That last paragraph reminds me of what Sapolsky wrote about the vmPFC in Behave. It also feels very applicable to postrat discourse. The excerpt:
"Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings —“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder. Moreover, eventual decisions are highly utilitarian. vmPFC patients are atypically willing to sacrifice one person, including a family member, to save five strangers.
They’re more interested in outcomes than in their underlying emotional motives, punishing someone who accidentally kills but not one who tried to kill but failed, because, after all, no one died in the second case. It’s Mr. Spock, running on only the dlPFC. Now for a crucial point. People who dichotomize between thought and emotion often prefer the former, viewing emotion as suspect. It gums up decision making by getting sentimental, sings too loudly, dresses flamboyantly, has unsettling amounts of armpit hair. In this view, get rid of the vmPFC, and we’d be more rational and function better. But that’s not the case, as emphasized eloquently by Damasio. People with vmPFC damage not only have trouble making decisions but also make bad ones.
They show poor judgment in choosing friends and partners and don’t shift behavior based on negative feedback. For example, consider a gambling task where reward rates for various strategies change without subjects knowing it, and subjects can shift their play strategy. Control subjects shift optimally, even if they can’t verbalize how reward rates have changed. Those with vmPFC damage don’t, even when they can verbalize. Without a vmPFC, you may know the meaning of negative feedback, but you don’t know the feeling of it in your gut and thus don’t shift behavior. As we saw, without the dlPFC, the metaphorical superego is gone, resulting in individuals who are now hyperaggressive, hypersexual ids. But without a vmPFC, behavior is inappropriate in a detached way. This is the person who, encountering someone after a long time, says, “Hello, I see you’ve put on some weight.” And when castigated later by their mortified spouse, they will say with calm puzzlement, “But it’s true.” The vmPFC is not the vestigial appendix of the frontal cortex, where emotion is something akin to appendicitis, inflaming a sensible brain. Instead it’s essential.
It wouldn’t be if we had evolved into Vulcans. But as long as the world is filled with humans, evolution would never have made us that way."
I strongly disagree with this post. I say "strongly" not so much because I disagree with this post (though I do), as because I believe the logocentric assumptions it rests on (1) don't work, and (2) lead to terrible things. I believe that the belief that thought is composed of words was a primary cause of most of the horrors Western humans have inflicted on each other in the past thousand years.
Unfortunately I can't possibly justify that claim in one comment on one blog post. So I'll just take a few swipes at the idea that language = thought / consciousness.
Perhaps Helen Keller lacked consciousness. But can you really say that a dog lacks consciousness? That a dog who goes to the door at 5:15 to wait for a person who will arrive at 5:20 is unable to anticipate the future? Can you explain how wolves cooperate in hunting by driving prey towards a spot where another wolf is waiting in ambush, without being able to think about the future? Why elephants take a trip to visit the skeleton of a dead relative and fondle its bones? How the chimpanzee Washoe described watching her mother being killed by poachers, a thing that happened before she ever learned any language?
Am I saying that the dog, having vision and hearing but lacking words, is more-human than Helen Keller was when lacking all three? I'm not asserting it, but I would believe that sooner than I'd believe that a dog isn't conscious.
The differences between a human brain and a chimp's brain, which gift the human with language, are trivial compared to the difference between a human's brain and a dog's. Language is one small thing added to a great mass of intelligence. It does not make as much difference as we think it does; nor is it sufficient to enable rational thought.
Until the late 20th century, there were many deaf-mutes all over the world who never learned any language, and no one ever, so far as I know, imagined that they weren't conscious. It was the loss of both sight and hearing to Helen Keller which made it hard for her to think of things not in her immediate presence. If Helen Keller was unconscious, and seeing deaf-mutes with or without language are conscious, and blind hearing people have language and are conscious, that tells us that it was being blind and deaf that made her unconscious, not her lack of language.
Vision, we think, takes up more territory in the cortex than language or emotion. The abilities to think about the past and the present, to form plans, and to make moral judgements, seem to be independent of language last I checked, although all are still poorly understood.
The opposition between reason and emotion, posited by Plato, is no longer in good standing. Have you read /Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain/ by Antonio Damasio?
I don't believe that your "rational" mind--a thing few people have--is the locus of your goals. The rational mind has /no/ goals, and rational thought is an interpreted language, not our native instruction set. It is just a tool. All goals come from preferences, values, feelings, qualia. All morals come from these goals. Love, compassion, joy, everything that makes life worth living, comes from the emotional brain. All those things must be stripped down and oversimplified before they can be pushed through any rational calculus.
I don't believe that thought is in language. There are many proofs it is not. For instance, the "tip of the tongue" feeling when you know the concept, but can't find the word. I have many times realized things in a fraction of a second that then took ten seconds to string together into words. I can say a thing in words and immediately think "that wasn't what I meant to say". I regularly must pause in the middle of a sentence to come up with the right word for that place in the sentence, which shows that I constructed the entire syntactic structure of the sentence /before/ choosing all of the words in it.
