Dreams and Perception (Poolside Musings)

After spending a hot Nashville afternoon poolside with Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," I haven't been able to stop musing about the possible ways in which dreams can provide important information. I'm not talking about a Freudian analysis of dreams, but rather the possibility of dreams revealing aspects of the way our minds work. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" is about a clinical patient, Dr. P, who has a certain type of visual aphasia that caused him to make very odd mistakes, including mistaking his foot for a shoe and his wife for a hat. As Dr. P got older this visual aphasia worsened. I would highly recommend reading the article as it is a short read and is full of very interesting information. An aspect of this article that interested me was that Dr. P's dreams ceased to have an visual component as his visual aphasia worsened, but his dreams still had content expressed in other ways. Patients with similar problems have reported image-less dreams as well. It is also worth mentioning that Dr. P was a musical genius and never lost his musical abilities or other cognitive abilities such as his ability to play a mean game of chess.
Some studies in psychology have suggested that different people learn differently; there are "visual learners" and "auditory learners," etc. etc. etc. Different peoples' ways of seeing the world are all very different. For me, personally, my dreams have never had striking visual components to them. They are almost always based on emotion and physical sensation. Upon further reflection, I really am not a very "visual" person (thus being a philosophy major fits, I suppose!). There seems to be a connection to the way a dreams' content is presented and the neurophysiology of the mind. Further study into this area would be very interesting and also very fruitful for clinical psychology, neurology and philosophy of mind.

Alyssa as an Emergentist

I know I've been gone for quite some time-- I got wrapped up in graduating from Belmont University and all that comes with that (*ahem, finals, ahem*). I did, however, want to follow up on my last post regarding consciousness as an emergent property. I am fairly convinced this theory has the most potential to explain the appearance of the explanatory gap (named by Joseph Levine; this is the gap that appears to exist because of the apparent failure of mental and physiological statements to fully explain the nature of consciousness). In a recent paper I wrote, I argue that the highly overlooked view of emergentism, if further researched, may provide a more satisfying explanation of the current appearance of the explanatory gap.

Most of my research focused on the British emergentist philosophers in the early 1900s, in specific C.D. Broad and Samuel Alexander. The type of emergentism I propose be further studied in relation to the explanatory gap is the emergentism Samuel Alexander presents; that is, a quality that emerges from the physiological but is not reducible to the physiological and a quality that supervenes on physiological processes. This emergence must also happen with necessity, as I disagree with David Chalmers’ belief that philosophical zombies are logically possible. Given that the constituents are the same, the same emergent qualities will arise; this view is consistent with the observations of chemical reactions by chemists. The emergent qualities are also not predictable a priori. Since emergent properties are repeatedly found on lower physiological levels, it seems highly probable that emergence also occurs elsewhere in nature on higher and on lower levels. I found a very interesting excerpt from Introduction to "Consciousness Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy" by Arne Dietrich:

An example of chaos theory is found in amoebae (slime molds): “When food is short this simplest of creatures undergoes what must be one of the most spectacular spontaneous self-organizations in nature. Individual amoebas cluster into colonies and metamorphize into one big, continuous sheet of slime. Then, in a radical transformation, those colonies differentiate into different functional components so that the newly restructured slime mold will behave as a single, larger animal. Self-organization from chaos to order! …From above, the new slime looks stable and coordinated. But under this macrostructure is slime mayhem. The closer you zoom in, the more radical individual amoebas’ behavior bifurcate until, in the close-ups of an electron microscope, a higher-order stability seems totally out of the question. But there it is: differentiated slime. …Order out of chaos, as long as you look at it standing back, way back. …With this in mind it is easier to ponder …how a hundred-billion-plus mindless units can make up a mind. Note that this is a form of global coherence emerging from distributed components. Such binding of individual activities into stable, large-scale phenomena occurs frequently in nature and can be explained without recourse to quantum weirdness. The unity of consciousness may simply arise naturally from the fact that the brain is a nonlinear system” (Dietrich 78-79).

A common argument against studying consciousness as an emergent quality is based upon the idea that reactions among chemicals in chemistry are fundamentally different from the realm of brain and consciousness. In a sense, consciousness has very different qualities than silver chloride and we experience these qualities from an intimate first-person point of view. The fact that the emergent qualities themselves are different, however, does not imply that the physiological laws and processes that produce these qualities differ; this result merely shows that the constituents that form these emergent qualities are different.

I'm hoping to further study consciousness as an emergent property this coming year in CSU Long Beach's philosophy M.A. program-- it seems like it has so much potential. I'm definitely ready to be back in class and am looking forward to everything I've heard grad school will be :-)

Cheers!

Grad School

I have just officially accepted the offer from California State University, Long Beach. I will be joining their philosophy M.A. program in the fall with a graduate assistantship and am extremely excited. I'm hoping to pursue studies of feminism, ethics and metaphysics, specifically emergentism. I also have just finished my paper on consciousness as an emergent property, which I will be summarizing on this blog in the near future.

Cheers to grad school!