Apr 26, 2021 03:16 AM
How philosophy is making me a better scientist
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01103-x
EXCERPTS: I am the only student on my PhD programme in genomics data science with an undergraduate degree in biology and philosophy. Initially, I saw these as separate fields: I was writing about theories of morality in one class and memorizing the Krebs cycle in another. It was only after picking up first-hand research experience while working on my final-year biology thesis at New York University Abu Dhabi that I began to understand how philosophy can make me a better scientist. As I progress through the early stages of my PhD, I can see how impactful reading and studying philosophy have been in shaping my career so far, and how much they will continue to influence me in my future work.
[...] I also learnt logic. Most of us have a foundational understanding in this area — but, as a philosophy student, I was required to take a structured course in logic. At the start, it was like taking a class in brain-teaser puzzles: A∧B is true if both A and B are true; A∨B is true if either A or B is true.
But my study of formal logic turned out to be very helpful in my transition from a wet-lab undergraduate scientist to a computational scientist on my master’s programme as I learnt coding languages, which involve elements such as logical operators and if-then reasoning. It also helped me to understand inference, the process of arriving at conclusions from evidence and reasoning. None of my science classes has formally taught the difference between induction (these frogs are all from this pond and they are all green: therefore all of the frogs in the pond are green) and deduction (all frogs in this pond are green and this frog is from this pond: therefore this frog is green), nor have any of them taught how to methodically evaluate arguments. Reading, studying and evaluating philosophical arguments as premises and conclusions has shaped my ability to scrutinize evidence and conclusions in research reports... (MORE - details)
William James, where all consciousness is motor
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/willia...s-is-motor
EXCERPTS: Alexander Klein is a philosopher of the histories of analytic philosophy and of pragmatism, with a special emphasis on naturalistic philosophy of mind in that historical context (i.e., late 19th and early 20th century). William James has been a central focus. Here he discusses William James, his empiricism, objectivity, what he thought the the ontological status of the mind was, neutral monism, intentionality and pragmatism, his theory of perception's importance for his theory of mind, his denial of complex mental states and reflex loops, his denial of the distinction between sensation and perception, why reading his account of consciousness just in terms of him wanting to articulate a phenomenological, first person description is misleading, his evolutionary account of consciousness, why he’s right to think that epiphenomenalism is incompatible with basic evolutionary principles, his account of will, whether he thinks consciousness is a wholly physical process, unconscious mentality, whether his scientific methodology is too a priori, his relation to correspondence theory, and his relevance for contemporary theories of mind.
[...] 3:16: You’re an expert in William James. Was he the original empiricist and what was the problem in psychology that his brand of empiricism was trying to solve?
AK: There are many passages where James presents his own view as a form of “empiricism.” Once upon a time, I made the mistake of asking myself what he meant by this term. I was drawn into this question because his usage is odd compared with how we understand the word today. James sometimes contrasts empiricism with “absolutism” or “intellectualism.”
[...] 3:16: What was the ontological status of the mind for James? Is he what Russell called a ‘neutral monist’? And why don’t you think we should understand it in terms of an American Realist response to the problem of the external world at the turn of the last century?
AK: In his more psychological work, James’s official position is interactionist dualism. He hypothesized that consciousness is an adaptation (in the Darwinian sense) for behavior-regulation, and he supported his hypothesis with a host of then-recent experimental and physiological research. But as James turned to more philosophical concerns in his older years, he developed a metaphysical account according to which the universe isn’t fundamentally divided up into minds and bodies. It is supposed to be composed of one basic kind of stuff—a stuff he calls “pure experience.” The idea is that minds and bodies are different kinds of arrangements of this basic stuff.
What motivated James to develop this view wasn’t the problem of the external world though, as it’s traditionally conceived. His psychology had been criticized for failing to give a naturalistically acceptable account of intentionality. And when he (James) really began developing his neutral monist metaphysics in the late 1890s, it was in response to this kind of criticism.
[...] 3:16: What was his his theory of intentionality? What makes it particularly pragmatist?
AK: Well, this is where James’s neutral monism (or as he called it, his “radical empiricism”) meets his pragmatism. You can see from my last answer that the model case of intentionality is a case where some mental state functions as a tool to put the organism into direct, practical contact with something in the environment. Insofar as one thinks of pragmatism as characterized by a tendency to theorize philosophically thorny concepts (like intentionality) by appeal to bodily action, James’s theory of distal representation does seem very pragmatist.
