Wrapping Up My Analysis/Review

Spending time with family today and thus limiting my time of meditation in isolation. I will post some quick quotes/comments about "Out Of Our Heads" by Alva Noë and assume the interested reader will pick up the book for full perusal.

Underlined sections on the following pages: 79, 84, 88, 107, 184, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203.

Some quotes to remember:

"It has been shown, famously, that monkeys using a rake, for example, exhibit enlarged cortical representations of the hand and arm." [p. 79]

"Studies have shown that the use of messaging among teenagers in Japan has transformed the dynamics of social relations. ... In effect, they are "pinging" each other: letting each other know that they are online, or in reach, or 'there.'" [p. 83]

"A case can be made that joint presence in an actual shared physical space is the best kind of presence." [p. 84]

"According to the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, all European languages are at a disadvantage when compared with Mandarin; he argues that the Chinese are on the whole better and faster at mental arithmetic and that the explanation lies in their linguistic system for talking about numbers." [p. 88; similar to what I reported from the book, "Outliers," if I remember correctly]

"One of the very many false ideas about language is that its primary function is to express information or communicate thoughts. Speech has many functions, but surely a large part of it is more like the grooming behavior of chimpanzees or the shepherding behavior of dogs than it is like reasoned discourse among parliamentarians. We bark so that our kids get out the door in time to get on their bus and so that they feel safe and loved; we purr so that our colleagues and coworkers know we're on the job and ready to be called on. The bulk of what we say and do each day is more like the grunts and signals baseball players use to indicate who'll catch the pop fly than it is like a genuine conversation." [p. 107]

"In mathematics you can distinguish the proof itself from the prose that surrounds the proof and comments on it. Philosophers writing about mathematics frequently take issue with the prose, but the proof itself stands untouched by philosophical scruples. In this book I am not interested in the prose of the science of consciousness but in the findings themselves. My purpose is not to comment on trends in neuroscience but to convince you that the neuroscientific, and more broadly the cognitive scientific, approach to mind needs rethinking from the ground up." [p. 184-185]

"The central and ambitious theme of [chapter 2: Conscious Life] -- that life is mind -- has been developed in the work of others. I single out, in particular, the excellent and for me influential discussion in Evan Thompson's Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). I would also mention a very good doctoral dissertation chapter by the Harvard philosophy student Bharath Vallabha (now a member of the philosophy faculty at Bryn Mawr)." [p. 193]

"Interested readers may want to read Kaye's The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons (Chicago: University of Chicago PRess, 1982). Another excellent book on infant development that has influenced my own thinking is Peter Hobson's The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). In these books one finds ample support for my claim that the social/environmental context of the child's relationship with its caretaker is necessary for normal development, this is the basis for my claim that, really, we are not entitled to think of the child's mode of being as independent of the contextual embedding." [p. 194]

"See also[Paul Bach-y-Rita's] "Tactile-vision substitution: past and future," in International Journal of Neuroscience 19, nos. 1-4 (1983): 29-36." [p. 195]

"Anyone who appreciates that sometimes we think with words, or with our pens, or with our paintbrushes, can appreciate this insight. [Andy] Clark has just published a new book on this 'extended mind' hypothesis; it includes a foreword by [David J.] Chalmers: see Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Notably, neither Clark nor Chalmers has sympathy for the idea developed here that consciousness itself can be explained only if we make use of such an extended conception of the machinery of mind. Conscious experience would seem to be detachable from and independent of the world itself." [p. 196]

"Roy Harris is an original and important thinker whose work has not received the attention it deserves. I first encountered him as a student at Oxford in the late 1980s. His books The Language Makers (London: Duckworth, 1980) and The Language Myth (New York: St. Martin's, 1981) provide a fascinating criticism of what many linguists take for granted. For example, it is Harris who (to my knowledge) first pointed out that our idea that languages are intertranslatable is itself an artifact of the fact that we have established, in school and elsewhere, important cultural practices of translation. In the absence of those practices, the correspondences between languages are not, as it were, just given; they are made." [p. 198]

"The idea of cognitive trails has been explored by Adrian Cussins; indeed, the term, as I use it, is his. See his "Content, embodiment and objectivity: the theory of cognitive trails," in Mind 101, no. 404 (October 2002): 651-688. Evan Thompson, in his recent book Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), makes use of a similar idea." [p. 199]

"In my text I try to make clear there are two routes to the idea that the world is a grand illusion. The first is the more traditional route: we are given so much less than we think we see, so what we think we see must be something that arises in us thanks to the workings of the brain. This view is expressed by almost every major thinker working in this field. ... The second is the less traditional and indeed in some ways more radical idea that precisely because the brain is not in the business of building up pictures in the head, our experience is profoundly illusory -- that is, we don't even have the experience we think we do." [p. 200]

"Kevin O' Regan has also advocated this particular, radical version of the "grand illusion" idea in his important paper "Solving the 'real' mysteries of visual perception: the world as an outside memory," in Canadian Journal of Psychology 46, no. 3 (1992): 461-488." [p. 201]

"There are in fact several philosophers -- foremost among them Andy Clark -- who grant that the body and the external environment play an important role in constituting our cognitive apparatus. But experience itself -- pure consciousness, Clark would have it -- depends only on factors inside us. It is Clark, in personal correspondence, who has sharply articulated what I am here calling the Foundation Argument -- i.e., the idea that the fact that we dream and that we can produce experiences by direct action on the brain shows that consciousness depends only on what is happening in the brain." [p. 203]

Overall, a quick read, a bathroom companion or train ride diversion, that looks at consciousness from the 50,000 meter level and poses the question, is consciousness a delusion we create to get around in the world successfully.

More later...