mind. Everyone would read literature about these subjects. This is definitely not the case. People know they have a brain and that alcohol, for instance, changes the way they behave because something in the brain changes. Yet, few people really want to know why they have a mind. Or whether neuroscience could ever be a tool to settle this question. So if the criterion is public awareness, I don’t think we live in a neurocentric age.

If the criterion is epistemic, as Alasdair suggests, we would have to know more than we currently do about the brains functioning. The question I would like to raise is how much knowledge is sufficient? How much do we have to know to talk about a neurocentic age? As mentioned before, we never had as much knowledge about the brain as we do now. What constitutes a “detailed and exploitable understanding of neurology” (Alasdair)? Would we have to solve the hard problem of consciousness?  Because it’s not called the hard problem for nothing ;-) Compared to Aristotle we know a lot about our brains, so if this is our criterion I do believe we live in a neurocentric age.

Interestingly, biology in general has received a huge boost in the past decades. Since we came to understand the molecular structure of DNA, thereby uniting several subdisciplines of biology and promoting neo-darwinian theories, much has been published about what life is and how it works. Neuroscience, or lets say neurobiology, is also a subdiscipline of biology. The neuro-movement is therefore part of a more general development in the sciences of life. Biology has developed many great tools to discover physiological processes and the brain is just an organ, albeit a really cool one. So within this meta-discipline, neurobiological advances are advances of biology.

Still, this alone does not explain the interdisciplinary programs springing up in so many research institutes. Neurophilosophy and neuroethics, but even neuromaketing, neurolinguistics, neuroesthetics, neurosociology and neurotheology being examples of this development. There lies explanatory power in neuroscience that many other sciences lack. Scientists of different disciplines have found the brain as the seat of the mind a very compelling idea. By applying neuroscientific methods, using neurophysiological and neuroanatomical terminology and making colorful pictures of the brain with expensive machines, they naturalize their theories. Scientists don’t like words like meaning, love and truth, unless they can show how the pretty picture of a brain looks when the “brain’s owner” thinks about these things. The pretty picture is really about something biological happening in the brain and that, thank neurophysiology, is something we can describe in words of physics. No soul, no weird platonic idea-heaven, nothing “unnatural” needed.

We live in a neurocentric age because every science investigating what it means to be human need a neuro-justification for their research. We don’t believe in love, we believe in hormones, pheromones, mirror neurons and other brain-stuff. If understanding the mind means understanding the brain, scientists are all in the translating business.

In conclusion, I do think it is appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age. But only if the term neurocentrism is used inclusively.

Update: The coolest thing just happened. I researched the mereological fallacy to answer the third question of this week’s assignment when I found a paper called “Love and brain: from mereological fallacy to “folk” neuroimaging”. Isn’t that a coincidence that I used love as an example of what scientists try to naturalize through neuro-talk? Crazy, huh?

My favorite part:

An archetype Cyberpunk setting nearly always permeated with a sense of impending doom. The first line of William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” published in 1984 describes the atmosphere with an adequate metaphor:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

The contrast to the “openness” of the sky in usual Science Fiction is evident. A Cyberpunk future is literally dark and not qualified for those of high hopes of the future. The most unsettling issue is the fact that the setting usually describes our own world in a postindustrial dystopian future. The timeline is set not very far from ours and underlines the uneasiness of witnessing a reality which makes its way of becoming ours. Over-sized and powerful multi-corporations replace governments, dominate the world, exploit people, resources and nature and leave nearly nothing for the little man. Rapidly developing science and technology have a negative impact on humanity and change society in every aspect of life. These apocalyptic circumstances echo the atmosphere of thriller and detective stories or the familiar film genre of the “film noir”. Characters placed in dark and gritty side streets of an exaggerated urbanized city filled with misfits, criminals and outlaws appear quite often in Cyberpunk.

Beautiful quote, huh?

Since going through every step of reading couldn’t really be represented in my blog. I should have made a montage video: Me washing my hair, reading a book, eating, reading a book, looking out the window, reading a book, surfing the web, reading a book, looking at a blank Microsoft Office page, reading a book… suddenly typing. The camera zooms in on the screen to show the words…  I’m writing right now. They have NOTHING to do with my paper.

But now…let’s fast forward to this evening: Pure bliss. I handed in my paper.

