The Crucible of Consciousness

The Crucible of Consciousness An Integrated Theory of Mind and Brain Zoltan Torey foreword by Daniel C. Dennett The Crucible of Consciousness The Crucible of Consciousness An Integrated Theory of Mind and Brain Zoltan Torey with a foreword by Daniel C. Dennett The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © Zoltan Torey 1999 First MIT Press edition, 2009 First published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, 253 Normanby Road, South Mel- bourne, Australia. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Stone by Binghamton Valley Composition in Quark, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Torey, Zoltan. The crucible of consciousness : an integrated theory of mind and brain / Zoltan Torey.—1st MIT Pess ed. p. cm. “A Bradford book.” Originally published: Melbourne ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1999. With new foreword. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-51284-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Consciousness. I. Title. BF311.T655 2009 153—dc22 2008041421 10987654321 To my wife Margaret Dawn Contents Acknowledgments ix Foreword by Daniel C. Dennett xi Preface xiii Perspective 1 A The Problem 1 B The Path to the Solution 15 C Some Technical Aspects 18 1 The Emergence of the Human Brain 25 A The Upgrading of the Prehuman Brain 25 B Modifications That Underlie Language 32 C The Internal Representation of the Outside World 35 2 Adaptive Changes for Speech and Thought 39 A Dual Excitation and the Oscillation of Attention 39 B The Building Blocks of Language 43 3 The Evolution of Language 53 A The Breakthrough to Protolanguage 53 B Secondary Language Evolution 59 C Using the Language Instrument 66 D Language and the Limits of Abstraction 72 4 More about Language 77 A The Perceptual Basis of Language 77 B The Acquisition of Language by the Child 84 C Ape Talk: A Tip without an Iceberg 87 5 Self-Accessibility 95 A Problems of Self-Detection 95 B Elements of Self-Detection 102 viii Contents 6 Reflection: The Key to Human Awareness 109 A Double-Stranded Reentrance 109 B The Mechanism of Reflective Awareness 115 C Self-Awareness 125 7 The Mind-System 129 A The New Identity: Brain to Mind 129 B The Alchemy of Self-Deception 135 C Problems with Self-Conceptualization 141 D The “Freedom” of the System: Fact and Fiction about the Mind 147 8 The Mind versus the Computer 155 A Formalism and the Logic of Misconstruction 155 B Model Formation and the Role of Semantics 164 C Society and the Shaping of the Mind 167 9 Evolution: The Model of the Loaded Dice 175 A The Watershed of Insights 175 B Prejudice and Counterprejudice 178 10 Between the Quantum and the Cosmos 189 AA Range of Perspectives 189 B Light at the End of the Tunnel 201 Notes 211 References 213 Bibliography 219 Glossary 231 Index 243 Acknowledgments It is with real pleasure that I acknowledge my debt to a small group of quite special people. I want to express my appreciation for my father’s generosity of spirit, for his peerless humanity. Its undiminished glow warmed my youth, its light accompanies me. I want to thank my loyal friend David Lenton, who for more than twenty years read and recorded for me, enabling me in spite of my blind- ness, to range across the literature of many disciplines. Without David’s amassing this large body of essential information, this book could not have been written I acknowledge my debt to the late John Falconer. For years we read together, his friendship broadened my outlook and enriched my life. I also want to thank my dear friend Charles Moess, whose support and en- couragement has been a source of strength. A special place is to be reserved for my long-time friend Nicholas Tschoegl of Pasadena, California, who with his outstanding intellect, knowledge and experience, generously undertook the task of editing this text. Sophie and Nick Tschoegl’s friendship and hospitality during our re- peated stays in the United States, was a much appreciated aspect of this en- deavour. Heartfelt thanks go to my dear friend Jean Cooney for her practical ad- vice and tireless constructive labours in streamlining the text for this MIT Press edition and for causing this project in the first place to fall into the right hands, in the right way and at the right time. Then there is Professor David Chalmers, who, as the Director of the Cen- ter for Consciousness Studies invited me to be one of the keynote speakers at the 2004 Biennial Conference in Tucson, Arizona, and Professor Dan Dennett who, following on our serendipitous meeting at the conference, gave me his generous support and was instrumental in finding the right publisher for this work. I remember the many enjoyable hours my wife and I spent with Chris x Acknowledgments Croft in turning the typescript into computer print for the original publication; and now I am very much indebted to Beverley Ranclaud for her ex- pert assistance and cheerful cooperation in preparing the text for the MIT Press edition. I also want to thank Syd Hooker, whose support, friendship, and enthusiastic participation have been of real value to me. I recall with appreciation the original publishing team Oxford University Press in Melbourne, Richard Sansom and Peter Rose, and I now want to thank the excellent team at MIT Press, Tom Stone, the senior editor, and in particular Judy Feldmann, who, with courtesy and efficiency, ironed out problems on the way to the book’s successful publication. Last but not least, I want to thank my wife Dawn who with her penetrat- ing insight, judgement and constructive criticism greatly contributed to the upgrading of the text. I wish to thank her for her unfailing emotional support and for all she means to me. It is to her I dedicate this book in love, friendship, and deep appreciation. Foreword Daniel C. Dennett There are lots of books on consciousness being published these days, and I end up skimming most of them and reading a few of them. Reading somebody else’s take on the whole set of issues is often frustrating and depress- ing: they just don’t get it. Other times it is tantalizing; they start on the right foot, in other words, where I start! and they get lots of it, and clear up some of the fog and even shine some light on part of the terra incognita, but then wander off into some unlikely and unconvincing blind alleys. Rarely, something much better happens: I encounter somebody who starts in quite a different place, with a different agenda and different presuppositions, but who eventually arrives in my own neighborhood having blazed some new trails. Zoltan Torey is such a pathfinder. And surprisingly, the disagreements I still have with some of his ways of putting things, and even with some of his main verdicts, don’t disturb me at all. On the contrary, I find it power- fully reassuring that two such different perspectives can home in on so much common ground. Like everybody else who works on the perplexing problems of the mind and consciousness, I have always had a sense that my own vision, while fundamentally correct, of course could be improved upon, and Torey’s book contains quite a few suggestions worth further reflection and research. Torey firmly roots his theory of consciousness in evolution by natural se- lection, as do I, but he comes at the issues with some strikingly different emphases. He sees that human consciousness is profoundly unlike the consciousness of all other species, and that language is the key to understand- ing this difference—another point of deep agreement between us—but he has a usefully different account of what kind of difference language makes and how. Much of this I will happily adopt from now on. He and I agree on the utter misguidedness of those who worry about the possibility of zom- bies and “the Hard Problem” but he has some novel ways of showing what is so bizarrely wrong about it. The greatest point of disagreement between xii Foreword us is on the power of the computational perspective. By my lights, he has been misled by a few other would be pathfinders—the usual suspects: Edel- man, Penrose, Searle, Fodor—into a pinched and unrealistic caricature of ar- tificial intelligence. If AI were what they say it is, I too would turn my back on it. But unlike these, and other, anti-computational ideologues, Torey surefootedly picks his way to a suitably astringent and non-miraculous, non- romantic vision of how the brain works its “magic.” He is, I insist, computa- tionalist malgré lui. As such, his ways of putting things often shed new light on just what is going on in the “computational” brain, since he has to find alternative metaphors to stand in for the now somewhat overworked com- parison with computers. Just as poets often find that the constraints of rhyme and meter force them to discover strikingly apt expressions of their thoughts, it turns out that couching a computational theory of the mind in resolutely noncomputational terms pays dividends.

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