Incidentally, this kind of view can be regarded as connected with figures we now think of as classically empiricist as well. Berkeley, in *Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision,* proposes that we have a sense of vision precisely so we can get a grip on what *bodily* experiences we can expect from things in our environment. What it is to see the knife as sharp is to form an expectation of what would happen if one were to handle the thing. It’s the bodily sensations we ultimately care about, for Berkeley and for James.
3:16: His theory of perception was a response to arguments that were designed to show that there couldn’t be a science of the mind wasn’t it? How did his rejection of Humean psychological atoms help to show that empirical scientific methods could be used to study the mind?
AK: Some of those criticisms of psychology as a science that I mentioned earlier—from people like T. H. Green—really exploited the atomistic way much empirical psychology conceived of the raw products of our sensory apparatus. So, the visual field was often conceived of as, at some level, a field of pixel-like colored points. These are what Berkeley and Hume called “minima sensibilia.” Green had argued that in order for our experiences to be coherent and meaningful, there must be some mental structure—some transcendental ego, in essence—that knits together all these disparate sensory atoms into one meaningful experience. For familiar Kantian reasons, that ego is supposed to be necessarily outside of time and space, and so not the sort of thing we can study scientifically (i.e. through observation).
So James tried to deny that sensation comes to us chopped-up into little bits that need to be actively knit together. Instead, he conceived of sensation as continuous and natively structured, which is supposed to obviate the theoretical need for some non-natural mind to make possible our experiences in time and space. And since this sort of picture blocks the prospect for there being unobservable transcendental egos, it is also supposed to clear the way for a genuine science of mind that can rely on the usual, observation-based techniques of science.
3:16: So did he think there are no complex mental states built out of simple impressions or ideas? Late on he denied that consciousness exists at all – can this be squared with his earlier empirical psychology? Does it hinge on his attitude towards this ‘elementarism’ and his notion of what he called a reflex ‘loop’?
AK: That’s right—James denied the existence of complex mental states, at least in the sense of states that are composed of simple, self-standing mental elements. Think of salvaging the bricks from a farmer’s wall that’s been knocked down, and then used to build something new, like a brick house. People like Berkeley and Hume treat complex mental states as built out of so-called minima sensibilia (minimum points of sensation, like little colored points in the visual field, or little pinpricks on the skin). James was against this way of thinking of mental states. When I see a red curtain, there’s no part of that red-curtain-experience that can somehow recur in a later experience of, say, a red cloak. He defends a kind of phenomenological holism according to which your experience at any given moment is the *whole* of your experience. To the extent that we “pick out” some one part of that experience (as when I focus on the way the table in front of me looks, and ignore the noise my kids are making in the background), we’re typically using attention (or perhaps concepts) to emphasize one aspect. But we are not picking out some kind of mental atom nestled in my visual field—there are no such things, he thinks.
In his later, more metaphysical work, what James would deny is that consciousness is a distinctive entity. His criticism of consciousness as an entity is not very far from his own earlier criticisms of elementary mental atoms. Just as we are unable mentally to distinguish part and whole in the way James thinks elementarists need to, so we are unable to distinguish consciousness from representational content—there’s no container/contained distinction to be drawn in an occurrent mental state, either. So if we’re thinking of consciousness as a component of a complex mental state—that view needs to go, according to James. His mature view is that consciousness is a “function,” not an entity, and the function we call consciousness is simply intentionality. In other words, mental states *represent* things, and consciousness simply amounts to representation.
Some readers might say that James sounds like he’s anticipating representationalism about consciousness today, and there’s some truth to that. But the catch is that what it is for a state to represent something else is for the state to help initiate or guide the right kind of action. So if he’s a representationalist, he’s got (speaking loosely) quite an enactive or embodied account of what representation amounts to...
[...] 3:16: Do you think he’s right to think that epiphenomenalism is incompatible with basic evolutionary principles?
AW: Yes! I think his argument is devastating, and under appreciated. He had a classic argument against epiphonemenalism that said that if consciousness makes no causal impact, then we cannot give an evolutionary explanation of why things that benefit our bodies typically feel good, and why things that harm our bodies typically feel bad. This is because if consciousness makes no causal impact, than it cannot differentially affect reproductive success. That part of the argument everyone seems to accept.