On one occasion, I dropped a glass I was holding, and, noticing it falling, moved one foot underneath it at an angle that would divert it down and sideways, so that it would bounce off the foot and then off the floor, with both bounces imparting far less force to the glass than a direct impact with the foot or the floor would have. This required doing a physics math problem in less than 1/10th of a second.
Our bodies, in producing our body language, make complex social calculations involving relative status, dominance relationships, mating potentials, and other factors, which we are /not even consciously aware of/. Robin Hanson's book /The Elephant in the Brain/ has a chapter on when it's advantageous for us to do these calculations unconsciously.
We now have many examples of people with brain damage to temporal lobes who still understand /concepts/ and can reason with them, but can't recognize or retrieve the words for some of those concepts. (This is hard to establish for people who can't retrieve /any/ words, because it's hard for them to tell us enough to convince us that they understand the concepts.)
The thing is, I'm not saying pre-language brains don't think. I'm saying they think using a different engine. to quote the post:
>The nuances and overlaps and contradictions among uncountable “feels good” and “feels bad” movements create a vast edifice of instincts and learned behaviors and urges and desires.
So when you say
> That a dog who goes to the door at 5:15 to wait for a person who will arrive at 5:20 is unable to anticipate the future? Can you explain how wolves cooperate in hunting by driving prey towards a spot where another wolf is waiting in ambush, without being able to think about the future?
You're pointing at something I didn't say. The brain does anticipate the future, and the animal does things using their intuitive cognition that will result in fitness-enhancing outcomes in that future. They don't "think" about it in the ways we understand "thinking" to exist though.
> How the chimpanzee Washoe described watching her mother being killed by poachers
FWIW, I don't believe these accounts are true. Much like Koko didn't actually talk, and her handlers exaggerated the communication that was happening.
> seeing deaf-mutes with or without language are conscious
I'm not convinced that the ones without any language are fully conscious. They don't even have to be deaf-mutes, feral humans that never learned language are likely in the same pre-conscious state.
>Have you read /Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain/ by Antonio Damasio?
I have not, sorry. :/
> All goals come from preferences, values, feelings, qualia. All morals come from these goals. Love, compassion, joy, everything that makes life worth living, comes from the emotional brain.
I don't think we disagree very much here.
Regarding the rest of your comment - I don't claim that we have full conscious access to everything our brain is doing. Much of it is below the level of awareness. I don't even think we are conscious all the time that we're awake! And, as you point out, our intuitive brain is still here, doing a LOT of work. That's why the post is titled "You Have Two Brains." The intuitive brain is deeper, older, and more powerful in terms of actual raw power. It's not what gives us the sense of self, though. Plus it lacks a few capabilities that have given us enormous advantages. :)
That last paragraph reminds me of what Sapolsky wrote about the vmPFC in Behave. It also feels very applicable to postrat discourse. The excerpt:
"Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings —“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder. Moreover, eventual decisions are highly utilitarian. vmPFC patients are atypically willing to sacrifice one person, including a family member, to save five strangers.
They’re more interested in outcomes than in their underlying emotional motives, punishing someone who accidentally kills but not one who tried to kill but failed, because, after all, no one died in the second case. It’s Mr. Spock, running on only the dlPFC. Now for a crucial point. People who dichotomize between thought and emotion often prefer the former, viewing emotion as suspect. It gums up decision making by getting sentimental, sings too loudly, dresses flamboyantly, has unsettling amounts of armpit hair. In this view, get rid of the vmPFC, and we’d be more rational and function better. But that’s not the case, as emphasized eloquently by Damasio. People with vmPFC damage not only have trouble making decisions but also make bad ones.
They show poor judgment in choosing friends and partners and don’t shift behavior based on negative feedback. For example, consider a gambling task where reward rates for various strategies change without subjects knowing it, and subjects can shift their play strategy. Control subjects shift optimally, even if they can’t verbalize how reward rates have changed. Those with vmPFC damage don’t, even when they can verbalize. Without a vmPFC, you may know the meaning of negative feedback, but you don’t know the feeling of it in your gut and thus don’t shift behavior. As we saw, without the dlPFC, the metaphorical superego is gone, resulting in individuals who are now hyperaggressive, hypersexual ids. But without a vmPFC, behavior is inappropriate in a detached way. This is the person who, encountering someone after a long time, says, “Hello, I see you’ve put on some weight.” And when castigated later by their mortified spouse, they will say with calm puzzlement, “But it’s true.” The vmPFC is not the vestigial appendix of the frontal cortex, where emotion is something akin to appendicitis, inflaming a sensible brain. Instead it’s essential.
It wouldn’t be if we had evolved into Vulcans. But as long as the world is filled with humans, evolution would never have made us that way."
I strongly disagree with this post. I say "strongly" not so much because I disagree with this post (though I do), as because I believe the logocentric assumptions it rests on (1) don't work, and (2) lead to terrible things. I believe that the belief that thought is composed of words was a primary cause of most of the horrors Western humans have inflicted on each other in the past thousand years.
Unfortunately I can't possibly justify that claim in one comment on one blog post. So I'll just take a few swipes at the idea that language = thought / consciousness.
