Mazviita Chirimuuta

Availability of the notion that the brain or mind represents the world by instantiating structures similar to relations amongst external items is crucial to the idea than an AI could represent the world in the same way that a human being does. This paper looks at the historical emergence of this notion within the structuralist movement in science, mathematics and philosophy seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Cassirer’s philosophy is a crystallisation of some these tendencies, and Heidegger’s disagreement with Cassirer over the role of sensory intuition in Kant’s epistemology forms the basis for a Heideggerian critique of AI different from the generalised anti-representationalism of Dreyfus and other proponents of embodied cognition.

The Brain Abstracted tackles the question of how we should interpret neuroscience for the purposes of doing philosophy of mind. Neurophilosophy rests on the premise that the findings presented in the theories and models of neuroscience are directly relevant to longstanding philosophical topics such as the nature of perception and agency. Insufficient attention has been paid to the challenge of brain complexity and how it fundamentally shapes neuroscientific practice. Given that all models and theories in neuroscience are highly simplified, relying on numerous abstractions and idealisations, as well as experimental controls which reduce the complexity of datasets elicited, it is reasonable to worry that such results may not be informative about the inherent natures of the neural processes associated with the cognitive kinds of interest to neurophilosophers.

This chapter examines the early development of the _physicalism_ that dominates philosophy today. In the first volumes of the journal _Mind_ philosophers, physiologists, and psychologists debated the mind-brain connection and whether it was possible to reject a dualism of matter and immaterial souls without lapsing into a problematic materialism. The first versions of physicalism—an epistemic position regarding the universality of the principles and methods of the physical sciences—were a popular solution to this dilemma. This chapter focuses on the writings of George Henry Lewes (1817–78) who, under the influence of Comte’s hierarchical depiction of the different levels of scientific investigation, rejected physicalism and argued for the autonomy of the biological and psychological sciences. In doing so he first coined the term ‘emergence’ and left a legacy for the British Emergentists of the twentieth century.

The most widely known account of levels of explanation in neuroscience and cognitive science is due to Marr), who proposed a three-level framework for explanation of the visual system. Various philosophers have given interpretations of Marr’s framework. The purpose of this chapter is different: to show how the analogy with artifacts (i.e., systems engineered by humans) is foundational for the idea that complex neuro-cognitive systems are amenable to explanation at distinct levels; to show how this works as a simplifying strategy attractive to anti-reductionists; and to argue that the resulting explanations are imbued with an ‘all-too-human’ character. Section 1 surveys various proposals for carving the brain into levels, and describes how epistemic conceptions of levels of abstraction differ from metaphysical conceptions of levels of organisation. Section 2 examines the artifact analogies. The most salient source of analogy is of course the digital computer, but the chapter discusses how more general comparisons with processes of design and engineering also play a significant role. It shows how the analogies, and the subsequent notion of a distinct computational level, have engendered common ideas about how to safely abstract away from the complexity of concrete neural systems, yielding explanations of how neural processes give rise to cognitive functions. Section 3 raises worries about these explanations, due to neglected differences between human-made devices and biological organs. The chapter concludes with some general observations about how reductionist and anti-reductionist approaches to mind and brain stem from intuitions deriving from the human experience of making functional objects.

In the philosophy of neuroscience, much attention has been paid to mechanistic causal explanations, both in terms of their theoretical virtues, and their application in potential therapeutic interventions. Non-mechanistic, non-causal explanatory models, it is often assumed, would have no role to play in any practical endeavors. This assumption ignores the fact that many of the non-mechanistic explanatory models which have been successfully employed in neuroscience have their origins in engineering and applied sciences, and are central to many new neuro-technologies. This chapter examines the development of explanations of _lateral inhibition_ in the early visual system as implementing an _efficient code_ for converting photoreceptor input into a data-compressed output from the eye to the brain. Two applications of the efficient coding approach are considered: in streamlining the vast datasets of current neuroscience by offering unifying principles, and in building artificial systems that replicate vision and other cognitive functions.

