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Brainstorming: Views and Interviews on the Mind University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 1-1-2008 Brainstorming: views and interviews on the mind Shaun Gallagher University of Central Florida Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Gallagher, Shaun, "Brainstorming: views and interviews on the mind" (2008). Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers. 1289. https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1289 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Brainstorming: views and interviews on the mind Abstract Gallagher presents a collection of dialogues between himself and a number of neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod, and Chris Frith, on the relation between the mind and brain. I did not write this book, I constructed it. And in regard to its content, let me admit at the beginning that in this book I beg, borrow, and steal (well maybe not steal, since I have observed copyrights) as much wisdom as I can from some of the best minds of our time. These are people who think about brains and minds professionally. Although this is a book about the philosophy of mind, it is also interdisciplinary, so I have made use not only of philosophers, but also of neuropsychologists and neuroscientists, people who have gained their understanding of how brain and behavior and mental experience go together through experimentation. I’ve borrowed from people in person – in a series of interviews, many of which have been published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I’ve borrowed by means of e-mail exchanges that I’ve had with numerous people over the past several years. And of course, I’ve borrowed from books. This book includes interviews, but is not strictly a collection of interviews. I have mixed in explanations and descriptions that are meant to clarify and explicate the issues under discussion. More specifically, this book is intended to be an unorthodox but very accessible introduction to certain themes that cut across the philosophy of mind and psychology. This might rightfully seem a contradiction. An introduction to a certain subject matter is supposed to be orthodox, if nothing else. That is, if one intends to introduce someone to a subject matter, one normally intends to review the established and received views that define the field. So in what sense can this be at the same time an introduction and unorthodox? Well first, the genre of this book is not standard for introductory textbooks since it consists in large parts of interviews rather than straight explanatory discourses. In addition, I can honestly say that there was no preconceived plan to the book, although this does not mean that a plan did not emerge in its construction. The topics and themes that we cover have emerged from the interviews themselves. But this is also why this can be considered an introductory text. The interview style, I believe, makes the various topics and themes very accessible, in the way that conversation tends to be more accessible than formal lecture. And as in a conversation, topics tend to emerge on their own and can be deeply engaging. Furthermore, the fact that these are the topics that emerged in conversations with some of the most important researchers in the field means that we will be exploring views that are close to the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy and science. So what we find expressed here are not so much the received and established views but a set of ongoing questions and discussions that define the field. If these are the issues that the leading researchers are concerned about and find exciting, it seems appropriate to think that these are the most appropriate issues to begin with, and that these are the issues that beginning students, or even experts who are approaching these topics from different fields, might find the most interesting. Keywords interviews, views, brainstorming, mind Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Law Publication Details Gallagher, S. (2008). Brainstorming: views and interviews on the mind. Virginia, United States: Imprint. This book is available at Research Online: https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1289 Brainstorming: Views and interviews on the mind Shaun Gallagher 2 Contents Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. How to study the mind Chapter 3. Preliminaries, prerequisites and precedents Chapter 4. Movement Chapter 5. Moving into action Chapter 6. Consciousness Chapter 7. Intersubjectivity Chapter 8. A short robotic interlude Chapter 9. Emotion and empathy Chapter 10. Language, cognition, and other extras Chapter 11. Self and self-consciousness Chapter 12. Free will and moral responsibility 3 Chapter 1 Introduction I did not write this book, I constructed it. And in regard to its content, let me admit at the beginning that in this book I beg, borrow, and steal (well maybe not steal, since I have observed copyrights) as much wisdom as I can from some of the best minds of our time. These are people who think about brains and minds professionally. Although this is a book about the philosophy of mind, it is also interdisciplinary, so I have made use not only of philosophers, but also of neuropsychologists and neuroscientists, people who have gained their understanding of how brain and behavior and mental experience go together through experimentation. I’ve borrowed from people in person – in a series of interviews, many of which have been published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I’ve borrowed by means of e-mail exchanges that I’ve had with numerous people over the past several years. And of course, I’ve borrowed from books. This book includes interviews, but is not strictly a collection of interviews. I have mixed in explanations and descriptions that are meant to clarify and explicate the issues under discussion. More specifically, this book is intended to be an unorthodox but very accessible introduction to certain themes that cut across the philosophy of mind and psychology. This might rightfully seem a contradiction. An introduction to a certain subject matter is supposed to be orthodox, if nothing else. That is, if one intends to introduce someone to a subject matter, one normally intends to review the established and received views that define the field. So in what sense can this be at the same time an introduction and unorthodox? Well first, the genre of this book is not standard for introductory textbooks since it consists in large parts of interviews rather than straight explanatory discourses. In addition, I can honestly say that there was no preconceived plan to the book, although this does not mean that a plan did not emerge in its construction. The topics and themes that we cover have emerged from the interviews themselves. But this is also why this can be considered an introductory text. The interview style, I believe, makes the various topics and themes very accessible, in the way that conversation tends to be more accessible than formal lecture. And as in a conversation, topics tend to emerge on their own and can be deeply engaging. Furthermore, the fact that these are the topics that emerged in conversations with some of the most important researchers in the field means that we will be exploring views that are close to the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy and science. So what we find expressed here are not so much the received and established views but a set of ongoing questions and discussions that define the field. If these are the issues that the leading researchers are concerned about and find exciting, it seems appropriate to think that these are the most appropriate issues to begin with, and that these are the issues that beginning students, or even experts who are approaching these topics from different fields, might find the most interesting. 4 As I begin to construct this book I’m sitting at a very large desk in my office. On the desk is my computer, and in my computer I have stored in electronic form hundreds of relevant papers, interviews, e-mails, and some of my own thoughts as I have recorded them. I also have lined up on my desktop (the actual one rather than the virtual one) a large number of books. Books that I consider some of the best written on the topic of the mind. When I say that they are the best, I don’t mean that all of the ideas they contain are true or that all of the theories they propound are correct. In fact, amongst all of these papers and books, on my estimate, there are thousands of contradictions – so they couldn’t all be right. Some of these works are scientifically outdated. Actually that is a rather easy claim to make since the practice in science seems to be to exclude references published more than five years ago. Philosophers have a different practice, going perhaps to the other extreme. In any case, as a philosopher I have no problem keeping Aristotle’s De Anima (350 BCE) on my desk next to Marc Jeannerod’s The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action (1998). Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) is uncomfortably sandwiched between Descartes’ Meditations (1641) and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991). Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy (1986) is lying there orthogonal to Edmund Husserl’s Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness (1928), which is piled on top of Davidson’s Essays on Actions and Events (2001). And Gerald Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992) is leaning lightly against Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
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