I just wonder, why it is that no matter how early  I start with a project, I always end up being totally stressed at the end because I realize something about my paper needs to be changed. My paper was practically written when I realized I missed a very important contradiction in McGinn’s book. Don’t misunderstand me here; I’m really happy I noticed early enough. Though I haven’t slept much the last 48h and kinda look like I don’t own a shower.

And worst of all, I missed handing in my assignment for the Peer 2 Peer University :-(  I gotta catch up. If they’ll still have me. If we were all meeting in real life I’d offer to bring self-baked muffins to make up for it.

But here is a goodie: My Mendeley tag statistics. Aren’t they cool. These tag-clouds show how I labeled the papers I’ve been reading for the last three weeks. If you click on the screenshot it’ll send you to my philosophy paper page. I’ll put up my paper there.

What I've been reading recently :-)

Xenia just found a fun new toy. Well, actually, it’s a very sophisticated research management tool, but I’m a nerd, so I guess this qualifies as a fun toy for me. Mendeley integrates desktop software and a Web-based social research network to bring back the fun to researching. Bring back the fun? There was never fun to be had. Well this, my friend, is about to change…or so I hope. Mendeley addresses referencing and paper management issues and a whole lot more. After a couple of days of testing and — how else could it be — researching, I’m on the hype and eager to share.

Let’s start with a disclaimer: I’m not a tech-nerd. I love science and philosophy, but I don’t usually write about software or whatever is new on the Web. I’m writing this because Mendeley is a great tool for people interested in science. Although Mendeley is presented as the up and coming social networking Web 2.0 site for researchers, I’d like to show you how this gadget can be used as an e-learning tool for like-minded non-academics and students alike. It’s free, it’s intuitive and it’s backed by a promising concept and a dedicated team. I’m writing about Mendeley because I want other people who like to learn collaboratively to join the ride. Like all social networking systems, Mendeley will improve its performance and practicality with the growth of its user base. So I’m not entirely altruistic in giving you this information.

A few basic features — what Mendeley can do for you:

• The Mendeley site has a clean look, so it doesn’t overwhelm new users with cluttered information or distract and interrupt the workflow, also the software is easy to install and use.
• Mendeley indexes and organizes your PDF files and research papers like a playlist. You can tag, search and filter your documents and group them into labeled collections. Mendeley integrates an academic software component with a Web-based research network, which also functions as a backup system that’s in sync with the digital bibliography on your computer. This means you can work on your project or paper at home, on a shared campus library computer or anywhere you have Internet access.
• You can import old document details and citations through CiteULike and add new ones including, when possible, PDF files with a click of a bookmarklet in your browser.
• You can create bibliographies in Word and OpenOffice.
• Ultimately the makers of Mendeley would like to enable the program to automatically extract metadata and cited references from PDFs.

My favorites:

Full-text search, viewer and annotation tool: Mendeley lets you highlight and annotate your PDF files with sticky notes in the internal PDF-viewer of Mendeley desktop. The new version will enable the synchronization of the annotated versions with colleagues. This, I believe, holds great potential for collaborative work, just as…

Sharing academic papers: I’m participating in a course at the Peer 2 Peer University. Mendeley might be enriching for different kinds of open educational projects, by enabling users to communicate about their reading habits and sharing their thoughts about specific text-passages in the assigned literature. Mendeley will eventually implement a group feature for the shared document collections, so that filesharing could be discussed in a blog-like or wiki-like format (German Interview with a co-founder of Mendeley).

Research statistics: Since Mendeley anonymously collects and analyzes the data users provide through the use of their online bibliographies on Mendeley Web, Mendeley can share information about the reading behavior of the scientific community and research trends with you. This isn’t as trivial as it sounds and might change how research is conducted and eventually mediated. This is a major reason for me to use Mendeley; it might change “the journal impact factor through real-time transparent statistics.”

Recommendation engines: Unfortunately, this has not been realized as till now, but this also will be a really cool e-learning tool. Imagine the older brother, sharing his record collection with you before you had your own taste in music. He has been replaced by last.fm. Mendeley can have educational value by being a virtual teacher, who can point to undiscovered intellectual terrain within the field of the students interest.

