The mind-brain problem, free will and consciousness - summary of chapter 7 of Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition)

Foundations of psychology
Chapter 7
The mind-brain problem, free will and consciousness

Introduction

Throughout history, humans have been impressed by their ability to reflect about themselves and the world around them.
Self: the feeling of being an individual with private experiences, feelings and beliefs, who interacts in a coherent and purposeful way with the environment.

Mind-brain problem: issue of how the mind is related to the brain.
Three main views

• Dualism
  The mind (or soul) is something independent of the body
• Materialism
  The mind is nothing but a by-product of the biological processes taking place in a particular brain.
• Functionalism
  The mind is indeed realised in a brain, but it could be copied in any other brain.
  Just like information on a computer can be copied to other computers

Dualism: the mind is independent of the brain

Mind: aggregate of faculties humans (and animals) have to perceive, feel, think, remember and want.
Dualism: view of the mind-body relation according to which the mind is immaterial and completely independent of the body; central within religions and also in Descartes’ philosophy.

Dualism in religion and traditional philosophy

Religion

Dualism is central to religions.
They are grounded in the belief that people possess a divine soul created by God, which temporarily lives in the body, and which leaves the corpse upon its death.
The soul is what gives people their purpose and values in life.
It usually aims for the good, but can be tempted and seduced by evil forces.
This gave rise to the demonologist view of psychopathology.
Demonologists view: the conviction that mental disorders are due to possession by bad spirits.

Plato and Descartes

Dualism was central in the philosophies of Plato and Descartes.

• Plato maintained that the soul exists before, and survives the body.
  Human souls were leftovers of the soul of the cosmos and travelled between the cosmos and the human bodies they temporarily inhabited.
  • Human souls had knowledge of the realm of ideas
• According to Descartes humans were composed of a divine soul in a sophisticated body
  The soul was immaterial and formed the thinking part of the person.

Cartesian dualism: theories in which the mind is seen as radically different from the body and as independent of the biological processes in the brain.

Dualism in philosophical writing does not focus to the mind’s fate after death.

Dualism in early psychology and lay thinking

Dualism in early psychology

In the second half of the nineteenth century a growing number of scientists began to question the dualistic view.

• They felt uncomfortable with the emphasis religion placed on the immortality of the soul, the connection of the soul to a divine entity, and its independence of the body

They were unwilling to reduce the human mind to nothing but brain tissue.
The distinction between mind and body was attractive to early psychologists because it provided them with their own study area that could not be invaded and taken over by brain scientists.

Dualism in lay thinking

Dualism nowadays still is the fundamental attitude people have about the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Dualism puts consciousness at the centre of human functioning and seems to give humans free will

Dualism has an intuitive appeal because it puts conscious information processing at the centre of our functioning and it gives us the feeling of being in control of our actions.

In dualist models consciousness is the core of human existence

Dualism in general gives priority to the mind.
Our conscious, deliberate thinking is at the centre of our existence and controls our actions.
Consciousness: word referring to the private, first-person experiences an individual lives through; contains all the mental states a person is aware of; part of the mind that can be examined with introspection.
Dualism puts consciousness at the centre of the person, because the mind (or soul) is the acting unit and the mind coincides with consciousness.
The actions of an individual are guided by the private, first-person experience of that individual.

Dualism and free will

Because in the dualist view consciousness is the centre of the mind, nothing happens unless it is licensed by the mind.
Free will: situation in which individuals can choose their course of action; choice is the outcome of an informed deliberation.
Three conditions must be met before an action can be described to free will:

• The agent must have been able to do otherwise. Free will only exists when there is a choice
• The act must originate in the agent, not in some external force
• The act must be the outcome of rational deliberation
  • Acts that are erratic and unpredictable are not seen as free

Problems with dualism

Although dualism strongly agrees with human intuitions, it has come under severe attack since the second half of the nineteenth century, to such an extent that it is no longer a viable approach within the philosophy of mind.

The interaction problem

How to explain the mechanisms by which an independent mind (or soul) can influence the body.
Similarly, how can a non-physical, spiritual mind control physical brain processes?

The existence of unconscious control processes

The discovery that many mental functions seemed to happen outside consciousness.
John Locke was the first to give rise to this issue.

• He wondered what happened to the mind when humans were asleep.
  If consciousness was the defining feature of human existence (as claimed by Descartes), did this imply that the human existence was interrupted during sleep?

Leibniz (1646-1716)
Thought that the human mind could not be limited to conscious thinking.

• There is in us an infinity of perceptions of which we are unaware because the impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own.