Since 1692, Molyneux’s question to John Locke has been a focus for the discussion of perception in philosophy and psychology. This chapter introduces a methodological question inspired by the Molyneux problem. Can a conceptual framework developed to theorize one sense modality generalize to other modalities? Previous philosophical accounts of the senses have assumed that the presence in perception of an external spatial field, or of bodily awareness, is a stable characteristic of sensory modalities, the former being associated with vision, the latter with touch. An argument is made against the possibility of a general theory of perception. However, findings of the plasticity of neural systems underlying sensory performance are a challenge to this assumption. Haptic awareness can become more “spatial” and less “corporeal” following the experience of optically driven touch stimulation in tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS). This removes one obstacle to a positive response to the MMQ regarding spatial perception. Yet neuroplasticity is not the whole story behind sensory substitution. The chapter argues that the inherent similarity of certain visual and haptic spatial functions makes these more “substitutable” than others, and that it is valuable to apply a unified approach to these functions.

The “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” -- the error of mistaking scientific abstractions for concrete reality -- is a central preoccupation of _The Blind Spot._ In this commentary I raise a question about the surprising tenacity of this fallacy. Given that it was pinpointed by various philosophers one hundred years ago, why did it remain so prevalent that a book such as _The Blind Spot_ needed to be published now? I outline three possible answers to this question, discussing how they shed a critical light on the arguments presented in the book.

Conscious Experience is a rigorous and intriguing reanimation of the empiricist tradition. There are many riches in the book that caused me to ponder, and that deserve mention in a commentary such as this. However, I will confine myself to a line of discussion on Gupta’s embrace of realism and rejection of pluralism in philosophy of science. The project of Conscious Experience is to reform empiricism in such a way as to firmly establish “experience as the supreme epistemic authority”, while avoiding the mistakes of earlier versions of empiricism. A related motive is to lend support to the idea that mature science is a privileged view on the world, that it provides the best understanding of reality, humanity included, leading reformed empiricism to endorsement of scientific realism. This is a surprising place to end up, given that scientific realism is the traditional antagonist of empiricism. My discussion of Gupta’s anti-pluralism centres around the hypothetical given, the distinctive innovation of this empiricism. Gupta’s commitment to convergent scientific realism, over accounts which take scientific knowledge to be inherently pluralistic, rests on the notion of the hypothetical given. I argue that this in turn depends on an over-simplified notion of experience, which cannot accommodate the way that scientific observation is learned skill that fundamentally affects how practitioners perceive their objects.

The victory of realism over idealism at the start of the twentieth century, and of scientific realism over logical empiricism and pragmatism in the mid twentieth century, is a striking phenomenon that calls for historical explanation. In this paper I propose an externalist account, looking at the social and political reasons why realism became attractive, rather than considering the internal factors–the merits of the arguments in favour of realism. I look at the agenda of Roy Wood Sellars’critical realismwhich was not narrowly theoretical, but very much related to his concerns for the development of American society post WW1, as expressed inThe Next Step in Democracy(1916b) andThe Next Step in Religion(1918). I discuss the significance of technocracy in America – not only the increasing influence of scientists and engineers in government, but also the diffusion of the view that social issues are best addressed by scientific, technical means. Counter-cultural critics of technocracy, such as Roszak (1969) claimed that a “scientific world-view” provided an “ideology” for this system of governance. We will see that RW Sellars was explicitly involved in the task of building a scientific world-view, but with political goals that were probably not realised by the post-war establishment.

Recent work in philosophy of science has shown how the challenges posed by extremely complex systems require that scientists employ a range of modelling strategies, leading to partial perspectives that make apparently conflicting claims about the target (Mitchell 2009b, Longino 2013). The brain is of course extremely complex, and the same arguments apply here. In this paper I present a variety of perspectivism called _haptic realism_. This account foregrounds the process by which the instrumental goals of neuroscience shape the way that objects of investigation are probed experimentally and conceptualised through modelling. Because such models do not aim to represent their targets exactly as they are, but in ways that are most useful for the investigators, the models should not be interpreted as literal descriptions of neural systems. Scientific realism traditionally involves a semantic commitment to interpreting theories and models as literal descriptions of human-independent nature. Haptic realism makes a significant departure from this tradition. Haptic realism also calls us to reassess the ontological commitments and knowledge claims of neuroscientific models and theories.

