This next paper is interesting for those who wish to understand the history of ideas regarding the brain/mind relationship antecedent to contemporary interpretations of psychophysical approaches to consciousness, first expressed by James and Fechner:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fphys.2011.00068/full
Extracts
". . . What James recognized, more than anything, was the powerful force of ideation, both socially and epistemologically. Moreover, when it came to the study of human consciousness, he underscored the impossibility of overcoming first-person narration. No matter how carefully one attempts to purge figurative speech and metaphor from scientific discourse, a human agent (with all its attendant messiness and subjectivity) is at the center of it. Furthermore, the translation and interpretation of observed or experienced facts into scientifically meaningful “events” – particularly in the case of the mind sciences – necessarily reduces complex inner states to static principles and formulae that describe physiological functions, while providing little account of how or why complex mental states come into being (James, 1981). The problem for James, as it was for Fechner, in his philosophy and in his psychophysical formula, was how to connect the subjective experience of inner psychological states with the so-called “external” facts of perception and sensory experience. This is where an understanding of James’s interest in physics allows us to pick up the lost thread of the more technical and scientific aspects of his philosophical thought . . . .
. . . While James turned to physics for insights regarding the “force” of the human mind, he turned to philosophy for explanations. The kinds of questions James pursued in his physiological study of the brain led him to philosophy and metaphysics for answers. James’s multidisciplinary approach to the study of mind combined his knowledge of natural history, psychology of religious experience and abnormal mental states to affirm a non-reductive materialism, a “softer” positivism, similar to that of Fechner. Radical empiricism, furthermore, marked James’s attempt to refute the positivism of his skeptical peers with a philosophical framework that would justify the scientific investigation of dissociative trance, abnormal and ordinary subjective mental states, associated with volition. James’s radical empiricism was ahead of its time in suggesting that what we think of as “mind” is a consequence of many interpenetrating systems, a result of the brain’s interactions with the environment, but not reduced to brain physiology or external stimuli alone. Though James had the philosophical framework in place, he lacked the technical scientific background to make it useful to the scientific study of consciousness. Therefore he turned to Fechner for the means of substantiating his theory of transmission and co-consciousness. . . .
". . . While James’s use of terms culled from physics was more poetical than technical, his ideas anticipate more recent understandings on the part of contemporary neuroscientists that mind is an emergent property of the nervous system’s engagement with its environment. James would have agreed with the recent consensus that identifying the neuronal correlates to consciousness alone will not address the “hard problems” concerning the how and why of subjective experience. The mind theorists whose ideas most resonate with those of James – from the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, to science historian and Buddhist practitioner B. Alan Wallace, phenomenologist Evan Thompson, and biomedical engineer Paul Nuñez – each postulate an interdependency of consciousness on the structure of reality itself. They approach the hard problem of consciousness by focusing on the “explanatory gap” between consciousness and the natural world. To understand the manifold attributes of consciousness, in relation to, but not reducible to neuronal networks, they argue, requires taking a closer look at the structure of reality. In recognition that consciousness and reality are co-constitutive, researchers are turning to dynamic systems, or complexity, theory to synthesize the efforts of neurobiology, phenomenology, and psychology in order to arrive at a better understanding of consciousness as a constituent component of reality itself. . . ."
". . . In developing his “transmission theory,” James had refined Myers’s theory of the Subliminal Self by being the first to explicitly link “notions of transmission and filtering with the brain” (through the metaphor of the “prism” through which light passes), only to come out on “the other side filtered, reduced, focused, redirected, or otherwise altered in some systematic fashion” (Kelly et al., 2007, p. 606). On the face of it, James’s “transmission theory” with its metaphors of a prismatic dome and pipe organ may sound like outlandish metaphysical claptrap, but, in fact, these metaphors suggest models that resemble more recent conceptions of mind–brain dynamics. James’s model of the brain as a “filter,” or, in contemporary terms, a “nested hierarchy” (Nuñez, 2010, p. 11), for processing information from the environment posits the mind and environment as co-dynamic, mutually constitutive entities. In a different context, James would describe this “permissive” or “transmissive” function of the brain as a kind of “Marconi station” (James, 1986, p. 359). Making no reference to James’s transmission theory, biomedical engineer Paul Nuñez then goes on to posit “a highly speculative” account of consciousness that is nonetheless dramatically similar to that of James when he describes how “whole brains or special parts of brains might behave like antenna systems sensitive to an unknown physical field or other entity that, for want of a better name, may be called Mind” (Nuñez, 2010, p. 274). In this way, James’s account of the brain’s “transmissive” properties resembles more contemporary accounts assigning the mind–brain specific temporal–spatial dimensions and a hierarchical structure. . . ."