He compared the universe to a living organism.
The building blocks were not material particles, but energy-laden and soul-invested units, which he called monads.
Four types of monads

• Simple monads
  The bodies of all matter (organic and inorganic)
  Some type of unconscious and unorganized perception. They ware motivated by a tendency to keep in line with the existing, pre-established harmony of the universe.
• Sentient monads
  Present in all living organisms, but not in inorganic material
  Had capacities for feeling pleasure and pain, and for the voluntary focusing of attention.
  Lacked the ability to reason about their experiences.
• Rational monads
  Corresponded to the conscious minds of humans
  Possessed the capacity of apperception, the faculty not only to perceive but also to reflect upon what is perceived.
  Apperception was not entirely based on empirical evidence, but also on innate truths.
  Innate knowledge demonstrated by perception
• Supreme monad
  Controlled and motivated by all other monads
  Omniscient and omnipotent God of Christian religion

Human consciousness was not aware of the activity of the simple monads and, to a large extent, of the sentient monads.
Still, these monads could motivate human behaviour.

Kant also started to wonder how much wider human knowledge was than the part people were conscious of.
Kant thought of unconscious representations as dark representations.

Leibniz’s and Kant’s thoughts were music in the ears of the German Romanticists.
They saw evidence for the argument that rational thinking was but the tip of human potential and the most interesting part of the mind was active below the level of consciousness.
They urged their readers to strive for unconscious artistic productivity and intuitive aesthetic sense.

The study of unconscious processing gained further momentum from the nineteenth-century neuropphysiologic discovery that reflexes and bodily functions were controlled by the spinal cord and subcortical structures, not by the cerebral hemispheres.

The disappearance of mystery forces in the scientific world

A reason why dualism lost its appeal was that it needed the existence of an immaterial, mysterious, animistic ‘soul’.
Two prime examples of mysterious ‘substances’ that had been postulated in science before but which in the end turned out to be materialistic phenomena that could be measured and manipulated

• Phlogiston: substance that was believed to make materials flammable before the chemical processes of combustion were understood
• Vital force: animistic substance thought to be present in living matter before the chemical and biological differences between living and non-living mater were understood

Given the mysteries of phlogiston and vital force in the end turned out to be chemical and biological processes that could be manipulated, an increasing number of scholars began to claim that something similar would happen to the mind.

Interim summary

• The mind refers to a person’s faculties to perceive, feel, think, remember and want
• In religions the mind is often equated with an immaterial, divine soul. This is an example of dualism. A similar view was defended by Descartes and, therefore, in philosophy is often called Cartesian dualism
• Dualism is an intuitively attractive model of the mind-brain relationship because it gives humans free will and it readily accounts for the existence of consciousness in humans. The latter refers to the rich and coherent, private, first-person experience people have about themselves and the world around them.
• Dualism does have problems explaining how an immaterial mind can influence the body, and how it is possible that so much information processing in humans occurs unconsciously. It also does not agree with a scientific world view, where there is no place for mysterious and animistic substances.

Materialism: the mind is the brain

The alternative: materialism

The idea of an independent, incorporeal mind (soul) as the core of a human being struck British empiricists in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries as quite implausible, although they had to be careful not to upset the church too much.
David Hume openly declared he saw no good reason why one should believe in a soul.

The idea of the mind as nothing other than a brain operation really took off towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Materialism: view about the relationship between the min and brain that considers the mind as the brain in operation.
Within psychology, the rise of materialism was one of the reasons why behaviourists wanted to get away from the study of ‘consciousness’.

The consequences for consciousness and free will

Materialism does not require consciousness or free will.

Consciousness is folk psychology

Paul Churchland (1981)
Consciousness as the centre of the human mind and the controller of human actions was not only an illusion but also a dangerous idea.
It gives individuals a misunderstanding of what makes them tick.
Consciousness and the associated opinions were examples of folk psychology.
Folk psychology: collection of beliefs lay people have about psychological functioning; no efforts made to verify them empirically or to check them for their internal coherence.

Is there still room for free will?

Rickard Dawkins (1979-2006)
The evolutionary theory was misunderstood in the first century after its introduction by Darwin.
The selection actually concerns the survival of DNA molecules.

• The contribution of individuals to their offspring rapidly dilutes after a few generations, making it impossible that something ‘biological’ of an individual is preserved
• Throughout history life forms have come and gone, to be replaced by others that were better adapted to the (changed) circumstances
  Species doe not survive either
  • The only things that have remained constant throughout are the genes that make up the living organisms
    They are the true survivors, and they have managed to mobilise a whole range of survival machines that keep them alive and enable them to multiply

In Dawkins’s view, humans are nothing more than survival machines for the genes that they carry around.

