[ExI] LA Times: Misreading the mind

[Lee Corbin]

PJ passed on the discouraging

> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-lehrer20jan20,0,1700536.story?coll=la-opinion-center

> The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method:
> reductionism...

Do you feel the "but" coming on?

> But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very
> real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into
> tiny pieces.

Boeing 747s also do not benefit from being broken down into tiny
pieces. However, the day that engineers try to enhance their calculations
by going beyond the reductionistic is the day I stop flying.

> Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music
> is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its
> physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The intangible
> beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in the first
> place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most elemental
> details. In other words, reductionism can leave out a lot of reality.

Oh, please. The "reality" you are talking about is your experience.
No matter how you squirm, your experience will never be able to
be put into words, and will never be communicable to others.

> The mind is like music. While neuroscience accurately describes our
> brain in terms of its material facts -- we are nothing but a loom of
> electricity and enzymes -- this isn't how we experience the world. Our
> consciousness, at least when felt from the inside, feels like more
> than the sum of its cells. The truth of the matter is that we feel
> like the ghost, not like the machine.

Well, of course!   Your *feelings* are merely your own possibly
very screwed-up experience.

So much of this trash comes from the illusion (which we all have
when our brains are functioning quite well) that we have a platonic
viewpoint---that our consciousness is pristine and above the mere
mechanical nerve firings. Perhaps it would be better if people
never wrote in this vein unless they were very high on drugs or
in severe pain, or in some other way were able to know with
total immediacy that they spoke from a very particular position
as a very particular brain.

> If neuroscience is going to solve its grandest questions,

Hah!  It won't, so long as it keeps parading hopeless confusions
as its "grandest questions".  No one is ever going to solve "the
hard question".  Why?  Again, because experience is not a
description of how anything is, except that particular experience
itself.  The experience may be duplicated (by constructing an
identical system), but it may not be put into words!  How many
times do I have to keep saying this?

> such as the mystery of consciousness, it needs to adopt new
> methods

Oh, I can't wait.  Now the only real mystery to me is how many
more centuries of futility is going to claim the efforts of bad
philosophers in trying to tackle "qualia" and all the other loser
concepts.

> that are able to construct complex representations of the mind
> that aren't built from the bottom up.

I wonder why reductionism always annoyed people.  I think it
goes back to the very real phenomenon of people being crushingly
disappointed when they learn that there are no spirits or souls or
gods, and that we are "just" machines.  What I don't understand is
why, as adults, they don't get over it after a while.

> Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole.

No!  You're kidding!  Is that really true?  You mean to tell me
that, for instance, chemistry or biology is best understood by
applying concepts at a level beyond the quarks and gluons?
Will wonders never cease.

> William James, as usual, realized this first. The eight
> chapters that begin his 1890 textbook, "The Principles of Psychology,"
> describe the mind in the conventional third-person terms of the
> experimental psychologist. Everything changes, however, with Chapter
> 9. James starts this section, "The Stream of Thought," with a warning:
> "We now begin our study of the mind from within."

In other words, James is saying, we will now try putting the ineffable into words.

> With that single sentence, James tried to shift the subject of
> psychology. He disavowed any scientific method that tried to dissect
> the mind into a set of elemental units, be it sensations or synapses.
> Modern science, however, didn't follow James' lead.

Not that in every single generation since then there haven't been hundreds
of people trying to obtain a "holistic" approach that will answer the "hard"
questions.  The only thing changes is the verbiage, the labels they use.
There never has been an iota of progress here, and there never will be.
These people have got to come to understand that there CANNOT
be any progress of the sort they have in mind.

> ...Unfortunately, this meant that the mind was defined in very narrow
> terms. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.
>
> But it's time to bring experience back. Neuroscience has effectively
> investigated the sound waves, but it has missed the music. Although
> reductionism has its uses -- it is, for instance, absolutely crucial
> for helping us develop new pharmaceutical treatments for mental
> illnesses -- its limitations are too significant to allow us to answer
> our biggest questions. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we
> knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?"

If we "know the world only through [the action of our] synapses",
then how could we know about rocks and trees?  Might as well
follow one idiotic question with another. Read my lips:  we are
*machines*.  Do you ask how a camera manages to record a
scene when at bottom all there is are atoms of silver iodide?
How can a picture of a rock band be captured by silver iodide
crystals?  Why not ask that question too; as long as you're
going to be clueless, go all the way.

