Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind

Description

This collection opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies. Approaching consciousness from diverse disciplinary perspectives—philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, neuropathology, psychotherapy, biology, animal ethology, and physics—the contributors offer empirical and philosophical support for a model of consciousness inspired by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Whitehead's model is developed in ways he could not have anticipated to show how it can advance current debates beyond well-known sticking points. This has trenchant consequences for epistemology and suggests fresh and promising new perspectives on such topics as the mind-body problem, the neurobiology of consciousness, animal consciousness, the evolution of consciousness, panpsychism, the unity of consciousness, epiphenomenalism, free will, and causation.
List of Figures and Tables
Key to Abbreviations of Whitehead’s Work

Introduction
Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes

Part I. Setting the Stage

1. Process Thought as a Heuristic for Investigating Consciousness
Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes

2. Whitehead as a Neglected Figure of Twentieth-Century Philosophy
Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes

3. Consciousness as a Topic of Investigation in Western Thought
Anderson Weekes

4. Whitehead’s Unique Approach to the Topic of Consciousness
Anderson Weekes

Part II. Psychology and Philosophy of Mind

5. Consciousness as Subjective Form: Whitehead’s Nonreductionist Naturalism
David Griffin

6. The Interpretation and Integration of the Literature on Consciousness from a Process Perspective
Michael Katzko

7. Windows on Nonhuman Minds
Donald Redfield Griffin

Part III. From Metaphysics to (Neuro)Science (and Back Again)

8. Panexperientialism, Quantum Theory, and Neuroplasticity
George W. Shields

9. The Evolution of Consciousness
Max Velmans

10. The Carrier Theory of Causation
Gregg Rosenberg

Part IV. Clinical Applications: Consciousness as Process

11. The Microgenetic Revolution in Contemporary Neuropsychology and Neurolinguistics
Maria Pachalska and Bruce Duncan MacQueen

12. From Coma to Consciousness: Recovery and the Process of Differentiation
Avraham Schweiger, Michael Frost, and Ofer Keren

13. Consciousness and Rationality from a Process Perspective
Michel Weber

Part V. History (and Future?) of Philosophy

14. Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection According to Whitehead
Xavier Verley

15. Consciousness and Causation in Whitehead’s Phenomenology of Becoming
Anderson Weekes

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Psychology
• Behavioral neuroscience
• Philosophy of mind
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438429427
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 15 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series in Philosophy

George R. Lucas Jr., editor

Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind
Edited by
Michel Weber
and
Anderson Weekes

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2009 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Process approaches to consciousness in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind / edited by Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes.
           p. cm. — (SUNY series in philosophy)
     Includes bibliographical references and index.
     ISBN 978-1-4384-2941-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
     1. Consciousness. 2. Process philosophy. 3. Psychology. 4. Neurosciences. 5. Philosophy of mind. I. Weber, Michel. II. Weekes, Anderson, 1960–
 
     B808.9.P77 2010
     126—dc22                                                                                             2009010131
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memoria ingentis ingenii,
dedicamus librum hunc ad
Alecem
MDCDLXXVI – MMVII

For much of the twentieth century, all sciences, including biology, were obsessed with reductionism: viewing the world at all levels, from the smallest to the largest, as merely a machine made of parts. Take the machine apart, examine the individual pieces, and we would understand how the world works. Reductionism has had many triumphs in understanding the nature of the parts and how some parts fit together. It enabled us to build computers and devise powerful medicines for example. But some scientists admit that reductionism falls short of its ultimate goal: understanding how the world works. It falls short because it fails to recognize the connectedness, the unity, that is the deep essence of nature in all realms. Not in the sense of physicists seeking the ultimate fundamental particle or the theory of everything. There is a oneness in nature in the sense of interdependence.
—Irene Pepperberg, Alex and Me

Figures and Tables
  Figure 10.1.  Depiction of a Center Cell and its Neighborhood on a “Life” World Grid Figure 10.2.  Necker Cube Figure 11.1.  Schematic Representation of the Three Primary Planes of Evolutionary Development in the Human Brain Figure 11.2.  A Microgenetic Model of Behavior Figure 11.3.  Medial Cross-section of the Human Brain Figure 11.4.  Levels in the Mental State Figure 13.1.  The Nuclear Pivotal Model of Normal Consciousness Table 10.1.  How the Experiencing of Phenomenal Individuals Fills the Carrier Role Table 12.1.  The Homomorphism of the Four Processual Spheres

