The neurology of self-awareness
edge.org
edge.org
> Otherwise monkeys would have self awareness and they don't
This suggests the existence of other research that has both defined the concept of self-awareness robustly and made it testable enough that we can state as fact that monkeys don't have it. Does anybody know what this might be alluding to?
It's easy to disregard others, when we don't share a common tongue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-pe...
Newer studies illustrated with MRI scans that dogs can comprehend language and the emotional tone of their owners....
And dogs can get jealous too.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/dogs-recognize-both-w...
Reference regarding jealously:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/23/dogs-jealous...
According to the article,
Self-awareness is 'other awareness' applied to yourself where 'other awareness' is constructing meaningful models of other peoples minds in order to predict their behavior.
But as you said it seems like 'monkeys are not self-aware' was a presumption made by the author, i.e monkeys don't have model for self. But, how can we verify this?.
He is saying'mirror neurons play important role in self but not that important otherwise monkeys would have a self', so the original problem still remains.
There was a footage on some simians ambushing and torturing (?) and killing another one.
> (Incidentally, Gallup's mirror test — removing a paint splotch from your face while looking at a mirror — is not an adequate test of self awareness, even though it is touted as such. We have seen patients who vehemently claim that their reflection in the mirror is "someone else" yet they pass the Gallup test!)
No other animal other than monkey? I don't think monkeys have self awareness either.
It's because animals don't communicate anything about themself, their signals are mostly based on pattern matching and direct response to events. They never communicate anything showing any evidence of an internal state.
They only communicate in response to external events, and maybe sensations from their bodies.
Even the chimps that did sign language never communicated anything showing any kind of internal state. (For example they never asked questions - events and things simply were.)
Emotions though, I agree animals have emotions. For example that sign-language chimp expressed sadness.
For animals to have self awareness they would have to show they are "thinking about something" - and I don't mean thinking about a solution to a direct goal for a problem in front of them.
Like in literally every non-biological context, everyone understands that similar systems in similar environments behave similarly. In my layman's understanding of biology, the only difference between human brains and other mammalian brains is neuronal density; all the structure is the same as far as I've read. If the structure is the same, and the behavior and neuronal activity matches what we'd expect from self aware organisms, why reach for a ghost?
If you have to keep believing humans are somehow special, then associate that specialness with being the only creature with highly dextrous appendages that evolved with access to trees and metal that also farms.
Oh really? So I never spent time simply pondering why this universe exists? Or why I like the color blue more than green?
> In my layman's understanding of biology, the only difference between human brains and other mammalian brains is neuronal density; all the structure is the same as far as I've read.
And yet humans are different. That's the puzzle. You can't say "I've solved the puzzle - there is no puzzle!" because there are obvious differences that you can't simply ignore by saying "I don't understand".
It doesn't work that way.
> If you have to keep believing humans are somehow special, then associate that specialness with being the only creature with highly dextrous appendages that evolved with access to trees and metal that also farms.
No thanks. I choose reality instead. Where humans are in fact special, they have self awareness and language, and the ability to argue on the internet.
You can go on imagining yourself as a body without a mind if you like, I choose different.
Go read Blindsight by Peter Watts, and ponder why we have a mind - the book will show you it doesn't have to be that way, yet it is.
Those are sensations coming from your body. The mind is a physical phenomenon, like breathing is a physical phenomenon.
edit: What is measurably special about humans is our unprecedented ability to change our environment, which seems explainable soley with the combination of high dexterity, farming, and access to highly manipulable elements. Each of those characteristics aren't unique to humans, but as far as I'm aware the combination of all three is. The cumulative changes of environment to the point where the immediate survival of the organism is guaranteed means the organism uses its facilities for things that aren't directly related to survival. Recorded history started after agriculture. Cave paintings took a ridiculous leap in complexity and detail after agriculture.
edit2: What I'm asserting is that high level behavior only happens in a high level, non-immediate survival based environment. The onset of human society was not deliberate and did not happen all at once.
Your cat prances up to you, swipes your face, and then runs away. Why does your cat do this?
Neural networks like this are trained with pavlovian methods, and are not self aware or conscious. So such behavior is not at all evidence of any kind of self awareness or consciousness.
[1] http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20120820/anesthesia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge...
The declaration: http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConscious...
