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

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more

entropy, teleology

Perhaps the best way to understand entropy is to look at it as the tendency of things to arrive at equilibrium.  Many non-living processes head in that direction, but not all.  For an example of an exception, consider the movement of electrons around the nucleus: that movement itself doesn't seem to be heading toward any equilibrium… unless one considers the tendency of atoms to combine into molecules so as to fill the electron shells.  If reductionism is false, then isn't the fact that organisms continually create disequilibrium at one level, while seeking another equilibrium (for example a full stomach) quite relevant?   Of course, entropy as a law is about systems, not individuals…. right?
2 comments
Read more