Problems with materialism

How can different experiences be compared?

Identity problem: the difficulty the materialistic theory of the mind-brain relationship has to explain how two events can be experienced as the same despite the fact that their realisation in the brain differs.
How is it possible for two humans to communicate if their brain codes differ?
Given the complexity and the flexibility of the human brain, it is next to impossible for two experiences of a particular input to be encoded in exactly the same way. How can the brain know these codes refer to the same stimulus?

How can we build a mind as the by-product of a brain?

Nobody has a convincing idea of how the human mind could be a by-product of the biological processes of the brain.

Interim summary

• Materialism holds that there is no distinction between the mind and the brain, and that the mind is a direct consequence of the brain in operation. To make the distinction with functionalism clear, we take this to imply that the mind is linked to the specific brain in which it has been realised
• According to the strongest versions of materialism, there is no consciousness or free will. Consciousness is an illusion, a form of folk psychology, and humans are comparable to robots or machines. According to Dawkins, they are the slaves of their genes
• A fist problem with materialism was that it seemed unable to account for the identity problem: how can different exposures to the same event be experienced as the same if they are not encoded similarly? A second problem was that attempts to simulate the human mind as a by-product of biological or mechanical processes were not successful, whereas computers running sequences of instructions on stored information started to thrive

Operational computers: the new eye-opener leading to functionalism

Information transcends its medium

The efforts to make machines intelligent would confront researchers with the discovery that information can be thought of as a realm separate from the medium upon which it is realised.
Mathematicians and logicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ventured that all intelligence could be represented by binary symbols upon which Boolean transformations operate.
Every medium capable of doing so could process the same information and was a Turing machine.

• The Boolean approach could easily be applied to computers and was the fasted (only?) way to make machines intelligent
• The building of operational, digital computers showed that information could transcend the medium upon which it was realised.

A solution to the identity problem

Because information in operational computers was independent of the precise ways in which it had been realised, the physical changes by which computers code zeros and ones worked with them did not really matter.
Similarly, the minute physiological changes that accompany a particular human experience may not be important, as long as they preserve the information code.
The same information can be realised and communicated in multiple ways.

Functionalism in philosophy

Functionalism: in philosophy, view about the relationship between the mind and brain that considers the mind as a separate layer of information implemented on a Turing machine; predicts that the mind can be copied onto another Turing machine.
Functionalists in philosophy from the 1970s onwards examined the functions of information, rather than the precise ways in which the information was realised.

Beam me up, Scotty

Thought experiment: hypothetical scenario that helps with the understanding of a philosophical argument.
What would teleportation do to the mind?

• Descartes
  The mind does not come from biological brain processes and can not be teleported with the rest.
  Teleportation would result in the reinstatement of the body without the accompanying mind
• Functionalist network
  Teleportation would work fine
  The mind is nothing but the information stored within the physiological network of the brain and, if the latter is restored, the mind should be back as well
  The mind will be transported as soon as the information code can be implemented on the new brain
• Materialist
  The mind would survive the teleportation without any loss of information only when exactly the same brain is reinstated
  Because the mind depends on the specific brain operations that give rise to it, only a reinstatement of the original particles in their initial positions would result in a flawless transportation of the mind

Information as the saviour of free will?

Information allows humans to rebel against the genes

The fact that humans can encode, store, retrieve and manipulate information enables them to pursue intentions that need to coincide with those of the genes.
The robots have a potential to rebel, if they ware willing to use rational thought aimed at their own personal interests.

Memes

Meme: information unit proposed by Dawkins that reproduces itself according to the principles of the evolutionary theory

Dawkins spotted that information shows many similarities with DNA molecules.
DNA need not be the only replicator in the universe. There may be others which also work on the principles of variation, selection and replication.
Dawkins argues that the build-up of information by humans fulfils all the principles of Darwinism.

• A few variations find a storage facility and a way to get copied
• During copying small changes are introduced
• Many of these changes are uninteresting and fail to be reproduced
  The few ideas that fit well in the environment copy themselves copiously and spread throughout the territory.

It might be that humans are not only ‘programmed’ to spread genes, but also to spread information in the form of memes.
The main difference between genes and memes at present is that the formed have managed to harness many organisms, so that they can survive the extinction of a species, whereas the latter (still) largely depend on the human race for their growth and distribution.