The standard epiphenomenalist response today is to say that conscious could still have evolved not through selection but through some random process that produces traits we now call by-products. If that’s right, we would say that consciousness isn’t an “adaptation,” but rather an evolutionary “byproduct." A classic example of a byproduct is the nipple in male mammals. Females of course need nipples to deliver milk to offspring. But there is no direct adaptive value in males having this trait. Males have nipples because the developmental process evolution hit upon for giving females this trait happens to have nipples forming in embryos before morphological sexual differentiation is much underway. In other words, the male nipple is a byproduct, not an adaptation, and today’s epiphenomenalists have suggested that conscious might also be a byproduct, like the male nipple.
What people haven’t appreciated about James’s argument is that he was not someone who simply assumed that every trait we find must be an adaptation—he wasn’t what we would today call an "adaptationist." In fact he was already working with some rough and ready criteria in psychology for how we should distinguish genuine adaptations from mere byproducts. He suggested two criteria that biologists today very much would still accept—complexity and precision of function. So James’s argument isn’t just that consciousness would be invisible to selection if epiphenomenalism were true, but also that consciousness is profoundly unlikely to be a byproduct given the functional complexity and precision with which it is connected with bodily states—even with *prior* bodily states that epiphenomenalists agree are the causal source of conscious states. I think that’s a good argument!
[...] 3:16: So why did he why did he become convinced that any self-respecting empiricism had to abandon a correspondence-theory of knowledge?
AW: Well, first I think we have to be clear what James is denying here. In some sense he is a correspondence theorist because he accepts that knowledge involves the right kind of relationship obtaining between a mental state in the world. I think it’s perfectly OK to call that relationship correspondence. What he rejects is a copy theory, according to which correspondence amounts to having an image in the mind that matches things in the world part for part.
This is for reasons that should make sense in light of things we have already discussed. If mental states are inviolable wholes, then knowledge cannot require a literal, part to part correspondence between any supposed elements of my mental state and things in the world. For instance,If I have a representation of a pile of marbles in mind, that representation cannot constitute knowledge in virtue of there being some independent parts of my mental image that correspond to the real marbles. My mental state has no parts! So that’s one reason I think he was forced to abandon a traditional copy theory. (MORE - details)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01103-x
EXCERPTS: I am the only student on my PhD programme in genomics data science with an undergraduate degree in biology and philosophy. Initially, I saw these as separate fields: I was writing about theories of morality in one class and memorizing the Krebs cycle in another. It was only after picking up first-hand research experience while working on my final-year biology thesis at New York University Abu Dhabi that I began to understand how philosophy can make me a better scientist. As I progress through the early stages of my PhD, I can see how impactful reading and studying philosophy have been in shaping my career so far, and how much they will continue to influence me in my future work.
[...] I also learnt logic. Most of us have a foundational understanding in this area — but, as a philosophy student, I was required to take a structured course in logic. At the start, it was like taking a class in brain-teaser puzzles: A∧B is true if both A and B are true; A∨B is true if either A or B is true.
But my study of formal logic turned out to be very helpful in my transition from a wet-lab undergraduate scientist to a computational scientist on my master’s programme as I learnt coding languages, which involve elements such as logical operators and if-then reasoning. It also helped me to understand inference, the process of arriving at conclusions from evidence and reasoning. None of my science classes has formally taught the difference between induction (these frogs are all from this pond and they are all green: therefore all of the frogs in the pond are green) and deduction (all frogs in this pond are green and this frog is from this pond: therefore this frog is green), nor have any of them taught how to methodically evaluate arguments. Reading, studying and evaluating philosophical arguments as premises and conclusions has shaped my ability to scrutinize evidence and conclusions in research reports... (MORE - details)
William James, where all consciousness is motor
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/willia...s-is-motor
EXCERPTS: Alexander Klein is a philosopher of the histories of analytic philosophy and of pragmatism, with a special emphasis on naturalistic philosophy of mind in that historical context (i.e., late 19th and early 20th century). William James has been a central focus. Here he discusses William James, his empiricism, objectivity, what he thought the the ontological status of the mind was, neutral monism, intentionality and pragmatism, his theory of perception's importance for his theory of mind, his denial of complex mental states and reflex loops, his denial of the distinction between sensation and perception, why reading his account of consciousness just in terms of him wanting to articulate a phenomenological, first person description is misleading, his evolutionary account of consciousness, why he’s right to think that epiphenomenalism is incompatible with basic evolutionary principles, his account of will, whether he thinks consciousness is a wholly physical process, unconscious mentality, whether his scientific methodology is too a priori, his relation to correspondence theory, and his relevance for contemporary theories of mind.
