I'm suspending the Dante series for one post because some folks wanted to know what this paper I'm so giddy about writing is about.
Because of my enduring faith in Aristotle's insights about sensation, I decided to write a paper on the Molyneux problem and the common sense. The Molyneux problem, which was printed in Locke's Essay, went thus:
Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other; which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Qaere, Whether by his sight, before he touch'd them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube.
Now, looking at the problem, the solution seemed to scream "Aristotle's common sense!" The common sense is that sense by which the different sensibles are united into one object and yet distinguished. Initially, I figured I would investigate it strictly on philosophical grounds, but then a very dear (and also very beautiful, and stunningly intelligent) friend of mine over at Texas A&M sent me a very interesting link to a Youtube clip in which Vilayanur Ramachandran, a professor at UCSD and virtuoso biologist, was discussing the various eccentricities of the brain, for example, qualia, consciousness, and the like. These had already (briefly) been discussed as theories in my Theory of Knowledge class at DSPT, and so a neuroscientist's take on their materiality was of the greatest interest. So rather than writing a paper that basically went "well, if Aristotle's common sense were as Aristotle claimed it would work in De Anima, then maybe the Molyneux problem would be answered something like this, or this other way, or perhaps that, and this one is most likely", I decided to attack the question as it stands neurologically, and then see whether or not Aristotle's theory would hold.
I expected it to hold. I did not expect that it would so exceed my expectation as to hold for stuff Ramachandran said in particular about neuronal pathways and the like, but I was given a great shock. It held with a whole greater degree of fittingness than I expected. The basic stuff was pretty obvious; the common sense, as Aristotle proposed, has to exist because our sensation is such; therefore, there's some faculty that carries out the thing that makes our sensation such. That I'd already presumed true, and even a cursory glance into neuroscience readily confirms it. It's part of sensation, not the intellect; therefore it's concerned with material particulars; therefore it's tied to a bodily organ tooled to receive that material particular's form; surprise, that function is tied to a bodily organ. Since Galen, the Medievals had placed the common sense in the brain, and one can figure this out even from conventional wisdom, that the common sense, if it exists, is in the brain. No big step there.
So I'd already shown that the hypothesis of the common sense broadly agrees with the modern understanding of what the brain does for sensation. If I presented that, I'd probably get an A for effort (writing obvious things is a real trial for me), but I'd expect a C for originality. So I decided to look deeper. After reading several articles (Gallagher's claims about the Molyneux problem, various articles on proprioception and phantom limbs, which are both concerned with sensation of touch, and various articles on synaesthesia, which was an easy task since it fascinates me, I'd deduced that there was a much closer investigation that could be made of the thing. So I rallied myself and got it together, and started to watch and read more Ramachandran (who is an absolutely fascinating person for his insights.) I cannot say how surprising this was; every single thing that I heard confirmed my prior judgement of the legitimacy of the common sense on the prior basis, even the more complex claims. One claim in particular, though, took the cake.
Before all this, I had decided to sweeten the pot as far as my argument by talking about what it means for the common sense to "know" the objects of the other senses, but from a philosophical standpoint, not a neurological one. This would be necessary to talk about the Molyneux problem. So I'd started by making a (rather lame, but pretty obvious) hypothetical argument that the common sense must be in the brain, because only in the brain are the different sense modalities conjoined as data, and the common sense must know and compose the different data. This would have been easy, but boring. However, I was watching Ramachandran talk about synaesthetes, and I heard him say something utterly remarkable. Neuroscience has actually investigated (and this was a shock) a colorblind text-color synaesthete.
This might take some explanation. A text-color synaesthete, when they read letters or numbers, see them as different colors. To take an example:
2
5 5
2 5 2
It might not be immediately evident upon first glance that there is a triangle of fives in the center of this diagram; when non-synaesthetes perceive the numbers, they see them in font color black. For synaesthetes, though...
2
5 5
2 5 2
...they look like this. As one might imagine, they have better pattern recognition, and in a feat that defies the conception of synaesthesia as some sort of lunacy or madness, they receive this pattern as the non-synaesthete reader might perceive the intentionally colored font of the second triangle, immediately. It's not an insanity, but perhaps it is a gift; one in about every two hundred people is a synaesthete, and many of the greatest artists (some even think Dante was one, because of his analogies!) have been closeted or openly synaesthetic.
