Who Was Mrs Willett?

Chris Nunn

Description

Here is an account of mentality and human experience, written for a multi-disciplinary readership. The focus is on how mind, consciousness and selves inter-relate, extending into exploration of ideas about the nature of awareness and a search for relevant evidence.'Consciousness studies' has reached something of a crossroads nowadays. Computational approaches to mind and 'quantum consciousness' theories, have not lived up to early hopes. Neuroscience has made huge strides in the last few years, but is still nowhere near able to account for the existence of consciousness itself - as opposed to being able to explain how some of its content gets there. Philosophically, there is lack of consensus over both the nature of consciousness and what questions we should be asking about it.Chris Nunn's book surveys the current situation and argues that, as far as 'mind' is concerned, we need to take the overall dynamics into consideration, which include genetic, environmental and social factors along with neurology. He emphasizes the close links that exist between memory, experience and personhood. What emerges most strongly from this account is that answers to questions about the nature of consciousness are likely to depend on achieving a better understanding of the physics of time.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845404123
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
Who Was Mrs Willett?
Landscapes and Dynamics of Mind
Chris Nunn



Copyright page
Copyright © Chris Nunn, 2011
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by
Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com



Acknowledgements
As the thesis of this book implies, I really ought to thank everyone whom I have ever known, corresponded with, or whose books I have read, for all must have contributed to it however indirectly. But special thanks to contributors to the Journal of Consciousness Studies - one of the first journals in its field (issue no. 1 appeared in 1994) and still perhaps the benchmark one. I have read over 1500 papers, published and unpublished, describing their ideas, arguments, interests and findings. Nearly all have influenced me in one way or another, although I’ve given only a few specific references to their work. Fay Dunbar probably still holds the record for the greatest number of references (over 5000) quoted by a single author. Her monumental survey of the psychosomatic literature was written in a more leisurely age, the late 1940s. Any attempt to follow her example would have turned this into a very different sort of book and I have followed the opposite strategy to hers. Apologies, however, to any authors who feel that their names have been unfairly omitted from what follows.
Another reason for keeping references to a minimum is that some of the papers that impressed me most have never seen the light of publication, such is the lottery of academia in general and peer review in particular. It’s perhaps invidious to single out particular authors in this category, but nevertheless I am especially grateful to Erhard Bieberich for conveying his enthusiasm for fractals, Peter Henningsen for his wonderful insights into brain attractor dynamics and Vadim Vasilyev for getting me to think about symmetries and consciousness - all of them, of course, have successfully published papers elsewhere on other topics.
Many thanks, too, to Mike Beaton, Bill Faw, Penelope Rowlatt and Max Velmans for extremely helpful comments on drafts of various chapters and to Alfredo Pereira Jr. for keeping me up to date on a range of topics, especially ones to do with astrocytes and their activities. I’m also grateful to participants in a ‘Nature-groups’ invited workshop, who spent a week discussing and refining some of the ideas described in this book. Professor Max Velmans has kindly allowed me to quote (in chapter 2) remarks that he sent in a private email, while Christian MacLean of Floris publishers permitted reproduction here (in chapter 3) of a table first printed in a previous book of mine. Other quotations given in this book adhere to the ‘fair dealing’ convention and are fully attributed to their authors: should there be any queries about them, please contact me.
Apart from these intellectual debts, I owe a huge amount to my wife, Ruth, for her love, patience and forbearance. Incidentally, other than having both suffered in the cause of consciousness studies, she has no connection with the ‘Ruth’ whose story is told in chapter 8.