[...] 3:16: You’re an expert in William James. Was he the original empiricist and what was the problem in psychology that his brand of empiricism was trying to solve?
AK: There are many passages where James presents his own view as a form of “empiricism.” Once upon a time, I made the mistake of asking myself what he meant by this term. I was drawn into this question because his usage is odd compared with how we understand the word today. James sometimes contrasts empiricism with “absolutism” or “intellectualism.”
[...] 3:16: What was the ontological status of the mind for James? Is he what Russell called a ‘neutral monist’? And why don’t you think we should understand it in terms of an American Realist response to the problem of the external world at the turn of the last century?
AK: In his more psychological work, James’s official position is interactionist dualism. He hypothesized that consciousness is an adaptation (in the Darwinian sense) for behavior-regulation, and he supported his hypothesis with a host of then-recent experimental and physiological research. But as James turned to more philosophical concerns in his older years, he developed a metaphysical account according to which the universe isn’t fundamentally divided up into minds and bodies. It is supposed to be composed of one basic kind of stuff—a stuff he calls “pure experience.” The idea is that minds and bodies are different kinds of arrangements of this basic stuff.
What motivated James to develop this view wasn’t the problem of the external world though, as it’s traditionally conceived. His psychology had been criticized for failing to give a naturalistically acceptable account of intentionality. And when he (James) really began developing his neutral monist metaphysics in the late 1890s, it was in response to this kind of criticism.
[...] 3:16: What was his his theory of intentionality? What makes it particularly pragmatist?
AK: Well, this is where James’s neutral monism (or as he called it, his “radical empiricism”) meets his pragmatism. You can see from my last answer that the model case of intentionality is a case where some mental state functions as a tool to put the organism into direct, practical contact with something in the environment. Insofar as one thinks of pragmatism as characterized by a tendency to theorize philosophically thorny concepts (like intentionality) by appeal to bodily action, James’s theory of distal representation does seem very pragmatist.
Incidentally, this kind of view can be regarded as connected with figures we now think of as classically empiricist as well. Berkeley, in *Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision,* proposes that we have a sense of vision precisely so we can get a grip on what *bodily* experiences we can expect from things in our environment. What it is to see the knife as sharp is to form an expectation of what would happen if one were to handle the thing. It’s the bodily sensations we ultimately care about, for Berkeley and for James.
3:16: His theory of perception was a response to arguments that were designed to show that there couldn’t be a science of the mind wasn’t it? How did his rejection of Humean psychological atoms help to show that empirical scientific methods could be used to study the mind?
AK: Some of those criticisms of psychology as a science that I mentioned earlier—from people like T. H. Green—really exploited the atomistic way much empirical psychology conceived of the raw products of our sensory apparatus. So, the visual field was often conceived of as, at some level, a field of pixel-like colored points. These are what Berkeley and Hume called “minima sensibilia.” Green had argued that in order for our experiences to be coherent and meaningful, there must be some mental structure—some transcendental ego, in essence—that knits together all these disparate sensory atoms into one meaningful experience. For familiar Kantian reasons, that ego is supposed to be necessarily outside of time and space, and so not the sort of thing we can study scientifically (i.e. through observation).
So James tried to deny that sensation comes to us chopped-up into little bits that need to be actively knit together. Instead, he conceived of sensation as continuous and natively structured, which is supposed to obviate the theoretical need for some non-natural mind to make possible our experiences in time and space. And since this sort of picture blocks the prospect for there being unobservable transcendental egos, it is also supposed to clear the way for a genuine science of mind that can rely on the usual, observation-based techniques of science.
3:16: So did he think there are no complex mental states built out of simple impressions or ideas? Late on he denied that consciousness exists at all – can this be squared with his earlier empirical psychology? Does it hinge on his attitude towards this ‘elementarism’ and his notion of what he called a reflex ‘loop’?