Now consider, if I may propose, the case of the colorblind synaesthete. How would this work? The subject in question had a pigment deficiency in his eye that made him "peripherally colorblind"; he did not see the full range of colors. Yet when he saw numbers, he saw what he called "alien" colors correspondent to them! For example, if one cannot see green in things, one would not expect to have green as an imagination, as an idea or otherwise; and yet the numbers, before him, were this weird shade of color he simply couldn't see in other things. If a synaesthete cannot see, through his external organs, a particular shade, but through the interconnection of his neuronal pathways has that shade projected to him, what is one to conclude?
He has the object of the proper sensibles in his mind already. Specifically, the V4 center of his brain, used to process and project color into our perception. And what faculty of his mind so "knows" the proper sensible? That series of neuronal pathways which enable him to give dominance to or intermodalize his senses. You know, that thing Aristotle predicted people had 2000 years ago? Which he also predicted knows the proper sensibles and is prior to the outer senses, as being closer to the immaterial intellect?
I'm not going to show my whole hand (plagiarism is a terror of modernity), but let's just say that this paper is one of which I can be proud.
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How does this relate to Kant's idea that we impose upon the outer world our preexisting notions of reality?
ReplyDelete(Not to be a killjoy! I really want to read this paper.)
Well, my dear Saturday, it's quite elementary when you think about it.
ReplyDeleteKant's categories of causality, time, space, etc are all synthetic a priori concepts of pure reason, understood as something prior and more essential even than our material configuration. So in the first place, this sensation, being an a posteriori principle of argument, is not ipso facto a priori.
BUT. You could be asking about whether there's a *material* conditioning of the "external" sensation which "imposes" this color on the sensation. First, this isn't a pre-existing "notion" of reality; it's the equivalent of getting wires from two different machines crossed. I would suppose that the actual PRESENTATION of the not-actually-there color would be a matter of the imagination (as presenting an image) and not the common sense. I would suppose that the COLOR presented arises from the V4 center being able, as it were, to "process" different wavelengths, as a compiler processes different programming languages into machine code. This example I find pretty helpful.
Let's say you've got a compiler that can turn C++ programs into factory code. Only thing is, the guy who made it isn't watching the use of a certain code command, and accidentally cross-connects it to another command, so that the computer not only compiles one but also the other code, and the program does both commands. The compiler, in itself, "has" the code commands in it; it "knows" them, by being made "like" them by the programmer. But the compiler's role, though active, is at the same time passive; though interpreting the code, it can ONLY interpret the code. A compiler does not produce a program without input.
Does this understanding count as "imposing" upon the outside world a certain reality? It would be fair to say that the inner senses condition the outer senses, yet the proper sensibles we see are nevertheless had (in perception) immediately from the outer senses; the inner senses, while conditioning them, nevertheless preserve them. A sign of this is that one has to have as absurd a situation as a colorblind synaesthete to show this oddity; it requires a defect in the outer sense organs to do anything one would call in-to-out conditioning, and in the case of regular synaesthetes, they are regarded as having a perfectly good natural cause to explain their situation (I will not call it an illness) rather than any need to posit a grand philosophical theory to explain them, in the manner of Kant.
In the paragraph after the colored numbers, you meant "defines" when you wrote "defies" right?
ReplyDeleteThat synasthete case is really cool. I'm starting to get confused, though, as to how it works: if they guy has a pigment deficiency, then this wouldn't be the case of him not being "aware" of seeing green. so where are you saying the green is coming from? Are they sure he has a pigment deficiency? The reason I say this is that, on the "sensus communis" account, there would be a defect in the material organ (brain) that prevented the subject from "sensing that he was sensing" green. However, he would still be receiving the sensible form green (albeit not aware of it), and thus his imagination/cross-wired (in some backdoor sort of way) sensus communis would allow him to see an "alien green" (haha). Am I tracking this right?
ReplyDeleteAlso, it seems key to point out that Aristotle technically didn't "predict" the sensus communis, he just flat-out discovered it. Although it is fair to say he didn't discover its organ, or map it out quite as effectively as modern cognitive science.
I also find "sight blind" and akinetopsia cases very cook in this respect.
Do you have any books/links/refs etc. for this Ramachandran?
Pax, Tsunami
So let me see if I have this straight. In a normal person, the outward senses receive the sensations, which are sent to the common sense. The common sense, then, uses the data from the outward sense and conditions them, making them more readily intelligible. In the synasthete, this process is either corrupted or simply different, whereby information that is more proper to one sense can enter the common sense through another passage. Therefore, since the information between the different senses can be cross-perceived in this way, the thing which conditions the senses must be one and the same organ.