This chapter surveys Ernst CassirerCassirer, Ernst’s responses to the vitalist and holist/organicist movements in biology during the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that examination of the combination of CassirerCassirer, Ernst’s enthusiasm for holism, and rejection of vitalism, puts into relief many themes and preoccupations that are consistent across CassirerCassirer, Ernst’s philosophical career, and aids the interpretation of his philosophy of symbolic forms. I propose that it is useful to read the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a critical response to anti-rationalistic tendencies in the philosophy of Henri BergsonBergson, Henri, and other proponents of Lebensphilosophie. Hence the availability of holism, as a purportedly less obscure alternative to vitalism, suits this broader agenda. At the same time, CassirerCassirer, Ernst’s acceptance of holism depends on a commitment to the autonomy of biology which is at odds with the physicalism of the Vienna Circle, but consistent with HeideggerHeidegger, Martin’s favourable response to holism in comparison with vitalism. Yet, in the end we are left with an interpretative puzzle about how CassirerCassirer, Ernst proposes to avoid the encroachment of physicalism into theorising in the biological and human sciences while maintaining his view that progress in science is the result of increasing quantification.

This paper examines the dispute between Burge and McDowell over methodology in the philosophy of perception. Burge (2005, 2011) has argued that the disjunctivism posited by naive perceptual realists is incompatible with the results of current perceptual science, while McDowell (2010, 2013) defends his disjunctivism by claiming an autonomous field of enquiry for perceptual epistemology, one that does not employ the classificatory schemes of the science. Here it is argued that the crucial point at issue in the dispute is Burge’s acceptance, and McDowell’s rejection, of the ‘Cartesian idealization’ of mind as a self-contained system. Burge’s case against disjunctivism rests on the assumption of a clearly demarcated boundary between mind and world, a picture of the mind that McDowell’s philosophy reacts against. This boundary is required for scientific, causal explanations of perceptual processing because it is a simplifying assumption that helps present scientists with a clearly demarcated object of investigation. Concurring with McDowell, I conclude that philosophers need not carve up their objects of investigation in the same way.

This paper takes an integrated history and philosophy of science approach to the topic of "simplicity out of complexity". The reflex theory was a framework within early twentieth century psychology and neuroscience which aimed to decompose complex behaviours and neural responses into simple reflexes. It was controversial in its time, and did not live up to its own theoretical and empirical ambitions. Examination of this episode poses important questions about the limitations of simplifying strategies, and the relationship between simplification and the engineering approach to biology.

This article examines the mutual influence between Ernst Cassirer and his cousin, the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. For both Cassirer and Goldstein, views on the nature of human cognition were fundamental to their understanding of scientific knowledge, and these were informed by both philosophical theorizing and empirical research on pathologies of the nervous system. Following Cassirer, and in agreement with the physicalism of the Vienna Circle, Goldstein held that the physical sciences had progressed by arriving at abstract, mathematical representations to take the place of qualitative characterizations of observable reality. In tension with physicalism, Goldstein was not sanguine about the fruitfulness of the abstractive approach in biology. He proposed that biology must adhere to its own sui generis methods of observation and experimentation in order to obtain knowledge of the “natures” of living organisms. I argue that there is a parallel with Cassirer’s assertion of the differences between physical and cultural sciences, underwritten by the deployment of varying symbolic functions. I also propose that the neurological writings of Goldstein are an important backdrop to Cassirer’s positive evaluation of abstract thought, in contrast to the pessimism regarding a worldview dominated by scientific abstractions expressed by philosophers such as Bergson, Whitehead, and Husserl.

