Andrew Brook

Cognition and the brain : the philosophy and neuroscience movement

Part I. Date and Theory in Neuroscience: 1. Localization in the brain and other illusions Valerie Gray Hardcastle and C. Matthew Stewart 2. Neurophenomenology Evan Thompson, Antoine Lutz and Diego Cosmelli 3. Out of the mouth of autistics Victoria McGeer Part II. Neural Representation: 4. Moving beyond the metaphors Chris Eliasmith 5. Brain time and phenomenological time Rick Crush 6. The puzzle of temporal experience Sean Kelly Part III. Visuomotor Transformation: 7. Grasping and perceiving objects Pierre Jacob 8. Action-oriented representation Pete Mandik Part IV. Colour Vision: 9 Chimerical colours Paul Churchland 10. Opponent processing, linear models, and the verticality of colour perception Zoltan Jakob Part V. Consciousness: 11. A neurofunctional theory of consciousness Jesse Prinz 12. Making consciousness safe for neuroscience Andrew Brook.

The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement

Abstract A movement dedicated to applying neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and using philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience began about twenty-five years ago. Results in neuroscience have affected how we see traditional areas of philosophical concern such as perception, belief-formation, and consciousness. There is an interesting interaction between some of the distinctive features of neuroscience and important general issues in the philosophy of science. And recent neuroscience has thrown up a few conceptual issues that philosophers are perhaps best trained to deal with. After sketching the history of the movement, we explore the relationships between neuroscience and philosophy and introduce some of the specific issues that have arisen.

Introduction: Philosophy in and Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Despite being there from the beginning, philosophical approaches have never had a settled place in cognitive research and few cognitive researchers not trained in philosophy have a clear sense of what its role has been or should be. We distinguish philosophy in cognitive research and philosophy of cognitive research. Concerning philosophy in cognitive research, after exploring some standard reactions to this work by nonphilosophers, we will pay particular attention to the methods that philosophers use. Being neither experimental nor computational, they can leave others bewildered. Thought experiments are the most striking example but not the only one. Concerning philosophy of cognitive research, we will pay particular attention to its power to generate and test normative claims, claims about what should and should not be done.

Approaches to abstraction: A commentary

Abstract In this commentary on the five preceding papers, we first try to summarize some of the main claims made in each and sort out the tricky terminology of abstraction. We then pick up two threads for special attention, generating new abstractions and symbolic versus nonsymbolic cognition and its relationship to the abstract. We conclude by briefly setting the relationship of language to abstract cognition into the context of the current debate over folk psychology, the so-called “theory of mind”.

Tracking a Person Over Time Is Tracking What

Tracking persons, that is, determining that a person now is or is not a specific earlier person, is extremely common and widespread in our way of life and extremely important. If so, figuring out what we are tracking, what it is to persist as a person over a period of time, is also important. Trying to figure this out will be the main focus of this chapter.

Desire, Reward, Feeling: Commentary on Three Faces of Desire

The three faces of desire are, in a nutshell, that desires are motivating, that satisfying desires is usually pleasurable, and that desires determine what will count as rewards and punishments. Schroeders view of how these knit together goes like this. Pleasure and displeasure are a result of desires so cannot be what desire consists in. We can desire without being motivated and vice-versa; this double dissociation entails that providing motivation cannot be what desire consists in, either. That leaves the link to rewards and punishments. Schroeder maintains that, because it is the reward system in the brain that determines what is pleasurable and what is motivating, “desires are realized . . . by the biological reward system” (p. 37). As he says in the crucial fifth chapter, “to desire is to be so organized that tokened representations of . . . well-being, if they occur, will contribute to the production of reward signals”(p. 134). More generally, determining what will count as rewards and punishments is “the essence of desire” (p. 178). Even more generally, what a desire is is determined by what it does.

Sense of fairness: Not by itself a moral sense and not a foundation of a lot of morality

Baumard et al. make a good case that a sense of fairness evolved and that showing this requires reciprocity games with choice of partner. However, they oversimplify both morality and the evolution of morality. Where fairness is involved in morality, other things are, too, and fairness is often not involved. In the evolution of morality, other things played a role. Plus, the motive for being fair originally was self-interest, not anything moral.

Further routes to psychological constructionism

In this commentary, we do two things. First, we sketch two further routes to psychological constructionism. They are complementary to Lindquist et al.s meta-analyses and have potential to add new evidence. Second, we look at a challenging kind of case for constructionism, namely, emotional anomalies where there are correlated, and probably relevant, brain anomalies. Psychopaths are our example.

Spent Fuel An Extra Problem: A Canadian Initiative

One of the most damning criticisms of the ethics of nuclear power generation has been that, despite a history that now extends more than 60 years, the industry has no long-term, permanent solution to the problem of managing spent fuel and other highly radioactive waste materials. From an ethical point of view, it was scandalous that this problem was allowed to continue for 60 weeks after the first peaceful reactors began to operate, let alone 60 years. The world over, nearly all these materials are stored beside the reactor from which they came and they stay there indefinitely. This practice contributed substantially to the size of the disaster at Fukushima, demonstrating that even as a short-term stopgap, it is attended by major risks. As a long-term response to the need to manage and protect the biosphere from these materials for the thousands of years that they remain significantly radioactive, the practice is clearly hopeless. One response is to hold that if Japan had had a facility in place to permanently dispose of spent fuel and other highly radioactive spent materials, at least this part of the Fukushima disaster would have been avoided. Unfortunately, the picture is more complicated than that. Current management of spent fuel (I will say no more about other kinds of highly radioactive materials) goes through two stages. Fresh out of the reactor, spent fuel bundles are not just extremely radioactive, they are also physically hot. More importantly, the rapid radioactive decay of many of the materials (‘isotopes’) in the bundles generates massive amounts of new heat. The amount of heat drops quickly, to less than 1/500 after one year and to less than 1/10,000 after 10 years. However, for the early years out of the reactor, the material requires active cooling, with a lot of cooling in the first year. For this reason, it is stored at the bottom of a pool of water. As the material warms the water, the warm water rises and drains, and is replaced by new, cool water. The pool is about 6 meters (18 feet) deep, which is deep enough to prevent any radioactivity from escaping. (Staff work on the top of

Cognition and the Brain: Contents

Part I. Date and Theory in Neuroscience: 1. Localization in the brain and other illusions Valerie Gray Hardcastle and C. Matthew Stewart 2. Neurophenomenology Evan Thompson, Antoine Lutz and Diego Cosmelli 3. Out of the mouth of autistics Victoria McGeer Part II. Neural Representation: 4. Moving beyond the metaphors Chris Eliasmith 5. Brain time and phenomenological time Rick Crush 6. The puzzle of temporal experience Sean Kelly Part III. Visuomotor Transformation: 7. Grasping and perceiving objects Pierre Jacob 8. Action-oriented representation Pete Mandik Part IV. Colour Vision: 9 Chimerical colours Paul Churchland 10. Opponent processing, linear models, and the verticality of colour perception Zoltan Jakob Part V. Consciousness: 11. A neurofunctional theory of consciousness Jesse Prinz 12. Making consciousness safe for neuroscience Andrew Brook.