". . . My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more… The centre works in one way while the margins work in another, and presently overpower the centre and are central themselves. What we conceptually identify ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any time is the centre; but our full self is the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving, and can hardly begin to analyze (1977, p. 130).
In writing this, James was thinking expressly of Fechner’s psychophysical threshold, now known as the Weber–Fechner law, postulating that “consciousness” is the threshold at which subjective perception and subjective sensation coincide. James was less interested in the mathematical formulation for this law than he was in the assigning of temporal–spatial movement to consciousness. These “movements,” as James would write in his introduction to the English translation of Fechner’s Little Book of Life and Death, “can be superimposed and compounded, the smaller on the greater, as wavelets upon waves. This is as true in the mental as in the physical sphere. Speaking psychologically, we may say that a general wave of consciousness rises out of a subconscious background, and that certain portions of it catch the emphasis, as wavelets catch the light… On the physical side we say that the brain-processes that corresponded to it altered permanently the future mode of action of the brain” (1904, p. xv). What James was arguing – drawing upon Fechner’s model of the threshold of consciousness as a sinusoidal wave – is richly suggestive of dynamical systems. James’s point of view similarly accords with that of phenomenologist Evan Thompson, who collaborated with the late Francisco Varela to write Mind in Life (2007). In this phenomenological account of neurophysiological processes, Thompson understands “dynamical systems” as “a collection of related entities or processes that stands out from a background as a single whole, as some observer sees and conceptualizes things” (Thompson, 2007, p. 39). The solar system is one such example, but James’s transmission theory offers the example of the social environment, in which one consciousness coexists among many others. In a very real sense, the compounding of consciousness suggests the co-penetration of individual consciousnesses within ever larger and interpenetrating systems.
This idea that consciousnesses themselves co-penetrate is made explicit in an even earlier passage, from the first lecture in A Pluralistic Universe. In distinguishing monism from his philosophical pluralism, James writes: “My thoughts animate and actuate this very body which you see and hear, and thereby influence your thoughts. The dynamic current somehow does get from me to you, however numerous the intermediary conductors may have to be. Distinctions may be insulators in logic as much as they like, but in life distinct things can and do commune together every moment” (James, 1977, pp. 115–116). The world of a Pluralistic Universe, is just such a dynamical system comprised of a world of interconnecting relations, of “complexity-in-unity” enveloped by a surrounding “earth-consciousness” (James, 1977, p. 73; James, 1909, 1910). And here we finally arrive at the panpsychic view James adopted later in life and attributed to Fechner. What exactly panpsychism means, particularly for James has been the source of much misunderstanding in James scholarship.
Just what is this “panpsychic view” and how does it correspond to contemporary neuroscientific debates about consciousness? James scholar David Lamberth distinguishes James’s “moderate” panpsychism from the “strong” or “idealistic” versions held by his contemporaries. The basic tenet of panpsychism is that nature is animate. More rigid versions are dualistic, positing an essential correspondence between the psyche and nature. The “pluralistic panpsychism” that James embraced allowed him to develop “a pluralistic metaphysics of pure experience and a correspondingly pluralistic notion of causality” (Lamberth, 1997, p. 250). This philosophical position of James’s strongly accords with the contemporary neuroscientific theory of “dynamic co-emergence,” held by Thompson and Varela, in which living and mental processes are understood as “unities or structured wholes rather than simply as multiplicities of events external to each other, bound together by efficient causal relations” (Lamberth, 1997, p. 67). In phenomenological terms, this means revising our understanding nature as “not pure exteriority,” but rather as possessing “its own interiority.” Thompson is careful to distinguish this perspective from “metaphysical idealism,” the argument for a “preexistent consciousness.” Instead, it implies a “transcendental orientation” by which we understand that “the world is never given to us as a brute fact detachable from our conceptual frameworks. Rather, it shows up in all the describable ways it does thanks to the structure of our subjectivity and our intentional activities” (Lamberth, 1997, p. 82). James would understand this in terms of an inherent intimacy of relations between the self and the world with which the self engages. Consciousness itself is “transcendent,” in Thompson’s terms, in part because, as he says, it “is always already presupposed as an invariant condition of possibility for the disclosure of any object[;] there is no way to step outside, as it were, of experiencing subjectivity, so as to effect a one-to-one mapping of it onto an external reality purged of any and all subjectivity” (Lamberth, 1997, p. 87). Consciousness seems defined then by some variable movement or change in time that is perceived differently in relation to one’s location in time and space, and that also depends upon one’s particular role and orientation toward the experiment, that is, whether one is experiencing mental phenomena as a subject in an experiment or as the witnessing and recording observer. In light of Thompson’s phenomenological orientation toward the mind–brain conundrum, it is this intersubjective dimension that becomes most salient to the future of contemporary mind–brain research.