Telecopying

If we, during teleporting, copy a human. Would it inherit the human mind, complete with consciousness and free will?

Problems with functionalism

The functionalist network agreed perfectly with cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology.
Marr (1982) argued that information processing could be studies on three levels

• The computational level
  Researchers postulate ideas about how a system can generate output representations form input representations received
• The algorithmic level
  Try to specify the algorithms necessary to perform the processes proposed at the computational level
• The implementation level
  Aim to make the algorithms work on a specific physical system

The challenge posed by cognitive neuroscience

The clear separation between information processing and brain tissue was questioned by cognitive neuroscience, which argued that human information processing could be understood by examining the brain parts involved in the operations.
This was not ad odds with the functionalist approach.
The adherence of the functionalist approach questioned whether cognitive neuroscience has had any theoretical impact beyond what is already known to psychologists on the basis of behavioural data.

The challenge posed by symbol grounding and survival in a changing environment

Gradually, an important distinction between human and computer became clear.

• There is one big limitations to computers.
  Computers do well as long as they stay disconnected to the environment and are fed information by humans.
  As soon as they interact with changing surroundings they tend to be sluggish and unpractical.
  • Computers based on Boolean information processing have no inherent knowledge about what information is important in which situation, so they they are obliged to process much more information than humans seem to do

The difficulties in making computers interact with their surroundings have confronted researchers with the fact that humans seem to have a lot of information based on their interactions with the world.
Information must be grounded in an external reality.
Symbol grounding problem: the finding that representations (symbols) used in computations require a reference to some external reality in order to get meaning.
The solution to the symbol grounding problem has been sought in the interactions humans have with the world through their bodies.
These interactions provide humans with sensory and motor representations in which symbols can be grounded.
Embodied cognition: the conviction that the interactions between the human body and the environment form the grounding (meaning) of human cognition
Four sources of embodied cognition

• Human physiology
• Evolutionary history
• Practical activities during reasoning
• Socio-cultural situatedness

The human mind is more than a simple Turing machine.
Knowledge of the real world is not completely independent of the substrate on which it is realised.

Interim summary

• Computer science has shown that information may transcend the medium on which it is realised. It can be copied from one Turing machine to another
• This insight provides a solution to the identity problem, the fact that it is unlikely that two identical thoughts are physiologically realised in exactly the same way
• This insight led to functionalism in the philosophy of mind, the conviction that philosophers of mind had to investigate the functions of information, and not the precise ways in which the information was realised in the brain
• Functionalism (and materialism) can explain how the mind is not lost in the thought experiment of teleportation, unlike dualism
• Some authors see the fact that information is a realm separate from the machine upon which it is implemented as a way in which humans can reclaim their free will; others claim it simply implies that humans are not only slaves of their genes but also slaves of the information realm
• Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology were realisations of functionalism in psychological research. They are currently questioned by the rapid expansion of cognitive neuroscience, which postulates a closer link between information processing and brain functioning. A further challenge for functionalism lies in the fact that digital computers cannot survive independently because they rely on humans for symbol grounding and to remain functional in a changing environment. This suggests that the human mind is more intimately connected to the brain and body upon which it is realised than is postulated by functionalism

Consciousness

Humans are thought to be ‘conscious’ of their information processing in ways computers are not.
Two types of consciousness:

• Access consciousness: access conscious information can be reported by the patient, used for reasoning and acted upon intentionally
• Phenomenological consciousness: the fact that human experiences possess subjective qualities that seem to defy description; experiences have a meaning that goes beyond formal report

Access consciousness

Masked priming

Humans can be influenced by stimuli they do not perceive consciously.
Emotional responses can be based on unconscious information processing.
Cognitive processing could be unconscious as well.
Masked priming: experimental technique to investigate unconscious information processing, consisting of briefly presenting a prime between a forward meaningless mask and a subsequent target, and examining the effect of the prime on the processing of the target.

Implicit memory

Strong evidence for unconscious processing in humans comes from research on implicit learning and implicit memory.

Libet’s study on the initiation of movement

Libet published a study showing that not only perception and memory to a large extent escape conscious control, but the same is true for action control.

According to Wegner, our feelings of doing things is an ‘illusion of conscious will’.
The human mind is programmed to attribute actions to its own initiative as soon as three conditions are met:

• A thought appears in consciousness just prior to an action
• The thought is consistent with the action
• There is no salient alternative cause of the action

The global workspace model

What is difficult to explain within materialism and functionalism is why processing from a certain point onward gives rise to a conscious experience of the event.

