Interesting interview about consciousness
Sorry to regurgitate this link for people who've seen it already, but I found this interview about, among other things, consciousness really interesting and funny.
The interviewee is Susan Blackmore, who apparently was a seriously scientific parapsychological researcher for about 20 years before deciding it was bogus. Now she studies "memetics," which I always thought was a flake subject, but apparently she sides with people like Dennett and Dawkins, and is a hard-liner about things like consciousness and self being illusions. I gather she's strictly a physicalist. She also does a lot of zen meditation, which she finds consistent with her work.
The interviewer is "jody," who is, in the first assessment, the kind of New Age-y flake that probably made me associate memetics with flakism. S/He really wants to get some kind of funk juice out of her, but s/he can't--Blackmore's just too tough. So you get these hilarious exchanges. My favorite:
jody: ... While you're talking about this "cultural substrate" other theories are popping to mind that may resonate with, or eventually complement or be integrated into, memetic studies, such quantum theory, perhaps Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, Carl Jung's theories of the collective unconscious and sychronicity. ... Is there a memetic memory field that exists in, or underlies, culture?
Susan: Not if you mean something separate from the brain. ... There is nothing else, there is no field. There is nothing remotely like Sheldrake's morphogenetic field, absolutely not. I mean that's totally anathema to whole the memetic way of thinking about things. Absolutely not collective unconscious. If you take the modern interpretation of collective unconscious as some kind of spooky field or something, absolutely not.
Score one for science!
Consciousness is an interesting topic for me because while my studies have turned to focus on what's going on in the head, they are normally working from the functionalist and computational perspectives, which mostly try to sidestep consciousness entirely. Even last semester's philosophy of mind class kind of petered out when it got to consciousness: "Dualism sucks, behaviorism and identity theory suck, functionalism works ok and...damned if we know anything about consciousness..." was sort of the take-home message. But here comes Blackmore with what is allegedly a rigorous approach.
Actually, rather it looks like she's giving a functionalist account of consciousness--by saying we don't actually have consciousness, but have functionalist reasons for believing that we do. [Memetics being a functionalist theory, as evidenced by the multiple realizability of Blackmore's conception of it--cultures and brains and the internet are all "memeplexes" because (my interpretation:) they have some kind of functional equivalence)]
Not that I'm agreeing with Blackmore on everything she seems to ally herself with, mind you. But it is interesting.
The New Age BS factor makes me skeptical of "Consciousness Studies." This is especially true at Brown, where the East Asian and Religious Studies people ally with a handful of Theater Arts and Comp Lit faculty run the "Contemplative Studies" pseudo-department and bring in speakers like David Lynch. My Indian Philosophy professor from a year ago, Peter Scharf, is involved of course. There are a couple of psych professors there, but philosophers and cognitive scientists seem to be staying the hell away.
But more and more I'm thinking I ought to check this kind of thing out. I mean, you can't just go around and ignore the hard problem, right?
Oh. Also, I think I ought to learm how to practice zen meditation. Put that on the to-do list.
The interviewee is Susan Blackmore, who apparently was a seriously scientific parapsychological researcher for about 20 years before deciding it was bogus. Now she studies "memetics," which I always thought was a flake subject, but apparently she sides with people like Dennett and Dawkins, and is a hard-liner about things like consciousness and self being illusions. I gather she's strictly a physicalist. She also does a lot of zen meditation, which she finds consistent with her work.
The interviewer is "jody," who is, in the first assessment, the kind of New Age-y flake that probably made me associate memetics with flakism. S/He really wants to get some kind of funk juice out of her, but s/he can't--Blackmore's just too tough. So you get these hilarious exchanges. My favorite:
jody: ... While you're talking about this "cultural substrate" other theories are popping to mind that may resonate with, or eventually complement or be integrated into, memetic studies, such quantum theory, perhaps Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, Carl Jung's theories of the collective unconscious and sychronicity. ... Is there a memetic memory field that exists in, or underlies, culture?
Susan: Not if you mean something separate from the brain. ... There is nothing else, there is no field. There is nothing remotely like Sheldrake's morphogenetic field, absolutely not. I mean that's totally anathema to whole the memetic way of thinking about things. Absolutely not collective unconscious. If you take the modern interpretation of collective unconscious as some kind of spooky field or something, absolutely not.
Score one for science!
Consciousness is an interesting topic for me because while my studies have turned to focus on what's going on in the head, they are normally working from the functionalist and computational perspectives, which mostly try to sidestep consciousness entirely. Even last semester's philosophy of mind class kind of petered out when it got to consciousness: "Dualism sucks, behaviorism and identity theory suck, functionalism works ok and...damned if we know anything about consciousness..." was sort of the take-home message. But here comes Blackmore with what is allegedly a rigorous approach.
Actually, rather it looks like she's giving a functionalist account of consciousness--by saying we don't actually have consciousness, but have functionalist reasons for believing that we do. [Memetics being a functionalist theory, as evidenced by the multiple realizability of Blackmore's conception of it--cultures and brains and the internet are all "memeplexes" because (my interpretation:) they have some kind of functional equivalence)]
Not that I'm agreeing with Blackmore on everything she seems to ally herself with, mind you. But it is interesting.
The New Age BS factor makes me skeptical of "Consciousness Studies." This is especially true at Brown, where the East Asian and Religious Studies people ally with a handful of Theater Arts and Comp Lit faculty run the "Contemplative Studies" pseudo-department and bring in speakers like David Lynch. My Indian Philosophy professor from a year ago, Peter Scharf, is involved of course. There are a couple of psych professors there, but philosophers and cognitive scientists seem to be staying the hell away.
But more and more I'm thinking I ought to check this kind of thing out. I mean, you can't just go around and ignore the hard problem, right?
Oh. Also, I think I ought to learm how to practice zen meditation. Put that on the to-do list.