Perhaps Helen Keller lacked consciousness. But can you really say that a dog lacks consciousness? That a dog who goes to the door at 5:15 to wait for a person who will arrive at 5:20 is unable to anticipate the future? Can you explain how wolves cooperate in hunting by driving prey towards a spot where another wolf is waiting in ambush, without being able to think about the future? Why elephants take a trip to visit the skeleton of a dead relative and fondle its bones? How the chimpanzee Washoe described watching her mother being killed by poachers, a thing that happened before she ever learned any language?
Am I saying that the dog, having vision and hearing but lacking words, is more-human than Helen Keller was when lacking all three? I'm not asserting it, but I would believe that sooner than I'd believe that a dog isn't conscious.
The differences between a human brain and a chimp's brain, which gift the human with language, are trivial compared to the difference between a human's brain and a dog's. Language is one small thing added to a great mass of intelligence. It does not make as much difference as we think it does; nor is it sufficient to enable rational thought.
Until the late 20th century, there were many deaf-mutes all over the world who never learned any language, and no one ever, so far as I know, imagined that they weren't conscious. It was the loss of both sight and hearing to Helen Keller which made it hard for her to think of things not in her immediate presence. If Helen Keller was unconscious, and seeing deaf-mutes with or without language are conscious, and blind hearing people have language and are conscious, that tells us that it was being blind and deaf that made her unconscious, not her lack of language.
Vision, we think, takes up more territory in the cortex than language or emotion. The abilities to think about the past and the present, to form plans, and to make moral judgements, seem to be independent of language last I checked, although all are still poorly understood.
The opposition between reason and emotion, posited by Plato, is no longer in good standing. Have you read /Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain/ by Antonio Damasio?
I don't believe that your "rational" mind--a thing few people have--is the locus of your goals. The rational mind has /no/ goals, and rational thought is an interpreted language, not our native instruction set. It is just a tool. All goals come from preferences, values, feelings, qualia. All morals come from these goals. Love, compassion, joy, everything that makes life worth living, comes from the emotional brain. All those things must be stripped down and oversimplified before they can be pushed through any rational calculus.
I don't believe that thought is in language. There are many proofs it is not. For instance, the "tip of the tongue" feeling when you know the concept, but can't find the word. I have many times realized things in a fraction of a second that then took ten seconds to string together into words. I can say a thing in words and immediately think "that wasn't what I meant to say". I regularly must pause in the middle of a sentence to come up with the right word for that place in the sentence, which shows that I constructed the entire syntactic structure of the sentence /before/ choosing all of the words in it.
On one occasion, I dropped a glass I was holding, and, noticing it falling, moved one foot underneath it at an angle that would divert it down and sideways, so that it would bounce off the foot and then off the floor, with both bounces imparting far less force to the glass than a direct impact with the foot or the floor would have. This required doing a physics math problem in less than 1/10th of a second.
Our bodies, in producing our body language, make complex social calculations involving relative status, dominance relationships, mating potentials, and other factors, which we are /not even consciously aware of/. Robin Hanson's book /The Elephant in the Brain/ has a chapter on when it's advantageous for us to do these calculations unconsciously.
We now have many examples of people with brain damage to temporal lobes who still understand /concepts/ and can reason with them, but can't recognize or retrieve the words for some of those concepts. (This is hard to establish for people who can't retrieve /any/ words, because it's hard for them to tell us enough to convince us that they understand the concepts.)
The thing is, I'm not saying pre-language brains don't think. I'm saying they think using a different engine. to quote the post:
>The nuances and overlaps and contradictions among uncountable “feels good” and “feels bad” movements create a vast edifice of instincts and learned behaviors and urges and desires.
So when you say
> That a dog who goes to the door at 5:15 to wait for a person who will arrive at 5:20 is unable to anticipate the future? Can you explain how wolves cooperate in hunting by driving prey towards a spot where another wolf is waiting in ambush, without being able to think about the future?
You're pointing at something I didn't say. The brain does anticipate the future, and the animal does things using their intuitive cognition that will result in fitness-enhancing outcomes in that future. They don't "think" about it in the ways we understand "thinking" to exist though.
> How the chimpanzee Washoe described watching her mother being killed by poachers
FWIW, I don't believe these accounts are true. Much like Koko didn't actually talk, and her handlers exaggerated the communication that was happening.
> seeing deaf-mutes with or without language are conscious
I'm not convinced that the ones without any language are fully conscious. They don't even have to be deaf-mutes, feral humans that never learned language are likely in the same pre-conscious state.
>Have you read /Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain/ by Antonio Damasio?
I have not, sorry. :/
> All goals come from preferences, values, feelings, qualia. All morals come from these goals. Love, compassion, joy, everything that makes life worth living, comes from the emotional brain.
I don't think we disagree very much here.
Regarding the rest of your comment - I don't claim that we have full conscious access to everything our brain is doing. Much of it is below the level of awareness. I don't even think we are conscious all the time that we're awake! And, as you point out, our intuitive brain is still here, doing a LOT of work. That's why the post is titled "You Have Two Brains." The intuitive brain is deeper, older, and more powerful in terms of actual raw power. It's not what gives us the sense of self, though. Plus it lacks a few capabilities that have given us enormous advantages. :)