Introduction
This book is a report from the front line of ‘consciousness studies’, woven around an attempt answer questions raised by the story of ‘Mrs. Willett’, an early 20 th century medium. It’s basically a broad brush account of where the subject has got to nowadays, plus a search for evidence that may prove especially helpful to its future development. Although neuroscience plays a large part in the picture that I’ll be describing, like most people I see the study of consciousness as necessarily covering a much wider field, ranging from philosophy and physics, through psychology and anthropology, to things like arts and history. And my account is of course to some extent an idiosyncratic one. People who prefer to reduce everything to its simplest components - as do some neuroscientists and artificial intelligence experts for instance - might say that the main campaigns are elsewhere and I’m describing side issues only. A few remaining diehards (e.g. so-called ‘Eliminative Materialists’ and their co-travellers) could well mutter something about a picture of the battle between Centaurs and Lapiths being as realistic as the one I offer here. But, the way things have been going in this new century, they themselves are likely soon to join the Centaurs and fade into mythology - as did the Behaviourists before them. In any case, like any reporter, I can only tell it as I see it, so here goes.
First, I need to introduce some words. I use ‘consciousness’ to refer to the sort of thing you or I experience when we see someone’s face, or feel an emotion, or know that we are thinking a thought. But, as we shall see later (in chapter 5), it’s not nearly as simple as this suggests. Scientists and philosophers attach many different meanings to the word, some of which are mutually incompatible though most overlap. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which consciousness is us. When we are deeply asleep or anaesthetized, for example, the lights have gone out and there is no longer any ‘us’ from our own personal points of view, even though others can still point to our bodies and say ‘that’s him or her’.
‘Mentality’ or ‘mind’ is a broader concept than consciousness, if only because it always refers to our unconscious minds in addition to our conscious ones. Ideas about ‘extended mind’ are attracting ever more interest nowadays from psychologists and others. They think it useful to regard ‘mind’ as also occupying aspects of our bodies, environments, tools and societies, not just our brains alone. I’m with them in this. Some philosophers (Idealists, Panpsychists and Property Dualists), and even a few physicists, go further still, supposing that mind may be co-extensive with the universe. Arguments offered for their views are better than you might think. But, whatever its boundaries may be, mind is nevertheless to do with information and meaning, and is dynamic - it flows and changes and does things.
In my last book ( From Neurons to Notions ), I developed a picture of mentality aimed at showing that it can usefully be viewed in terms of ‘state spaces’ containing ‘attractors’, which in turn could be pictured as forming ‘landscapes’. Don’t worry about what these terms mean if they seem unfamiliar; all will be revealed in due course. It was a good picture in that it could be used to explain a whole lot of puzzles, ranging from why we need to sleep to why bureaucracies are often so awful. And, crucially for a wannabe scientific view, it predicted things that we may (or may not) discover in the future; it was refutable in other words. However, the book ended with a sort of cliff-hanger and contained a feature that I’m not at all happy about.
The cliff-hanger had to do with the size of the ‘state space’ relevant to some particular aspect of mentality. This may sound dry and boring, but in fact raises all sorts of fascinating questions. If you go to a football match, for example, is what you regard as your own mind confined within your own skull, or does it belong, in a very fundamental sense, to the whole crowd of which you are part? Common experience shows that sometimes you will feel you are an autonomous self and other times you will feel ‘part of the crowd’ in a way that can seem a lot more than just metaphorical. What is responsible for the difference, how does it arise and what does it mean? I want to try to get to the bottom of questions like these in this new book.
The bit I wasn’t happy with concerned the status of consciousness. The picture of mind offered in my earlier book implied that ‘consciousness’ is simply our word for whatever the small part of the content of mentality may be that one can tell oneself about at any given moment. It is defined, in other words, by being ‘introspectible’ or ‘reportable’ (if only to oneself), and should probably be regarded as basically something that comes for free as a consequence of certain types of memory. Mentality is where the interest and action mostly is, while consciousness is a sort of decorative add-on, according to this view. Well, there’s something basically right about some of this, as we shall see later on. Many people probably would say it’s the whole story. But I think there is more to consciousness than that alone. I want both to describe reasons for thinking there’s more to the story than reductionists often suppose, and to outline some ideas about what the extra parts of the story could be like. The telling will involve asking deep questions about causation, the status of physical law, the origins of things like electro-magnetism, the nature of selves and other matters. Some of the concepts we’ll need are primarily mathematical, but there won’t be many equations (only two) you may be relieved to hear - if only because I lack the technical competence to deal with them!
So that’s what this book is mainly about. It offers a view of what we currently understand about mind, consciousness and aspects of personhood, then explores some ideas about possible future understandings. After providing a ‘taster’ to indicate the scope of the problems (the ‘Mrs Willett’ history described in chapter 1), I’ll be taking a look at the boundaries and basis of mentality, especially conscious mentality, in chapters 2 to 4; then I’ll go on to explore how consciousness itself might possibly arise in chapters