From The Guardian "For art critic Tom Lubbock, language has been his life and his livelihood. But in 2008, he developed a lethal brain tumour and was told he would slowly lose control over speech and writing. This is his account of what happens when words slip away" Tom Lubbock: a memoir of living with a brain tumour via MindHacks post A poetry of muddlings and loss
This kind of philosophy is ok with me “Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”from Hacker’s challenge . And there is more on neuroscientists, consciousness studies “The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd – they are in pursuit of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent. The questions they are asking don’t make sense. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.”
“I doubt whether this absurd misunderstanding is stoppable. It’s too entrenched now. But I think it is a kind of intellectual fraud. I’m not accusing paid-up members of the so-called consciousness studies community of bad faith – I’m sure they are just deluded – but the result of their confusion is that we’re bringing up a whole generation of people to think in a thoroughly muddled way, to have hopes and expectations which are totally absurd, and to concentrate on things which are just incoherent. It’s literally a total waste of time. But if anyone thinks that I am completely mistaken, I’d like them to explain to me why. If they cannot show that my arguments are wrong, they should admit the errors of their ways and withdraw from the field! That’s the challenge.”
Jonah Leher's interview of Antonio Damasio Self Comes To Mind (via 3quarksdaily). A quote “The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd – they are in pursuit of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent. The questions they are asking don’t make sense. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.” But there is more.
And Special Edition of Science Times via 'The Loom'. It has an article A Direct Hit of Drugs to Treat Brain Cancer on glioblastoma, the brain tumor that affects Tom Lubbock.
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2 comments:
The bit you quote from Hacker's Challenge is OK, but I thought his representation of neuroscience was appalling, and even his examples like "what is it like to see a red button": seeing a red button may "lack any hedonic quantity" but it is not a completely neutral experience either. People react, measurably, to the smallest things. Seeing a red button on a green shirt may be disturbing. Seeing a red button in a glass case in a high-security room may be alarming -- especially if the glass is broken. But if you look closer and find it is in fact a shirt button that someone has dropped there, you may calm down. And neuroscientists do have some understanding why. Context and conditioning matter. Hacker is, in his way, as dismissive of science as all the philosophers he criticises.
I may do a longer post on this. I read that article yesterday and found it extremely annoying. But no doubt Hacker thinks nothing in his prose merited any "hedonic" reaction.
RS,
I liked his bit on philodophy and did not carefully read the bits on neuroscience. good to know that you may blog about it.
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