Open-Access: Although Mendeley will not be a platform to share documents as Napster shared music files, researchers are encouraged to post their own papers on their profiles, thereby making them publicly available. Some of my Professors load their published papers onto their Web sites, with Mendeley, one could find these papers easily.

I’m not only impressed with the product, I’m enticed by the perspectives it brings to working and learning. Not only is it a handy referencing tool, there are other products equally usable, it might change how scientists research and communicate with each other. Thereby, Mendeley can enhance university-level e-learning by anonymously aggregating metadata of the papers read and making the statistics available to its users and in future even making recommendations. In the long run, I hope Mendeley can open science up to the public and further scientific investigation. By the way, I also like their cute little squishy logo.

by Alexa Paultre

Therein McGinn quotes Wittgenstein: “Images tell us nothing [...] about the external world.” Satre also is quoted in support of this view: “No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there.”

With the citation of Wittgenstein and Satre, McGinn initiates the development of his own theory of imagination. He seeks to account for the phenomenological difference between  imagination and perception. That is to say, he wants to explain why perceiving and imagining ‘feel’ differently. Let’s put it this way, one would have to be a complete lune to confuse something imagined with something perceived. According to McGinn, the causal properties of perceiving and imagining must differ. Moreover, the relationship between the perceiver/imaginer and the content of a percept/image must itself influence how it is to imagine or perceive.

Not only is imagining inherently different from perceiving, it also has different epistemological status. Plainly, one already knows what one is currently imagining, whereas one learns through the process of perceiving. It is this idea that guides McGinn’s line of argument, he writes:

The object of my imagining does not feed new information to me as I imagine it, and there is no updating of my beliefs about its properties. I do not adopt an attitude of cognitive openness to what the object might reveal about itself; there is no dynamic flow of information from it to me– just a static positing of the object, which is causally remote from my current mental activity. There is no observational input from the object. [...](Images) tell us nothing we don’t already know. (p.18/19)

McGinn writes, as if the object of ones imagining were an entity that could be analyzed independently from the mind that ‘created’ the image. In an important way, however, I do not believe any causal relationship can be established on purely conceptual grounds. Not only is there an important ingredient, empirical scientific investigation, missing to support his claim, I believe that McGinn overlooks a very important conceptual aspect of the problem: Images and percepts are not merely given/created by the mind and stand as independent entities. They are part of the mind. The mind is made of images in a way. It is hard to see how, when viewing images and percepts from this perspective, one could postulate the causal relationships McGinn writes about. In a very interesting sense, the entities in question overlap ontologically.  Because of this, they can not be described as having separable properties.

McGinn tries to explain the difference between imagining and perceiving by disclosing the way images and percepts ‘interact’ with the mind. But there can not be such an interaction, at least not at the level of complexity McGinn purports, if the relevant features are mereologically related.  I am not saying, that mind and image are identical, or that if you add up lots of images you get mind. Still, mind and image can  not be disintegrated to reveal a simple mechanism relating the two. Although McGinn beautifully uses the metaphor of the ‘inner eye’ to depict the mental faculties in use during imagination, I doubt the existence of such an entity. In spite of McGinns lucent reasoning, I fail to see how imagining translates into mindsight.

Although McGinn acknowledges that images can augment peoples knowledge by “making explicit what was previously implicit” (p.20), I find his epistemological claim debatable. Imagining, according to this view, is a means of recollecting memories. To explain what that means I’ll just use one of his examples. Say, one was supposed to remember whether a frog had lips. This could be accomplished by visualizing a frog, thereby retrieving information stored in memory. One could then see whether the frog of ones “memory image” had lips and accordingly form an articulate belief. This is a salient inconsistency in McGinn’s writing. Would I have to visualitze the frog if I already knew how it’s mouth looked. Am I not the maker of the image, as McGinn might put it. If I didn’t imagine the lips to be there in the first place, then I there wouldn’t be any lips to ‘see’. Beyond making implicit knowledge explicit through a visualizing process, the image only shows what has been perceived in other contexts before.