• Metaphor of the theatre
  The brain can be compared to a big theatre where many processes are needed in the background for the play to take place
  These processes work to a large extent independently, but they need to be informed about what is going on in the play, in order to synchronise their activities with those of the central event. This is the role of consciousness.
  Making information available to the global workplace, so that the activities of the automatic processes can be tuned to each other.
  • Global workplace model: model that explains the role of consciousness by analogy to a theatre.

Phenomenological consciousness

The Chinese room and Mary thought experiments

Chinese room: thought experiment proposed by Searle to illustrate the difference between information processing in humans and information processing in computers.

Mary thought experiment.
If someone lives in a black and white room, and he or she learns everything there is to know about colour, how come it is different from seeing colour?

Qualia

The absence of meaning in computer processing is very unlike human thinking, where the symbols have extensive and rich meanings, grounded in the interactions with the world.
Qualia: qualities of conscious thoughts that give the thoughts a rich and vivid meaning, grounded in interactions with the world.

Zombies and the hard problem

Zombie thought experiment: thought experiment proposed by Chalmers to illustrate that consciousness is more than the working of the brain or the implementation of information on a Turing machine because it involves a subjective component with qualia.
There can be twin of us, who is and reacts exactly the same as we do, without the experience of qualia. This means that we cannot reduce consciousness to functionalism.

Hard problem: name given by Chalmers to refer to the difficulty of explaining in what respects consciousness is more than accounted for on the basis of functionalism.
What makes our mind different from that of zombies?

Embodied cognition as the source of qualia?

Claims about the importance of qualia in human experiences received a major boost form research on symbol grounding and embodied cognition.
Maybe human experiences feel so rich because they are effectively grounded in our bodily interactions with the world.
Cognitive neuroscience has found compelling evidence for this possibility.
The fact that perceptual and motor areas become co-activated when we say or hear perceptually or motor-related words arguably is the reason why conscious experiences are so rich that they cannot be fully communicated to others by means of words.

Interim summary

• Information as currently implemented in computers does not seem to possess the phenomenological richness of human consciousness. Block proposed to make a distinction between access consciousness and phenomenological consciousness.
• There is a lot of empirical evidence that processing is going on in humans without them being consciously aware of it. We discussed the phenomena of masked priming, implicit memory, and Libet’s experiment on the voluntary initiation of movement.
• Unconscious processing strongly resembles conscious processing; the main differences seem to be that it is less rich and integrated than conscious processing and that humans cannot deliberately act on it
• A model of access consciousness is the global workplace model, which compares the human mind to a theatre. A lot of activity is going on behind the scenes, but the activity on the scene must be visible to all, in order to synchronise the various activities. This is the function of consciousness
• The phenomenological richness of human conscious experiences seems to require the existence of qualia. This has been illustrated by three thought experiments; the Chinese room, Mary, and the zombie world.
• Because of the differences between human consciousness and information processing in computers, Chalmers claims that the hard problem of phenomenological consciousness had not yet been solved. Others disagree and argue that it will be solved when a solution to the symbol grounding is found.
• A possible solution to the symbol grounding problem is to assume that human cognitive representations (symbols) derive their meaning from the interactions between the human body and the environment. Cognitive neuroscience has found evidence in line with this view of embodied cognition.

Focus on: can automatic processing help us to make better decisions?

Associative thinking: learning on simple associations (correlations) between all types of events; thought to be the basis of automatic, type 1 thinking.
Heuristic-based thinkers: those who think based on heuristics, rules of thumb that do not require as much effort as the scientific method and that most of the time result in good decisions, but that are subject to a number of biases.

Three main differences between conscious and unconscious thought:

• Unconscious thinking, unlike conscious thinking, is completely determined by the stimuli
• Conscious thinking is able to follow strict rules
• The main limit of conscious thought is that is has a low capacity

Interim summary

• There is increasing evidence for two thinking systems
  • Type I, automatic and based on associative learning
  • Type 2, controlled, explicit and based on hypothetical thinking
• For a long time, cognitive psychology was only interested in type 2 thinking, which was seen as heuristic-based and prone to reasoning errors. Type 1 thinking was largely overlooked and considered as the origin of some reasoning errors.
• Currently there was a redressing of the balance, because it is now realised that system 1 thinking forms the basis of much of everyday interaction and intuitive thinking
• According to the theory of unconscious thought, it is possible to evaluate information without consciousness. Such evaluation is less susceptible to the capacity limitations of conscious thought. It does not lead to precise conclusions, but to rough estimates of the desirability of the alternatives, and can be used in combination with conscious thought when complex decisions must be made