Beyond the Brain 2023 PDF

Beyond the brain: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended (and maybe even machine) mind Lecture game plan Attendance question Review accounts of how the conscious mind and physical brain might relate, …including a bunch of “isms,” with special attention to the debate between physicalism an...

Beyond the brain: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended (and maybe even machine) mind Lecture game plan Attendance question Review accounts of how the conscious mind and physical brain might relate, …including a bunch of “isms,” with special attention to the debate between physicalism and dualism. Alva Noë: an alternative to both physicalism and dualism? The “four e’s”: embodied, embedded, enacted and extended mind And what about AI? Attendance question Are you a stochastic parrot? Some “-isms” regarding the mind and consciousness Dualism Descartes’ substance dualism: mind is thinking stuff and is immaterial – utterly distinct from the physical body, which is extended (material) stuff Property dualism: there is only one kind of stuff with two distinct kinds of properties (mental and physical).  Dualism, cont. Some form of dualism may seem intuitively plausible to you: Most of us think that our beliefs and desires (mental states) cause many of our behaviors (physical states)… but those mental states seem very different from physical ones. Ex: I decide to raise my hand, and my arm goes up. We also understand ourselves to have “privileged access” to our own mental lives (and not to others’ mental lives). Problem: how do immaterial and material substances or mental and physical properties interact and influence each other? Physical events have physical causes – “causal closure” leaves no room for mental causes  Against dualism Gilbert Ryle: dualism (wrongly) posits a “ghost in the machine” Talk of the mind or the mental as some ghostly thing inside our heads is a “category mistake” Example: visitor to the university The “mind” and mental activity isn’t a separate realm of things existing alongside and like physical things do (neurons and their firing, say). No shadowy realm of the mental exists akin to the physical realm of the brain and body. Recommends enlarging the domain of the mental to get beyond a choice between inner and outer (ghost and machine). Physicalist (non-dualist) approaches (sorry…more isms…) Physicalism (sometimes called materialism) is a kind of monism, meaning there is one kind of stuff – all explicable in physical terms. One version: Functionalism, including ”global workspace theory,” emphasizes what consciousness DOES in the system. Conscious mental content is the information that gets “broadcast” to the rest of the brain for our use – guiding our behavior. Access to conscious information allows us to tackle new situations that require attention to the “big picture.”  Remind me: what are we talking about? Global consciousness (or Local or state creature consciousness): consciousness (or conscious content): Sentience Items in my awareness (sense Wakefulness (in contrast to perceptions, emotions, sleep – dreaming, or dreamless) thoughts) Degrees of sedation Sensory “qualia” (like sweetness or color) Hypnosis “What it is like” MCS, VS Narrative consciousness  The standoff Dualists believe we will never Physicalists: There is no hard have a complete physical problem. explanation of how brain We have increasing insight into processes cause consciousness how the brain causes because the mental aspect – consciousness. subjective experience – cannot be Consciousness does not exist at reduced to brain processes. the level of the individual neuron, but (one day) we will explain the The “hard problem” of way the complex behavior of consciousness is in fact the billions of neurons account for impossible problem. consciousness.  One path out of the dualist-physicalist stand-off? Alva Noë: “Consciousness is not something you have. It’s something you do” (italics added). “Enactivism” emphasizes features of living organisms interacting with their environment: “What matters for consciousness is not the neural activity as such, but neural activity as embedded in an animal’s larger action and interaction with the world around it. … I propose that the brain’s job is that of facilitating a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body, and world. Experience is enacted by conscious beings with the help of the world.” (Out of Our Heads, 47) Noë on Noë https://closertotruth.com/vi deo/noeal-005/?referrer=81 99 Who are enactivists arguing with here? Contemporary neuroscientists studying consciousness who assume that we can locate consciousness in the brain The “brain in a vat” thought experiment encourages us to think disembodied brains could continue to operate (if wired up to receive appropriate life- sustaining resources and input) Bringing Infant humans come into the world with massively incomplete brains, and they are dependent upon embodiment experience of the world to develop those brains and back: the states of consciousness that brains states are Neuroplasticity correlated with. (or “livewired” “Experience of the world” includes other humans: brains, in David baby-caretaker dyads are crucial to brain Eagleman’s development, given our uniquely long periods of helplessness phrase) extends Example: Nursing (breast or bottle) involves jiggling our brains beyond the baby, who will nod off, then be guided back to the vat eating, need burping, etc. Proto-conversation? Developing (human) minds and bodies and their limits Language, musical ability, religious proclivities – in childhood, our brains have enormous flexibility, which we lose as we age, locking down patterns for the sake of efficiency. Danielle Crockett and the consequences of severe social and environmental deprivation (D. Eagleman, Livewired, 23) New York Times, 9/4/22: The woman with the “curious hole” in her head Perinatal stroke in utero – brain “bled into her mother’s uterus” Result? (M)onth after month, I surprised the experts, meeting all of the typical milestones of children my age. I enrolled in regular schools, excelled in sports and academics. The language skills the doctors were most worried about at my birth — speaking, reading and writing — turned out to be my Digging into Noë’s examples: beyond the brain in the vat  1. Ferret ears and eyes MIT’s Mriganka Sur’s work (in 2000) on infant ferrets: rewired the nerves from the eyes to the auditory cortex. Result? Sight via the auditory cortex Surprised! Had expected genetically predetermined sensory functions of different cortices. Got the attention of the popular media, including NYT. Lesson? “The link between brain areas and conscious experience … is malleable” (Out of Our Heads, 54) Does this challenge the brain in the vat idea? 2. Sensory Substitution Video camera mounted on glasses produces images that are transformed into vibrations felt on tongue After training, subjects “see” objects located in space via their tongue rather than just feeling vibrations on the tongue User’s ability to control the camera through her movement (bringing things closer or changing the angle, etc.) improves “visual” experience. Sensing and acting affect each other, shaping how the “input” is experienced. 