Minds and Brains
For Friday January 22: A visit to the phenomenological garden
Reading: Dennett, "A Visit to the Phenomenological
Garden." From Consciousness Explained (Little Brown,
1991). (Handout)
Baker, The Mezzanine, pp. 1-47.
Overview.
Rather than a study guide, for this first assignment you'll pursue a more generic and social alternative.
What to do.
1) During the first class, you met your fellow
neurophenomenologists. Between now and Friday's class, a)
Read the Dennett and Baker selections, and then b)
Whenever you see another student from Minds and Brains, introduce
yourself and enter into a discussion of the readings:
What do you think is true in what he says?
What do you think is false in what he says?
What do you wish you could know a lot more about?
2) Write one paragraph or maybe two in which you describe your experience of something. Discover and describe an unexpected or previously hidden aspect of the thing or your experience of it. (Baker does this all the time -- read him for examples.)
Minds and Brains 1999
For January 27: Introducing Phenomenology
Reading:
Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology, pp. 1 - 66.
Overview. We enter the nexus of mind and brain from the aspect of mind. Phenomenology is the rich description of experience. The practice of phenomenology requires special attention to aspects of awareness that are usually overlooked. For the next few classes, we will focus on this form of heightened awareness.
Your work includes the reading (of course!), a "phenomenological experiment" (as always, due via email on Tuesday night), and preparation for the closed-book in-class quiz, which will take place either Wednesday or Friday. The quiz will be drawn from the following study questions. You'll enjoy working on these with other members of the class.
A note on handing in your Phenomenological Experiment: Please send it email to dan.lloyd. (If you prefer, drop off two hard copies at my office, 325 McCook, by 5 PM Tuesday.)
What?
Give concise definitions of the following terms, using Ihde as
your guide. Note that phenomenology uses some terms with meanings
that are different from ordinary usage or from other schools of
philosophy. The terms:
phenomena
intentionality
epoché
apodictic
"horizontalize"
invariants
variational method
noema (noematic correlate)
noesis (noetic correlate)
transcendental ego
manifest profile
latent sense
Would Ihde find the following claims true or false?
1. One cannot begin a phenomenological inquiry without first
defining the terms one is attempting to understand.
2. One main rule of phenomenology is "Describe, don't
explain."
3. Some of the objects of experience are "more real"
than others, from a phenomenological perspective.
4. To understand experience, one begins with the Ego, and works
back toward the world.
5. Every object in the visual world appears against a background
of some sort.
6. There must be some sort of transcendental ego in order to
understand the ordinary relations of the mind and the world.
So what?
1. How have the readings for this week changed your own
conception of your mind?
2. How might phenomenology be relevant to the study of the brain?
Now what?
Where would you like to go from here?
Minds and Brains
For February 3: Seeing polymorphically
Reading: Ihde, pp. 67-134
Your quiz next week will be drawn from the questions below, as well as from previous study guides.
And don't forget, PE 2 is due Tuesday night at 10 PM. If you submit via email, please copy and paste your essay directly into an email message to dan.lloyd. Thank you.
What?
I. Give concise definitions of the following terms, using
Ihde as your guide. Our author doesn't always offer definitions,
so some of your definitions will have to be inferred from use and
context.
apodicticity
adequacy
polymorphic-mindedness
sedimentation
free variation
constituting
hermeneutic strategies
transcendental strategies
thematization
mundane seeing
II. True or false, according to Ihde?
1. As a viewer ascends toward polymorphic-mindedness, the
alternatives seen tend to lose apodicticity.
2. A bird-watcher does not discover the markings on a bird
that enable its identification; rather, she constitutes
them.
3. To see the phenomenological invariants in an experience, one
must overcome ordinary assumptions and sediments.
4. A first glance gives the best insight into the essential
characteristics of perception.
5. The hermeneutic strategy and the transcendental strategy
ultimately lead to the same endpoint.
6. The closer one comes to mundane seeing, the easier it is to
achieve free variation.
So what?
Ihde uses the "tribal language" of
phenomenologists, which is often a difficult jargon. To secure
your understanding of this jargon, see if you can redescribe your
most recent phenomenological experiment using the terms in Ihde's
book.
Now what?
What is the most interesting aspect of all this?
Minds and Brains 1999
For February 10: It's about time...