ReplyDeleteI must admit, I did have the same question that Miss Saturday had, which I see you addressed. :)
John B., I've read Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain, in which he talks about many cases of things like phantom limbs, autism, hallucinations, and a refreshingly sympathetic speculation about our ability to perceive God. It's a good read for someone with a solid background in philosophy.
John:
ReplyDeleteI did mean "defies"; it's neither a madness (in the sense of the product of a diseased mind; the thing that causes synaesthesia is closely tied up with our ability to understand metaphor) nor a use of metaphor (like, when they say Monday's blue, Tuesday's gray and Wednesday's too, they don't mean they're ACTUALLY blue, but that they're just using a metaphor) but an actual function of sensation. It's not a madness; it's a fortuitous gift, because many poets of fame were quite possibly synaesthetic. The figures used to be supposedly one in one hundred thousand people, but now they estimate that synaesthetes are maybe even one in twenty.
As to the question of the sensus communis: He materially has an observable pigment deficiency in his eye. His external sense organ is thus deficient. Simultaneous with this, he has a very healthy brain, albeit one with some extra neuronal pathways. He receives the sensible form of a black-fonted number, because the number itself does not contain the green, and (I would guess this is how it works, less important to the argument) the imagination acts with the common sense to make it appear to have colors other than black. The question then is where he got the alien colors from; yet he could not have received them by the eye, since his material organ is deficient, and the phantasm is not dematerialized until the act of the agent intellect; or to put it empirically, he can't get that wavelength of color, 'cause wavelength needs a wave receptor, and the eye can't do it without the right pigment, or, to switch back to the Aristotelian world, the proper act of the moist and the dry; which is to say that he lacks the necessary moisture of the eye (the pigment as receptive) to receive the impressed form.
My point is this; that although nothing enters into the mind except through sensation, the common sense is just that, a sense, and so I don't see the necessity of saying from this that it isn't entering into the person "through sensation." The difference is that the sensation in particular we are talking about is the equivalent of a processor misinterpreting code, still provoked by the sensible form, revealing that the brain-process DOES take in outside color, but that the alien colors are in fact pre-existent in the formation of the visual cortex WITHOUT their reception by the external organ.
This should not be so abhorrent, because Aristotle predicted it; the common sense, as part of a perfect animal, must KNOW THE OBJECTS of the other senses. In this case, it does, like an interpreter knows the language someone speaks. The interpreter has the language in their head before it is spoken; likewise, the human brain has the ability to process color before it is seen.
As for my claim about prediction, I meant that Aristotle, by discovering it, predicted its empirical verification or corroboration. :-)
ReplyDeleteAkinetopsia makes my brain hurt even thinking about it. And I LIKE thinking about this stuff. :-D
Em: It's MORE than that, which is crazy. The common sense has the sensation as an interpreter has the words spoken to it. In the synaesthete, it's as though the interpreter associates the word "the" or "cat" with some other action, like slapping itself in the face, so that every time it (perhaps rightfully) translates the word, it slaps itself in the face. It's cross wiring of two different sense functions, is what I mean.
To be more to the point: The information enters the common sense normally, you aren't "seeing sound" or suchlike. Yet you are having a sight-act which corresponds to this sound, because the sensation of such-and-such a sound has been wired to coincidentally and in one object fire the sound-act neuron that activates another neuron (a "mirror neuron") which fires at the same time and corresponds to a sight-act.
It's not that the information is cross-perceived; it's that the senses that simultaneously fire accidentally due to an unpruned neural pathway, despite being from two different centers in the brain (the V4 color center and the number center, both adjacent to one another in the fusiform gyrus) manifest themselves in ONE OBJECT (namely, a number, colored, or a hearing we inexplicably associate with a splash of color, or such other synaesthetic events.)
Definitely a good try, though. It took me HOURS to wrap my brain around this. The remarkable thing beyond that is the phenomenon of the alien colors. The crown jewel of the hypothesis fits there.
John: Just look up Ramachandran and Reith Lecture or Consciousness or Beyond Belief on Youtube. Beyond Belief is most relevant.
ReplyDelete"The difference is that the sensation in particular we are talking about is the equivalent of a processor misinterpreting code, still provoked by the sensible form, revealing that the brain-process DOES take in outside color, but that the alien colors are in fact pre-existent in the formation of the visual cortex WITHOUT their reception by the external organ."
ReplyDelete"...the common sense, as part of a perfect animal, must KNOW THE OBJECTS of the other senses."