James’s metaphors of “stream,” “halo,” and “penumbra” to describe what has been termed a “fringe” consciousness describe a structure for consciousness that is, in my words, a “distributed” one. To explain what I envision by the term “distributed,” I will use a familiar metaphor from the natural world. Imagine a tree in winter: a single trunk gives rise to smaller branches, forming the essential architecture of the tree; from these branches, smaller ones grow, giving rise to even smaller, finer branches as the tree extends upward and outward. Imagine, if you will, a whole forest of such trees, whose branches co-penetrate to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their proximity to one another, or upon other natural forces in the environment: a gust of wind, birds alighting, rain or snow falling on the branches. It would not be hard to imagine this “system” of co-penetrating branches in still other naturalistic forms: a flock of birds, a school of fish, a moving crowd, or bundles of neurons within a human brain, as each individual within the larger system imperceptibly shifts in relation to the subtle movements communicated at a subconscious level. These images are not hierarchical and they are not necessarily linear, for, at any point within the system a single movement, or a random complex of movements among disparate individual parts could produce something like the perception, to an observer, of cooperative “decision” within the system as a whole. But the observer is also part of the system, and we now arrive at a problem that links physics indelibly to consciousness as part of the “measurement problem” in quantum physics.
The observer’s volitional role of visually arresting an object in space in the act of perception is deeply problematized by the phenomenon known as the “collapse of [the] wave function” in quantum physics. As B. Alan Wallace explains, “quantum measurement entails the ‘collapse of a wave function,”’ in which measurement itself involves selecting one alternative from “a range of probabilities.” This selection thus forces a “reduction” in which “all the alternatives vanish.” This “reduction postulate” attempts to “describe what is actually observed in the measurements of quantum systems using classical methods” (Wallace, 2007, p. 81). Building on Michael Mensky’s “many-worlds interpretation,” Wallace argues for an abandonment of classical methods and a recognition that “Consciousness does not mechanically cause the wave function to collapse or influence physical particles. Rather, the observer’s brain and the observed system are synchronously entangled” (Wallace, 2007, p. 82). The measurement problem has brought increased attention to the role that the observer’s “cognitive frame of reference” plays in studies of consciousness, particularly in acquiring the first-person accounts necessary for an empirical study of subjectivity. As a Buddhist adept, Wallace maintains that scientific observers should integrate “contemplative methods of inquiry” into the study of mind; only by acquiring heightened powers of mental concentration, will scientists develop more reliable first-person accounts of subjectivity (Wallace, 2007, p. 105). Thompson, whose phenomenological approach to the mind–brain problem we have just seen, similarly argues for the need for observers to “suspend or refrain from judgment,” and “to develop more explicitly the pragmatics” of such practice “as a first-person method for investigating consciousness” (Thompson, 2007, p. 20). James’s concluding remarks in his Pluralistic Universe, anticipates the words of both Wallace and Thompson, when he urges his listeners to “discriminate ‘theoretic’ or scientific knowledge from the deeper ‘speculative’ knowledge aspired to by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge, which is knowledge about things, as distinguished from living contemplation or sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of reality” (James, 2007, p. 111). This more philosophic attitude of receptivity, delineated by Thompson, is one that James pioneered in his radical empiricist philosophy and in his life-long willingness to attend to the less clear-cut aspects of individual psychological experience. . . ."
Note: these extracts are not sufficient to substitute for a reading of the full paper.
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