Readings: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
(handout excerpt)
Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness
(handout selection)
Overview. We exist in an infinitely thin sliver of the instantaneous present, but we live in time, with a past, present, and future folded together in our ongoing experience. The Husserl reading begins to unpack the complexities of temporal life and the perception of objects in time. This is hard reading. Read both the introduction and the selection carefully. And then a second time.
What?
Terms for definition or synopsis:
retention
primal impression
protention
the "now-phase"
immanent time
"presentification"
T or F, according to Husserl?
1. Every thought or perception of an object in time extends
beyond the now-phase and encompasses past and future as well.
2. As an event runs off into the immediate past of retention, it
retains its clarity.
3. Every subsequent point is a retention for every earlier one.
4. An echo is a good example of retention.
5. The constituted act, constructed from now-consciousness and
retentional consciousnes, is adequate perception of the temporal
object.
6. In recollection, a now "appears" to us.
7. In primary remembrance, we see the past in a representative
way.
8. The flux of consciousness is really two intentionalities.
Translate into English:
"It is the one unique flux of consciousness in which the
immanent temporal unity of the sound and also the unity of the
flux of consciousness itself are constituted." (p. 287)
So what?
1. Do any of the PEs we've encountered in this class, including
those you've developed yourself, illustrate any of Husserl's
observations? Briefly describe how one example fits with the
theory.
2. Would distributed representations in a recurrent neural
network display any of the properties of temporal consciousness
discussed by Husserl? Why or why not?
Now what?
Minds and Brains 1999
For February 17, 2011: The psychology of time
Reading: William Friedman, About Time: Inventing the Fourth Dimension (MIT Press, 1990) (handout)
Overview: The psychological study of time perception and temporal orientation can supplement the phenomenological. Friedman's book will help us identify the contextual information that inflects our awareness of time, and propose some of the mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenology.
What?
Terms:
Circadian clocks
The time-tagging model
The temporal sequence model
Strength models
The inference model
The reminding model
Mnemonics
Semantic network
Abstract vs. Concrete time
Factor analysis
Present hedonism
Present Fatalism
T or F, according to Friedman:
1. People in traditional cultures have no way of conceptualizing
series of unique, nonrecurrent events.
2. People in modern cultures cannot appreciate repetitive
temporal patterns.
So what?
€You will find it helpful to experience the experiments
described for yourself, noting as you do the full phenomenal
richness of these temporal experiences.
€We will try to relate this book to Husserl, of course. Does
the Husserlian conception of "thick time" explain any
of the observations Friedman makes?
Now what?
Minds and Brains 1999
For March 3: A first foray into the conscious brain
Readings:
McClelland, Rumelhart, and Hinton, "The Appeal of
Parallel Distributed Processing" (handout)
Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul
(handout selection, Chs. 1 - 4)
Overview.
The study of neural networks offers a new way of reflecting
on the complexities of conscious experience. Our first foray
culminates in a hypothesis about the neural foundations of some
aspects of consciousness. At this point, we will be looking for
bridges between very general aspects of our phenomenology and
very general aspects of neural computation.
What?
Terms, either to define or to briefly characterize:
multiple simultaneous constraints
content-addressable memory
graceful degradation
default assignment
spontaneous generalization
local vs. distributed representation
neural computation (according to Churchland)
parallel distributed processing
fault tolerance
"taste space"
vector coding
prototypes
facial agnosia
backpropagation
mean squared error
holon
distributed information (distributed representation)
categories, according to Churchland
concepts, according to Churchland
vector completion
inductive inference, according to Churchland
T/F (according to this week's authors):
1. The brain represents the general or lasting features of the
world with a lasting configuration of its myriad synaptic
connection strengths.
2. The more fleeting facts about the world are represented by the
configurations of neural activation levels.
3. The random loss or 10% of neural connections is enough to
cripple the brain and cause its complete malfunction.
4. Seeing relevance and analogy through noise and confusion is
beyond the capacity of most PDP computers.
5. Our basic conception of human cognition and agency is a myth.
6. The subjective taste of popcorn just is the activation
pattern of the four types of tongue receptors, as re represented
downstream in one's taste cortex.
7. The fact that the face-coding process in humans requires at
least five synaptic steps, while in a simulated neural network it
takes just one step, is a significant contrast.
So what?
As Dr. Suess says, "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." The connections between consciousness and the brain can be anywhere -- but if you aren't actively looking for them, they will escape you. See you you can develop other connections between minds and brains, going beyond those discussed in class.