Arguing against mind designers.

Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Scienceby Sunny Y. Auyang, MIT Press (2001). $49.95/£34.50 (viii+529 pages)ISBN 0 262 01181 6Professor Auyang's book is provocative, makes interesting claims about the mind, and contains a crisp exegesis of mind science. Overall, it is brisk, lively and can be read with interest, although at times the book can move too quickly. She brings a physicist's perspective on the role of theory to the scenes of several cognitive crimes, and displays an encyclopedic range of knowledge.Auyang argues that contemporary approaches to cognition (computational/representational schemes, connectionist models, and dynamical systems) commit fatal errors. The first error consists in isolating the mind from the world with a representational veil, preventing unmediated knowledge of things. The second consists in isolating the mind from the world by disembodying it, making it a purely computational entity. The third consists in attributing to traditional approaches properties (such as meaning and intentionality) that are not in fact manifested by the systems themselves but are present only in the ‘mind designers’ articulating them – programmers, neuroscientists or philosophers. Eliminative alternatives are particularly incoherent as they deny the existence of mental items (desires, beliefs, etc.) that make possible scientific reasoning. Auyang's alternative is an ‘open mind emerging from the self-organization of infrastructures.’ The ‘open mind’ is our conscious life, as conceived in folk-psychology, consisting of everyday activities – believing, remembering, desiring, and so on. This open mind makes the world intelligible and emerges non-reductively from the infrastructure currently studied by cognitive science. Auyang's approach owes much to distributed cognitive, pragmatic, and continental philosophies; she usefully discusses the last of these, not often found in such books.Consider this prototypical paragraph, representative of both the book's strengths and sometime shortcomings, wherein Auyang discusses the ‘binding problem’:Mind and its infrastructure constitute two distinct organizational levels. How do the two levels connect? How do numerous brief and narrowly specialized infrastructural processes organize themselves into prolonged experiences with broad and variable contents? This is called the binding problem in cognitive science, and scientists are very far from solving it. (p. 135)A more precise statement helps disentangle several related issues. Hummel cogently explains, ‘Binding is the problem of representing conjunctions of properties. It is a very general problem that applies to all types of knowledge representation…For example, to visually detect a vertical red line among vertical blue lines and diagonal red lines, one must visually bind each line's color to its orientation…’ (Ref. 1xBinding problem. Hummel, J. : 85–86See all ReferencesRef. 1, p. 85). Hummel makes clear how binding is distinct from the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (how qualia – ‘raw feels’ – arise from purely physical processes 2xThe Conscious Mind. Chalmers, D. See all References2). Auyang understandably conflates the two (the secondary literature is sometimes confusing), which explains why some research is not covered (the pioneering work on visual search and attention of Treisman and Gelade, for example). Auyang's claim that she lays the groundwork for solving the problem by demonstrating how the open mind emerges from non-conscious mental infrastructure is not sustainable. Still, she offers a useful perspective on weaknesses of the current approaches. Similar strengths and drawbacks attend discussions of semantics, connectionism, and theories of reduction.Another ongoing theme details a link between traditional approaches to mind and oppression. Totalitarian governments have used the assumptions of behaviorism to justify killing sprees (as ‘godlike’ mind-designers deny the people what they alone possess); indeed, computational conceptions justify treating people as objects:If people and things are separated only by the degree of behavioral intelligence, it is reasonable to consider ‘smart’ things ahead of ‘stupid’ people. If mind is nothing but computation, there is reason to treat people as we treat computers…as machines of meat, as in meat grinder…what the trenches of the First World War are called. (pp. 75–76)This is too quick: respect for persons might be grounded in non-Kantian assumptions (ask rule utilitarians or virtue theorists); metaphysical freedom is not a pre-requisite for moral respect (ask compatibilists); philosophies of mind have no analytic connections to norms (ask functionalists, who come in all moral flavors); and arguments that eliminative positions are unstable because they assume the existence of what they dismiss have been answered 3xEvaluating our self-conception. Churchland, P.M. : 25–38See all References3. Despite this, Auyang's synoptic view is admirable (if sometimes bordering on the ad hominem) – her willingness to discuss possible normative entailments of cognitive philosophy is refreshing, and one I hope she and others pursue (for more on norms and the mind, see Ref. 4xCasebeer, W. See all ReferencesRef. 4).The book fascinates with flashes of insight (Auyang's description of dynamical systems is marvelous) and is motivated by useful intuitions. As a prelude to the study of cognition, it can be read fruitfully, if with caution. As a contribution to the professional literature its stunning breadth prevents it from exploring issues in real depth, but there is nonetheless much of value for us ‘mind designers’ to ponder. Perhaps cognitive philosophers have toiled too much in the salt mines of representationalism… after all, much cognition is not concerned with ‘re-presenting’ the world, but instead in dealing with it. Auyang's book is a timely reminder of this fact.