AK: That’s right—James denied the existence of complex mental states, at least in the sense of states that are composed of simple, self-standing mental elements. Think of salvaging the bricks from a farmer’s wall that’s been knocked down, and then used to build something new, like a brick house. People like Berkeley and Hume treat complex mental states as built out of so-called minima sensibilia (minimum points of sensation, like little colored points in the visual field, or little pinpricks on the skin). James was against this way of thinking of mental states. When I see a red curtain, there’s no part of that red-curtain-experience that can somehow recur in a later experience of, say, a red cloak. He defends a kind of phenomenological holism according to which your experience at any given moment is the *whole* of your experience. To the extent that we “pick out” some one part of that experience (as when I focus on the way the table in front of me looks, and ignore the noise my kids are making in the background), we’re typically using attention (or perhaps concepts) to emphasize one aspect. But we are not picking out some kind of mental atom nestled in my visual field—there are no such things, he thinks.
In his later, more metaphysical work, what James would deny is that consciousness is a distinctive entity. His criticism of consciousness as an entity is not very far from his own earlier criticisms of elementary mental atoms. Just as we are unable mentally to distinguish part and whole in the way James thinks elementarists need to, so we are unable to distinguish consciousness from representational content—there’s no container/contained distinction to be drawn in an occurrent mental state, either. So if we’re thinking of consciousness as a component of a complex mental state—that view needs to go, according to James. His mature view is that consciousness is a “function,” not an entity, and the function we call consciousness is simply intentionality. In other words, mental states *represent* things, and consciousness simply amounts to representation.
Some readers might say that James sounds like he’s anticipating representationalism about consciousness today, and there’s some truth to that. But the catch is that what it is for a state to represent something else is for the state to help initiate or guide the right kind of action. So if he’s a representationalist, he’s got (speaking loosely) quite an enactive or embodied account of what representation amounts to...
[...] 3:16: Do you think he’s right to think that epiphenomenalism is incompatible with basic evolutionary principles?
AW: Yes! I think his argument is devastating, and under appreciated. He had a classic argument against epiphonemenalism that said that if consciousness makes no causal impact, then we cannot give an evolutionary explanation of why things that benefit our bodies typically feel good, and why things that harm our bodies typically feel bad. This is because if consciousness makes no causal impact, than it cannot differentially affect reproductive success. That part of the argument everyone seems to accept.
The standard epiphenomenalist response today is to say that conscious could still have evolved not through selection but through some random process that produces traits we now call by-products. If that’s right, we would say that consciousness isn’t an “adaptation,” but rather an evolutionary “byproduct." A classic example of a byproduct is the nipple in male mammals. Females of course need nipples to deliver milk to offspring. But there is no direct adaptive value in males having this trait. Males have nipples because the developmental process evolution hit upon for giving females this trait happens to have nipples forming in embryos before morphological sexual differentiation is much underway. In other words, the male nipple is a byproduct, not an adaptation, and today’s epiphenomenalists have suggested that conscious might also be a byproduct, like the male nipple.
What people haven’t appreciated about James’s argument is that he was not someone who simply assumed that every trait we find must be an adaptation—he wasn’t what we would today call an "adaptationist." In fact he was already working with some rough and ready criteria in psychology for how we should distinguish genuine adaptations from mere byproducts. He suggested two criteria that biologists today very much would still accept—complexity and precision of function. So James’s argument isn’t just that consciousness would be invisible to selection if epiphenomenalism were true, but also that consciousness is profoundly unlikely to be a byproduct given the functional complexity and precision with which it is connected with bodily states—even with *prior* bodily states that epiphenomenalists agree are the causal source of conscious states. I think that’s a good argument!
[...] 3:16: So why did he why did he become convinced that any self-respecting empiricism had to abandon a correspondence-theory of knowledge?
AW: Well, first I think we have to be clear what James is denying here. In some sense he is a correspondence theorist because he accepts that knowledge involves the right kind of relationship obtaining between a mental state in the world. I think it’s perfectly OK to call that relationship correspondence. What he rejects is a copy theory, according to which correspondence amounts to having an image in the mind that matches things in the world part for part.
This is for reasons that should make sense in light of things we have already discussed. If mental states are inviolable wholes, then knowledge cannot require a literal, part to part correspondence between any supposed elements of my mental state and things in the world. For instance,If I have a representation of a pile of marbles in mind, that representation cannot constitute knowledge in virtue of there being some independent parts of my mental image that correspond to the real marbles. My mental state has no parts! So that’s one reason I think he was forced to abandon a traditional copy theory. (MORE - details)