3. The rubber hand illusion “Feeling” a hand that you KNOW https://www.youtube.co is not your own. m/watch?v=DphlhmtGRq What is going on here? I Noë: “the sense of where we are is shaped dynamically by our interaction with the environment in multiple sensory modalities” (71) Note: effect is more pronounced when stroke hand in time with your heartbeat. Rubber hand – an “illusion”? “In one sense this is clearly an illusion. After all, you really are being touched on your right hand under the table. But in another sense, there’s no illusion – or rather, the mechanisms at work in this illusion, if we want to call it that, are those of normal, successful perception.” (Out of Our Heads, 74) We are embodied and embedded: our bodies and situations are the “background” – the setting – for being and acting in the world. Our body, on this view, is NOT just another thing in the world that I relate to as an observer. Our bodies, ourselves: the lived body My body isn’t merely one object among others in a world of physical things (although I can treat it this way). My body provides my point of view on the world and structures my experience of the world. The “body schema” – body as background against which I attend to things in my world, as a condition of “readiness” for me to engage in activities. More aspects of the “lived body” Hands: not just something I can observe, but that with which I reach out and grab my water bottle. Sense of the space around me (crowded, wide open, stuffy) Emotional valence experienced through the body (sluggish, clumsy, depressed, elated) Body as revealing my situation as meaningful to me (water is out of reach; bus bearing down fast) See: Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge Press, 2021), Ch. 7. What lessons should we draw from all this? The “4E” approach to mind Embodied: involving body parts and processes beyond the brain Embedded: situated in the organism’s environment Enacted: involving the organism’s activity in its environment Extended: incorporating items from the organism’s environment Switching gears… AI – like us, or more like salami? Questions: Which approach to consciousness would be likely to expect that we should (one day) be able to create consciousness in AIs? When a chatbot tells you it is afraid of being turned off, does that mean its conscious? Podcast plug! Today’s AI: Large Language Models Large language models, or LLMs, use statistical models to analyze massive amounts of data, picking out the patterns and connections between words and phrases. “Training a large language model involves feeding it large amounts of data, such as books, articles, or web pages, so that it can learn the patterns and connections between words. The more data it is trained on, the better it will be at generating new content.” See: BoostAI blog post https://www.boost.ai/blog/llms-large- language-models I asked Bard to generate an image of an astronaut riding a horse Question: do you think Bard prefers one of these images over the other? Then I asked it to tell me a good joke. Here is what I got: Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field! Here is another one: What do you call a fish with no eyes? Fsh! I hope you like these jokes! Emily Bender “You are not a parrot. And a chatbot is not a human. And and the octopus a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what example will happen when we forget this.” Octopus example, cont. Some differences between LLMs and natural language? Bender: (human) languages are built on “people speaking to each other, working together to achieve a joint understanding. It’s a human- human interaction.” (New York, 35) LLMs, in contrast, are “stochastic parrots” An entity “for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms … according to probabilistic information about how they combine without any reference to meaning.” (Italics added) Human credulity: finding meaning everywhere? https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q= heider+simmel+video&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive &vld=cid:82146811,vid:VTNmLt7QX8E,st:0 Daniel Dennett’s worry about “counterfeit people” Our natural inclination to treat anything that seems to talk sensibly with us as a person—adopting what I have called the “intentional stance”—turns out to be easy to invoke and almost impossible to resist, even for experts. We’re all going to be sitting ducks in the immediate future.  How to combat our blurring of mind and non-mind? Stop encouraging the blurring – reject the “I’m a stochastic parrot, and so r u” sloganeering. Change our terminology? SALAMI or DGM or cybernetics instead of “artificial intelligence”? Step back from designing bots to seem like us Dennett: Hold big tech companies liable for harms perpetrated by “counterfeit people” (and mark them as counterfeit) Ethical implications? Life-sized RealDoll + chatbot example One approach: we don’t need to respect the doll’s “no,” and we can tolerate “nonconsensual” acts with it because it’s not the kind of thing that could consent or possess the moral dignity and agency demanding our respect. Even if you accept that view, will we erode ethical attitudes and practices towards beings that do possess moral personhood? Ethical principles (and values) for AI? Transparency, Justice and fairness Non-maleficence Responsibility Privacy Beneficence Freedom and autonomy Trust Sustainability Dignity Solidarity