It seems there might be an objection here: how do "knowing" and "without" fit together? Knowing is reception of form (i.e., not a 'without the form' state). This seems to make the organ of the common sense some sort of "pre-arranged harmony" ... this would spell doom for an identity theory of knowledge. (And "doom" should appear in various red and fiery colors).
One of the difficulties that seems to be coming up here is that the common sense is receptive of the sensed forms. This is at least what Aristotle argues in DA 3.2; the whole idea is that the common sense is the awareness of the 1) difference and 2) awareness of various sensible forms.
What do you think generally about measuring brain activity as a way to get at sensation? (see DA 2.12): the sense has no bodily extension; the organ does (and hence the entire faculty does) but the sense power as a "logos" or "form" does not. What I'm trying to point out here (granted--the power and the organ, as form and matter, are one 'thing' or part of the ensouled organism) is that sensation cannot be measured fundamentally from an 'external' perspective. One of the reasons psychology (in Aristotle's sense) is among the most certain of the sciences is because the experiences which provide matter for the science are so close at hand. So, when Aristotle concludes that a sense power is a "mean" that has no extension, he's talking about a receptivity of form proportioned to a thing in the world (granted that such a power has to be materially-based). But the activity of that sense faculty is one activity--any concomitant brain/nerve firings are not the sensation, they would only be indirect measures of it. So, to avoid a sort of "dualism" with regard to the senses (a body-even and a soul-event) it seems that there needs to be some sort of distinctions made that "unify" things. Something I would like to learn more about...
Ack! I was going to post a reply but Blogger went stupid.
ReplyDeleteI see what you are saying, John, but think of it like this. Wax analogy. The signate ring enters the wax, leaving an impression. Nothing is there except what the signate ring has imposed. And yet there is something there other than the impression; the volume of wax. The volume of wax, as the substance receiving this accidental form, limits the reception of that form; one can only impress the signate into the wax for so far until one runs out of wax.
To the analogy, it's like this. The external sensed thing is like the signate. The various senses are the wax. The common sense, here, receives the impressions from the external senses and it does something to them. But here's the thing; what constitutes the actuality upon which its ability to do that something to them is founded? On the principle that an act requires an actuality of the same kind in the actor, the common sense must know the proper objects it's uniting.
And think about what Thomas calls it in 1-1 Q78 A4 Ad 1: "the common root and principle of the exterior senses." As a principle and root, it must have the actuality of the exterior senses SOMEHOW. I am merely asserting that there is a strong pre-existence in the development of the brain of the processor which is in potency to the firing of such neurons as correspond to colors the eye hasn't and could not have seen.
Now, this has interesting consequences. But I wonder whether it isn't because our normal conception of the common sense isn't in some way a conception borne of being tricked into sleeping with the enemy; most of these pictures presented sound like Lockean experience theory, supported by a priority of the external senses, not just for the reception of the outside species, but even for the reception of that by which the outside species is understood.
THERE's the clincher. "How can we have this color if we don't see it?" This seems to me the wrong question. A more shocking situation is if, upon the first time encountering the color, we should come to have it where it was not before. After all, how would we encounter the color? There is a drastic equivocation, you see, on "it." Let's rephrase the questions.
ReplyDelete"How can we have *the ability within our brain to interpret this color* if we don't see *the color to be interpreted* beforehand?" Sounds kind of silly, doesn't it? The color in the common sense isn't "the same" as the color in the species impressed, any more than the knowledge in your mind of language is "the same" as the spoken words of German or French you might hear; and yet just as the intellect in act is the thing known, so the color in the common sense is the color in the impressed sensation. Confusing, I know.
My theory is this. We develop our brains, obviously, as embryos, in the fetal stage, and by the time we're infants, neonates, we have this primitive, intermodalized system which HAS the colors, but according to the development of the brain, which comes about from substantial form. So we HAVE the colors from some other source, namely, our nature; and we don't have them in act, so that we don't see them all the time, but in potency, as sight without light is in potency.
One last clarification: Knowing IS reception of form, but it's also possession, or else God couldn't "know", nor would a person, having abstracted the form in the agent intellect and adequated it into the possible intellect thereby, "know" the abstracted thing anymore, since the person wouldn't be actively "receiving" it anymore.
ReplyDeleteAs for the identity theory: I'm not sure it would spell doom for it, because the occasion for the neurons firing is always and only the reception of this species, upon which reception the common sense is brought into act. It's just that the common sense needs those colors as "processable" to be in potency to that act. When they are fired, the person becomes like the sensed in act. Before that, they are only thus in potency, and in act only by analogy. Ergo, identity.