Key to Abbreviations of Whitehead's Works AI Adventures of Ideas , 1933/1967 (New York: The Free Press) CN The Concept of Nature , 1920/1964 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ESP Essays in Science and Philosophy , 1947 (New York: The Philosophical Library) FR The Function of Reason , 1929/1958 (Boston: Beacon Press) MT Modes of Thought , 1938/1968 (New York: The Free Press) PM Principia Mathematica , 1910–13/1925–1927 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) PNK Principles of Natural Knowledge , 1919/1982 (New York: Dover) PR Process and Reality , 1929/1978 (Corrected edition, New York: The Free Press) PRel The Principle of Relativity , 1922 (Cambridge: The University Press) S Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect , 1927/1985 (New York: Fordham University Press) SMW Science and the Modern World , 1925/1967 (New York: The Free Press) UA A Treatise on Universal Algebra , 1898/1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Introduction
Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes
We introduce this volume with a brief preview of its overall concerns (Section I), followed by a précis of the individual contributions (Section II) and an overview of the most important literature with a similar or related focus (Section III). The preview will show that this is not a collection of specialty scholarship, but a volume rightly intended for the broadest possible learned readership. The uniqueness of its approach is tempered by the generality of its concerns. The précis then situate each contribution in the larger context of the book's philosophical and interdisciplinary ambitions, while the last section situates the book in the broader context of today's intellectual landscape, where a growing body of literature reinforces its cause without anticipating its results.
In this Introduction, we adopt the following conventions in referring to the chapters that follow. (1) Chapters are identified by authorship. Contributors’ proper names, including those of the editors, refer to their respective contributions to Parts II – V . Proper names do not reference the contributions to Part I , which resulted from collaboration ( chapters 1 and 2 ) or consensus ( chapters 3 and 4 ) between the editors. These chapters in Part I we refer to simply as the contributions of “the editors.” “Contribution(s) of the editors” does not refer their individual contributions in Parts IV and V . (2) Source and locus will not be given for quotations if they are taken from the chapters that follow. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this Introduction are from the named author's contribution to the present volume.

Main Themes of the Book
Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy was a protest against the compart-mentalization of knowledge. A specialized subfield of philosophy focused on Whitehead interpretation is therefore something of a paradox. Given the daunting complexity of Whitehead's writing, literal exegesis and historical scholarship aiming at an “immanent” interpretation of his thought have a continuing and obviously important role to play, but Whitehead himself would scarcely recognize such activities as his rightful legacy. A failure of Whiteheadians to be sufficiently Whiteheadian in this regard may well be the reason Whitehead's ideas have seemed at times to be threatened with extinction and mostly available in fossil form. If this is changing, it is at least partly because outsiders are storming the museum. Straightaway this has opened vast avenues of new dialogue with unsuspected partners, to which this book bears witness.
This volume brings multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on White-head's psychology (which, in a way, is his whole philosophy—a metaphysics of experience) in order to analyze it in terms of relevance to contemporary consciousness studies. Accordingly, we have gathered contribution from scholars whose areas of research are diverse and often do not include Whiteheadian process philosophy as a subfield of expertise, but whose own intellectual paths have led them to recognize an important kinship with Whitehead.
The area of consciousness studies proves to be a busy intersection: a place where one can't help but meet everything from metaphysics to psychotherapy. This is not happenstance. It reflects the nature of the beast we are tracking, and we have not shied from it. This accounts for both the broad scope of the volume and the diversity of its contributions.
In important respects, this book complements David Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem (1998), which grew out of an interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont Colleges in 1994, “Consciousness in Humans, Animals and Computers. A Scientific-Philosophical Conference.” Bringing a Whiteheadian perspective to contemporary consciousness studies, Griffin effects a broad synthesis of the issues currently under debate and at the same time provides an excellent introduction to Whitehead's psychology. We reverse directions. Bringing different contemporary perspectives (including Griffin's) to bear on Whitehead's psychology, we replace synthesis with analysis and highlight the richness and polyvalence of Whitehead's ideas. Of particular concern to this volume is the role that Whitehead's process philosophy can play in providing an interpretive framework for neuropsychology, and, conversely, the role that neuropsychology can play in providing an empirical model for Whitehead's concept of process and an empirical confirmation of his theory of consciousness. According to Whitehead, consciousness is a process—a very specific kind of process that, despite its uniqueness, holds the key to understanding process as such. Consequently, a number of important findings of neuropsychology, some of them familiar, but some of them quite new and even startling, will figure decisively in these pages.
The contributions to this volume can be grouped according to a number of shared themes. Several contributors (David Griffin, Katzko, Shields, Pachalska, and MacQueen, and the editors in Part I ) show that some recognizably Whiteheadian issues are at stake in the current debates about consciousness and that Whiteheadian ideas can be exploited—sometimes in ways that Whitehead could not have anticipated—to advance the debate beyond some well-known sticking points. Two of the contributors (Rosenberg and Weekes) explore the curious connection Whitehead alleges between consciousness and causation. One author proceeds by a conceptual analysis of the structure of explanatory theories, the other proceeds phenomenologically, but they both lend support to Whitehead's signature idea, refereed in chapter 4 , that scientists and philosophers find consciousness very difficult to explain for the same reason that they have a problem unde