I however contend that there is much to be learned from an image. More precisely, I believe the process of imagining is not merely a way of retrieving visual memory. What one is aware of when one imagines is only the tip of the iceberg, so to say. I maintain that imagining gives rise to emergent properties of the mind. Moreover, the images one has merely accompany the underlying processes of the brain, of which only little is consciously accessible. If my image were “causally remote from my current mental activity”, as McGinn claims, there would be no reason to imagine at all. I hold the view, as do many philosophers an scientists, that consciousness must have been an adaptive feature. Conscious representation, of which imagining is a variation, made it possible to operate on ones own mental functions. This is a lot more than what McGinn means when he writes, that one makes implicit knowledge explicit. In my last chemistry exam for example, it was very advantageous to be capable of  imagining the change in conformation of an organic compound during a specific reaction. Students who were not gifted (or trained) to maximize this ability used plastic models which took long to put together and restructure accordingly. The cost: Exam time. Nature must have been a lot harsher, the cost here: A lost dinner, loss of social status or even death.

Imagining is more than a memory-retrieval process. How else could I imagine a flying horse, a dragon chasing it and other crazy stuff?

For my talk I had to read among other papers two chapters of  Collin McGinn’s book “ Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning”. My groups contribution to our class ‘Träume aus der Perspektive der Bewusstseinsphilosophie’ (dreams from the perspective of philosophy of consciousness) was to explain two mutually exclusive theories accounting for the generative processes underlying dreaming and the implications these theories have for certain (mainly epistemological) questions.  Is dreaming a form of hallucination (a kind of false perception) or is it rather a form of imagination? McGinn opts for the latter… I’ll get back to that some other time.

Sidenote: I really need to get his book so I can read the first chapter. He refers to it in chapter six where he explains why his distinction between perception and imagination is dichotomous. I’d really like to know how he came to that conclusion because I’ll most likely have to contextualize the very specific topic of my paper in a broader framework of McGinn’s Theory. Obviously I already know where I’m heading ;-) How do I know what I’ll be writing about? I had an Idea one morning last week and handwrote a few pages. Here’s an  abbreviated version:

McGinn’s contention that the “plot-like structure” of dreams must be the product of an “intelligent design” (p.90) process by an unconscious will must not be shared. The most prominent mechanism giving rise to complex design through a simple algorithm (and a substrate it can work on) is of course evolution. Darwinism (or more precisely Neo-Darwinism) has unified the biological subdisciplines and delivered a meta-theory whereby every phenomenon in living nature can be understood without assuming the existence of any intentional system let alone divine will. What is ‘unconscious will’ anyway? I mean, McGinn makes a point in refraining from losing the agency in imaginative processes because of theoretical simplicity and the fear imagination might lose part of its conventional meaning. This he writes would make his argument a purely verbal one, but isn’t introducing an unconscious will kinda just a ‘verbal’ solution itself? Anyway, if we follow a naturalistic line of thought in matters of the philosophy of mind it seems reasonable to assume, that neuroscience has much to teach us in this regard. Below the personal level of explanation we find the brain with its lobes and wrinkles and the cells that constitute it. It is the language of physics that adequately explains processes at this level. Being a naturalist one should agree that what can be described and explained on the subpersonal level can be explained mechanistically*.  If we assume that consciousness arises from the physical properties or functional processes of the brain one could assume that any ingenuity or creativity exhibited on the personal level is rooted in a process that can be described and explained mechanistically.  So I’m saying that McGinn’s dream-agent can be identified with subpersonal processes of the brain. Descriptions/explanations of these processes do not involve words describing intentions, beliefs and such and consequently do not allow the ascription of will.

*While copying this from my doodled paper I realize that I need a book on this topic. 1.) It’s a cool topic I want to know more about. 2.) I might change my mind if I know more about the philosophy of neuroscience and levels of explanation therein. –>I choose ‘Explaining the Brain‘ by Carl F. Craver. The index looks promising :-)

Now, obviously this part was just a snippet from a heap of thoughts I had after reading McGinn. I will elaborate on this and contextualize my thoughts in later posts. But since I’m lacking an audience right now I don’t feel very much inclined to do this immediately.

to do:

• learn more on Thomas Metzinger’s use of the term transparency and figure out why you had the gut-feeling it could help with McGinn’ idea of a ‘psychic split’. (read in “Being No One“)
• write post on psychic split and the implication this has: dreaming as quasi-perception. (idea: McGinn probably took his film-analogy too far.) –> imagination and perception not so different?
• research experiment on image/percept confusion
• find literature on false memory and the role of imagination