Skip to main content

problematizing the relation between higher and lower level neurons as understood by Dennett

Dennett talks of higher level neurons performing a more complex operation than the lower ones while taking the operations of lower level operations as a kind of basis for their higher operations.

Question: If the processes occurring in the higher and lower neurons are chemically the same except for their placements, then wouldn't the purportedly higher-level neuron simply do the same sort of thing as the lower?  Why would it "know" more than the neurons earlier in the feeding chain of information described (albeit not as such) by Dennett?  In simply pointing to different parts of the brain and saying this part does that, etc.,  isn't Dennett engaging in the sort of mysticism that he derides elsewhere?

Also, if the higher level operation has the lower as its object, then doesn't that make for a lot of cognitive redundancy?  For example, suppose the lowest level neuronal response to a very, very small and faint light on a surface mapped with gridlines.  The very small light emitted at gridline points a1, a2, and a3 at time 1 causes neuron 1 , neuron 2 and neuron 3 to become active.  They in turn cause higher level neuron A to become active.  Isn't A's operation a repetition of the operations of 1, 2, and 3, so that the light being emitted is sensed twice?  Or does no sensation occur until all of these things affect the visual cortex?

If cognition does occur in the visual cortex but not earlier, then what about an animal's interpretation of what it has  seen?  Based on my ignorance, it seems the the "message" in the visual cortex can travel from that area to the motor cortex or to  higher cortical areas: when these areas receive the so-called message does one cognize the same colors and shapes yet again?  If so, then we would see the same color many times over.

I think these questions show that simply pointing to areas of the brain, identifying chemical processes and saying that cognition goes on here and there does not suffice to tell us what is really going on.

What would DD say in reply?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more