This final statement not only seems snide but also dumb to the difference between science and philosophy. (I'm not an expert on that difference but I can see that there is one. I can see that there is a clear difference in spite of the fact that each steps on the others' toes, that each side attempts to take credit for the others' insights at times, or makes snide comments at each other like this statement here.)
So I find the "free-ride" a little harsh. What happens over time is that more and more questions that used to be purely "philosophical" have more and more empirical answers.
I think it might be useful for Philosophy to be less its own specialty and more an umbrella for the whole enterprise of "love of wisdom".
I sometimes think this might be a bit of a positivist myth. Most of the domains where we've gained a great deal of empirical knowledge are domains which people always investigated empirically, albeit less systematically and with fewer available resources (e.g. astronomy). On the other hand, most of the big philosophical puzzles that Aristotle engaged with remain largely untouched by developments in science. E.g. Is it possible to make true statements about the future? How is change possible?
How so? For example: http://www.astronomynotes.com/history/s3.htm
Looks like an astronomy problem to me. Aristotle is also considered one of the early astronomers.
>On the other hand, most of the big philosophical puzzles that Aristotle engaged with remain largely untouched by developments in science
Exactly my point. Of the problems they worked on (and they worked on everything they could think of), the ones that we have solved we now consider science, the ones that are still unresolved we consider philosophy.
Sort of like the definition of AI: if we solve it, it's no longer considered AI.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. My point was that Plato and Aristotle (and other early astronomers) realized that astronomy had to be based on observation. No-one (except perhaps a few cranks that no-one remembers) has ever tried to do "armchair astronomy".
>the ones that we have solved we now consider science, the ones that are still unresolved we consider philosophy.
I think the distinction is really just the distinction between empirical science and metaphysics, which is a distinction that Aristotle would also have made, though perhaps in slightly different terms. For this reason, I think the image of armchair philosophy gradually yielding ground to science is wrong. Broadly speaking, philosophers have always worked on philosophical problems using philosophical methods, and scientists have always worked on scientific problems using empirical methods. There hasn't been any great shift from one to the other. What has occurred of course is a shift in prestige: society currently values empirical science much more than it values philosophy.
The point is that this wasn't the case, philosophy was the umbrella that included everything.
Heck, just look at the title "Doctor of Philosophy", which is the name for doctorates in both the sciences and the humanities. Not just for doctorates in today's specific sub-discipline of philosophy.
Philosophy has been pivotal in shaping human civilization, laws, morals, government, arts, and even science itself.
That's a pretty bold claim to make without citing any specific examples.
Do you think you have free will? Some philosophers argue convincingly that you don't. And if there's no such thing as free will, where does that leave the notion of punishment in the criminal justice system? I think that's "content" if there ever was such a thing.
Should we be socialists or capitalists? Is one system better than the other? What does it mean for an economic system to be "better" than another anyway? On the basis of philosophical arguments regarding these questions, people have been inspired to violently murder those who they see as perpetuating injustice. Surely, then, these arguments are not just "abstract" and "without content".
It's very difficult to explain why science is as successful as it is, or why we should put our trust in the results of scientific inquiry. The history of science is littered with mistakes, after all; who's to say that the expert scientific consensus isn't wrong today? So when you encounter someone on the street who says "I think global warming is nonsense," what sorts of arguments will you use to try and persuade them otherwise?
The problems of philosophy don't go away just because you're not looking at them.
Most socialists viciously reject all association with the kind of nonmaterialist, non-scientific, ahistorical kind of philosophy you're trying to justify here. We use "metaphysics" as an insult and "liberal metaphysics" especially to sneer at our opponents for trying to draw moral justification from a kind of Platonic realm of Forms rather than from the material needs of human beings.
I'm sure you have some thoughts to add in response, but my point is that socialism itself, as usually taught, is not a very good example to make your point with.
I'm also aware that some socialists hold views of agency that render the notion of "persuading someone to be a socialist via argumentation" incoherent. Hopefully such debates don't prevent me from using the history of socialist thought as an illustrative example of philosophy that is decidedly not "abstract argumentation without content".
Also, you seem to be unaware of the diversity of thought in contemporary moral realism, if you think that all moral realism is equivalent to Platonism.