Objections to the computational theory of cognition, inspired by twentieth century phenomenology, have tended to fixate on the embodiment and embeddedness of intelligence. In this paper I reconstruct a line of argument that focusses primarily on the abstract nature of scientific models, of which computational models of the brain are one sort. I observe that the critique of scientific abstraction was rather commonplace in the philosophy of the 1920s and 30s and that attention to it aids the reading of The Organism ([1934] 1939) by the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. With this background in place, we see that some brief but spirited criticisms of cybernetics by two later thinkers much influenced by Goldstein, Georges Canguilhem (1963) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1961), show continuity with the earlier discussions of abstraction in science.

The use of machine learning instead of traditional models in neuroscience raises significant questions about the epistemic benefits of the newer methods. I draw on the literature on model intelligibility in the philosophy of science to offer some benchmarks for the interpretability of artificial neural networks used as a predictive tool in neuroscience. Following two case studies on the use of ANN’s to model motor cortex and the visual system, I argue that the benefit of providing the scientist with understanding of the brain trades off against the predictive accuracy of the models. This trade-off between prediction and understanding is better explained by a non-factivist account of scientific understanding.

In this article, I discuss the concept of robustness in neuroscience. Various mechanisms for making systems robust have been discussed across biology and neuroscience. Many of these notions originate from engineering. I argue that concepts borrowed from engineering aid neuroscientists in operationalizing robustness, formulating hypotheses about mechanisms for robustness, and quantifying robustness. Furthermore, I argue that the significant disanalogies between brains and engineered artifacts raise important questions about the applicability of the engineering framework. I argue that the use of such concepts should be understood as a kind of simplifying idealization.

John Hughlings Jackson is a major figure at the origins of neurology and neuroscience in Britain. Alongside his contributions to clinical medicine, he left a large corpus of writing on localisation of function in the nervous system and other theoretical topics. In this paper I focus on Jackson’s “doctrine of concomitance”—his parallelist theory of the mind-brain relationship. I argue that the doctrine can be given both an ontological and a causal interpretation, and that the causal aspect of the doctrine is especially significant for Jackson and his contemporaries. I interpret Jackson’s engagement with the metaphysics of mind as an instance of what I call meta-science—the deployment by scientists of metaphysical positions and arguments which help streamline empirical investigations by bracketing off unanswerable questions and focussing attention on matters amenable to the current tools of experimental research.

In this article I examine the perceptual metaphor at the heart of perspectivism, discussing three elements: partiality, interestedness, and interaction. I argue that perspectivists should drop the visual metaphor in favor of a haptic one. Because the sense of touch requires contact and purposeful exploration on the part of the perceiver, it is obvious that with touch one apprehends an extradermal reality in virtue of and not in spite of its interactive and interested nature. By analogy, perspectivists should investigate the thesis that scientific representations inform us about the natural world in virtue of their interactive and interested qualities.

Is color real or illusory, mind independent or mind dependent? Does seeing in color give us a true picture of external reality? The metaphysical debate over color has gone on at least since the seventeenth century. In this book, M. Chirimuuta draws on contemporary perceptual science to address these questions. Her account integrates historical philosophical debates, contemporary work in the philosophy of color, and recent findings in neuroscience and vision science to propose a novel theory of the relationship between color and physical reality. Chirimuuta offers an overview of philosophy’s approach to the problem of color, finds the origins of much of the familiar conception of color in Aristotelian theories of perception, and describes the assumptions that have shaped contemporary philosophy of color. She then reviews recent work in perceptual science that challenges philosophers’ accounts of color experience. Finally, she offers a pragmatic alternative whereby perceptual states are understood primarily as action-guiding interactions between a perceiver and the environment. The fact that perceptual states are shaped in idiosyncratic ways by the needs and interests of the perceiver does not render the states illusory. Colors are perceiver-dependent properties, and yet our awareness of them does not mislead us about the world. Colors force us to reconsider what we mean by accurately presenting external reality, and, as this book demonstrates, thinking about color has important consequences for the philosophy of perception and, more generally, for the philosophy of mind.