> The question, of course, is how neuroscience can get beyond
> reductionism. Science rightfully adheres to a strict methodology,
> relying on experimental data and testability, but this method could
> benefit from an additional set of inputs.

What a grotesque mischaracterization.  The writer leaves out the
most important part:  hypotheses and conjectures.

> Artists, for instance, have
> studied the world of experience for centuries. They describe the mind
> from the inside, expressing our first-person perspective in prose,
> poetry and paint. Although a work of art obviously isn't a substitute
> for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac --
> the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they
> are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something
> apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.
>
> Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the
> novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary
> day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in
> appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
> consciousness."
>
> In other words, she wanted to describe the mind from the inside, to
> distill the details of our psychological experience into prose. That's
> why her novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel
> true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.

Novels do not "capture" anything.  They certainly don't capture reality.
What they do, and do very well on occasion, is create in a reader an
experience that so far as we can see is very much like the experience
of the author.

> Some of the most exciting endeavors in neuroscience right now are
> trying to move beyond reductionism. The Blue Brain Project, for
> example, a collaboration between the École Polytechnique Fédérale in
> Lausanne, Switzerland, and IBM, is in the process of constructing a
> biologically accurate model of the brain that can be used to simulate
> experience on a supercomputer.

On this list, we can tell them quite a bit about the implications of that!

Okay, so let's suppose they succeed in "simulating experience
on a supercomputer".  I imagine they'll want the conscious program
to tell them what its experiences are like. And they'll find themselves
right back at square one!

> Henry Markram, the leader of the
> project, recently told me that he's convinced "reductionism peaked
> five years ago." While Markram is quick to add that the reductionism
> program isn't complete -- "There is still so much that we don't know
> about the brain,"

Oh, I'm glad for that. What a concession.

> he says -- he's trying to solve a harder problem,

Yikes, the "hard problem" once again.

> which is figuring out how all these cellular details connect together.
> "The Blue Brain Project" he says, "is about showing people the whole."
> In other words, Markram wants to hear the music.

I cannot imagine any experience that will allow him to think
that he has succeeded.  Suppose that with a joystick and mouse
he can arrange for his own brain to have any experience whatever.
So what?  He an almost do that by going to movies and using
present-day VR techniques.

I wish one of these people would write a science-fiction story
that described success in their endeavor. Can you imagine a
number of researchers going around saying "We solved it! Now
we know the secret!  We know how the brain creates sensation!"
The problem is that no matter what they truly know, it won't *be*
the experience itself.  And it's some form of this hopeless quest
that the poor fools have saddled themselves with.

> One day, we'll look back at the history of neuroscience and realize
> that reductionism was just the first phase.

I want to bet some money with this guy.  When?  How much?

> Each year, tens of
> thousands of neuroscience papers are published in scientific journals.
> The field is introduced to countless new acronyms, pathways and
> proteins. At a certain point, however, all of this detail starts to
> have diminishing returns. After all, the real paradox of the brain is
> why it feels like more than the sum of its parts. How does our pale
> gray matter become the Technicolor cinema of consciousness? What
> transforms the water of the brain into the wine of the mind? Where
> does the self come from?
>
> Reductionism can't answer these questions.

Rather, the kinds of answers to these questions (some of them
quite real) aren't what he's after and aren't satisfying. Consider
the set of all 10,000 word paragraphs in the English language.
Not a single one of them can possibly satisfy this guy and people
like him. Why?  Because no one of those paragraphs is going
to be able to precisely specify what it is like to have an experience!

> According to the facts of neuroscience, your head contains
> 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you,

No particular color of the pastel is the Mona Lisa painting,
either.

> or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist.

When you start making just incredibly obvious foolish statements,
it should be a sign that you are completely off base.

> Unless our science moves beyond reductionism and grapples
> instead with the messiness of subjective experience -- what
> James called a "science of the soul" -- its facts will grow
> increasingly remote.

They'll become increasingly remote to those who don't want
to see.  (By the way, you'll notice that these yearnings after
solutions to the "hard problems" repeat themselves over and
over, without ever saying anything new.)

Lee