I'm well aware of moral naturalism, and ascribe to it myself. However, defenses of "philosophy qua philosophy" and that sort of ilk are almost never about any form of naturalism. If you are a fan of seriously naturalistic philosophy, done well and in accordance with the best scientific evidence, than you probably belong on the Science side of the insipid "science versus philosophy" flame-wars, and your favorite philosophers actually spend portions of their books arguing exactly that. Because they have to, over and over again, ad nauseum.
Because otherwise, the Platonism-of-the-gaps people will rush in and declare Platonism About Everything, which is what they really want.
So for instance, I think that Derek Parfit really needs to see a therapist, because if you actually assert that "if naturalism were true, ... I would have wasted much of [my life]"[1], then you've got a problem. You should not need Platonism about X, for any value of X; you should be disinterestedly considering whether Platonism is true (I damn well think it's not).
[1] -- http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/on-wasted-philosophic-liv...
Huh. Well, I'm an error theorist. ;)
>If you are a fan of seriously naturalistic philosophy, done well and in accordance with the best scientific evidence, than you probably belong on the Science side of the insipid "science versus philosophy" flame-wars
I don't see why I have to pick one side or the other...
I consider my outlook to be thoroughly naturalistic, yet I still find myself frequently defending philosophy to people who misunderstand it. That doesn't mean I support all types of philosophical work that are being done, or that I think all philosophical questions are equally valuable.
>Because otherwise, the Platonism-of-the-gaps people will rush in and declare Platonism About Everything, which is what they really want.
Who are these Platonism-of-the-gaps people? I sort of see where you're going with this, and I agree with you that a lot of what is done in analytic philosophy is misguided, but I also want to be careful to avoid using the word "Platonism" as a pejorative for everything I disagree with.
Thanks for that Parfit quote, by the way. I think that's pretty hilarious.
I would go ahead and label them as the entire "robust realist" school of thought in meta-ethics, and we can then throw in large portions of the people doing philosophy of mathematics (the original Platonism in modern philosophy), many people's positions on semantics in philosophy-of-language (ie: they think of semantics in a way that requires Platonic propositions to exist in order to give semantic content, as opposed to merely pragmatic content, to sentences), and of course the endless droning claims of dualism in philosophy of mind.
I would grant these people a lot more charity if they could all get together and agree on what exactly the Immaterial or Platonic Stuff is supposed to actually be, and how it comes into contact with the physical world, not only through supervenience but through some form of actual causation. Instead, since they don't have a unified account of the Immaterial, it looks (admittedly, from the outside) as if they're just working in separate fields and positing various forms of Immaterial Stuff as disparate "solutions" for all the problems they refuse to allow to be solved naturalistically.
Naturalism can at least shunt off the hard work of explanation to actual sciences, and when that work gets done, naturalism ends up with philosophical accounts that don't require new and different forms of spooky stuff for each and every thing we want to explain.
I find it disappointing that non-naturalism is seeing a resurgence in metaethics, especially since I'm not even a moral realist to begin with. It's clearly just a lot of people grasping at straws.
For modern lines of development regarding Platonism (or something like it) in the philosophy of math, you might want to check out Ladyman and Ross's "Every Thing Must Go". They attempt to argue from insights from quantum mechanics that relations are real, but objects are not. I haven't read the whole book, but I believe they're explicit in stating that their position is not Platonism as it's classically understood, even though their position sounds suspiciously similar to it.
Even though I'm not a dualist of any kind, philosophy of mind is still the area where I'm the most sympathetic and forgiving towards spooky explanations. Consciousness is pretty weird, after all. So when someone wants to defend property or even substance dualism, I think they're wrong, but not crazy; and yet physicalism completely dominates in philosophy of mind, while moral non-naturalists get a free pass on their weak "well, it SEEMS like there are morals, therefore morals" arguments. It just feels completely backwards to me.
Anyway, I'm not quite sure what prompted you to take the discussion down this path. There is much in contemporary analytic philosophy that I find problematic and even indefensible, but when I'm trying to impress upon people the importance and relevance of philosophy, I don't mention the shortcomings until the person has a deep enough understanding to take a nuanced view of these issues. This is just like how, if you're trying to convince the global warming skeptic that the scientific consensus is to be trusted, you don't start off by talking about the replication issues in psychology. When I talk about philosophy with people, my main goal is to convey the point that there are important philosophical questions that are worth thinking seriously about.
Actually, cognitive scientists emerged after millennia of philosophic treatments of the matter (although they approach things with a different methodology of course).
That said, I don't think we have many, if any, philosophers today. All the main perspectives in philosophy have been played out from the time of Pre-Socratic philosophers to the 20th century.
Today we mostly have tame and bland tenured academics in Philosophy departments -- a pale shadow of philosophers of yore, and not so original to boot.
His research seems, to me, to be the neurology of a delusion, albeit an absurdly common one. What would be much more interesting, and what I believe others are studying, is the neurology of those who have managed to move past this illusion.
These were dubbed "mirror neurons" or "monkey-see-monkey-do" neurons. This was an extraordinary observation because it implies that the neuron (or more accurately, the network which it is part of) was not only generating a highly specific command ("reach for the nut") but was capable of adopting another monkey's point of view. It was doing a sort of internal virtual reality simulation of the other monkeys action in order to figure out what he was "up to". It was, in short, a "mind-reading" neuron.
I don't really see how this follows- maybe the neurons are just recognising things that happened, like seeing a peanut being picked up. That doesn't require "adopting another monkey's point of view" or "figuring out what he was up to". It could just be the brain attempting to verify that the action happened, which is going to be seen regardless of who made it happen.
"Self-awareness is 'other awareness' applied to yourself where 'other awareness' is constructing meaningful models of other peoples minds in order to predict their behavior" ^ This is totally circular. You(others) have some way of guiding your(their) own behavior before being aware of others and using that to construct a model of behavior and self.
This essay is armchair philosophizing completely removed from any real experience. I'd go so far as to call it psychologically harmful to anyone that entertains the essay as true and attempts to apply the ideas presented in it to understand their self.
It also seems unlikely that a single neuron would carry a complete meaning in themselves... like probing a single bit in a data structure, you might be able to tell if it's odd or even, positive or negative, but probably need a constellation of bits/neurons to make sense of it.
But he may be simplifying in this high-level essay, and I haven't read papers in the field.
At sensory level our own "doing" is not really different then sombody else's "doing" , and that can pe processed by the same mechanism, but reconized as "our own doing" based on additional cues..
A very interesting hypothesis nevertheless. There are pathologies in which theory of mind is impaired. For example Baron-Cohen studies that aspect of autism. There might be hypotheses formulated what that means for self-awareness.
Either way, I think the author needs to address correlation vs. causation before assuming the latter.
Regarding consciousness there is too much philosophical discussion. Wordplays of which little is clear.
The sense of sight has exhausted such emotions. We are able to say that a simple multicellular organism having one photosensitive cell is a primitive ancestor of the eye.
What do you say if we define consciousness as the next sense, but in contrast to other senses directed to the center, that is, to our memory.
I find the work and ideas especially the
"attention schema theory"
of sentience, consciousness, self-awareness proposed by Michael Graziano[1] most compelling in that area; they as well propose an evolutionary path towards the development of "consciousness"
And yeah sure, why should/could the mirror-neurons-"apparatus" _not_ be involved?
[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/ : including some The Atlantic essays.
See e.g. "Mirror neurons and imitation: a computationally guided review" at http://pacherie.free.fr/COURS/MSC/Oztop-Kawato-Arbib-2006.pd... for an overview.
The reason why you don't see so much of this type of literature is because the dominance of virtual AI: Google, Siri, etc. Hardware is expensive and learning with hardware is slow. However, the type of AI required is IMHO much more interesting. I think we really understand how our brains work if we have an AI competing at the Olympics.
Thanks.
I'd be interested in knowing exactly how the mirror neurons communicate and work with the rest of the brain.
Sure, monkeys don't have self awareness.
If there is an experience of what it is like to be a thing, then that thing can be said to be conscious.
Such things may be some subset of or superset containing "things with brains." But the idea that it is uniquely human seems absurd.
This has quite obvious evolutionary advantages. If you can predict how someone feels or what he might think you can outsmart him in competition for food. You could trick him for trade (e.g. food for tools) when he least suspects that it might not be in his favor. Essentially externalizing mirror neuron processes is much more beneficial in the short term, if you can think how the other person might think. In the long run in order to be successful you also need to internalize you mirror neurons - you need to think how to think about yourself and to start thinking what this person might think about you and what kind of self awareness they could have. You can't just trick the other, the deal is to trick them without them noticing otherwise you end up with prisoners dilemma. Probably those processes could also had led to evolution of language and trade.