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Garyhall at 11:18, 14 September 2011

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Garyhall at 11:15, 14 September 2011

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	'''From Brain to General Intellect: Commentary on the Mediations of Consciousness''' <br><br> Alberto López Cuenca <br><br>		'''From Brain to General Intellect: Commentary on the Mediations of Consciousness''' <br><br> Alberto López Cuenca <br><br>
	<blockquote>‘The modern human mind is not a simple medieval clock; it is not a radio or telephone switchboard; it is not a system of clever software; and it is most definitely not a general-purpose computing device like a Turing machine. These things are its inventions, products of its culture. They are no more than the metaphors it currently uses when contemplating itself.’ (Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the Modern Mind'' )<br></blockquote>		<blockquote>‘The modern human mind is not a simple medieval clock; it is not a radio or telephone switchboard; it is not a system of clever software; and it is most definitely not a general-purpose computing device like a Turing machine. These things are its inventions, products of its culture. They are no more than the metaphors it currently uses when contemplating itself.’ (Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the Modern Mind'' )<br></blockquote>
	<br> There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed. <br><br> Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states? <br><br> As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes:<blockquote~~><br><br~~> Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005)</blockquote~~><br><br~~> Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3). <br><br> This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3). <br><br> What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place. <br><br> What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment. <br><br> Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious: <~~br><br~~> In the hybrid scheme proposed here, the functional locus of ‘consciousness’ can shift, depending upon the representational system currently in command. What we experience as basic, unreflective awareness probably corresponds somewhat to direct episodic experience, uninterpreted by any of our representational systems. Such unreflective states are probably as close as modern humans can get to the episodic cultures of higher mammals. In such a state, the absence of mimetic or linguistic representation concedes control to episodic cognitive structures, by default. (Donald, 1991: 369) <~~br><br~~> So, along with an episodic unreflective awareness, Donald argues that there is both a mimetic and a linguistic consciousness. Mimetic states of awareness are event-oriented and generally socially interactive. ‘Above all, and in contrast with unreflective episodic experience, mimetic states take an active, modeling approach to experience. The invention and practice of sport, games, dance, ritual, and craft without the engagement of verbal thought are typical of such states’ (1991: 369). There is also a more symbolically complex and mediated linguistic consciousness. According to Donald, this is the most spread state of consciousness because most cortical regions in the human brain are tertiary: they receive great quantities of highly digested inputs from all over the brain (1991: 379). This leads Donald to a quite surprising conclusion: <br><br> In summary, the degree of consistency across individuals that has been assumed in neuropsychology may not exist in tertiary cortical regions at all. This might be expressed as the principle of singularity: the individual human brain develops a unique functional organization at the representational level. This has serious implications for optimal research strategies in neuropsychology; at the very least, it is a very strong argument in favor of the single-case approach. The regions of the brain that are most characteristically human – especially the great expanses of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes – are likely to be the most malleable neurological structures in nature, taking on many forms. They are configurable and reconfigurable to a remarkable degree, because their resources are allocated on a competitive basis to the many input paths impinging on them. In effect, the physical structure of mind has become less and less fixed as neocortical evolution has progressed. This leaves room not only for the kinds of radical reconfiguration introduced by literacy but also (presumably) for larger differences between the brains of individual human beings. (Donald: 1991: 380) <br><br> From this perspective, the brain appears to have transformed itself during human evolution according to the need to interact with others and the environment. Consciousness here has evolved along the lines of the brain's plasticity. What this implies is that consciousness is not just molded by the brain. The latter is an argument put forward by Andy Clark and labeled 'extended mind theory' (2003; 2008). For Clark, the human mind cannot be circumscribed to the 'biological skinbag': <br><br> The human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag. In fact, it has never been thus restricted and bound, at least not since the first meaningful words were uttered on some ancestral plain. But this ancient seepage has been gathering momentum with the advent of texts, PCs, coevolving software agents, and user-adaptive home and office devices. The mind is just less and less in the head.’ (Clark, 2003: 4) <br><br> This is Clark’s key idea: that the mind relies on the material means human beings have to encode and transmit information. According to Clark, this is not just a question of cultural or material human development; it is a structural neurological condition of human beings, namely, the plasticity of the brain to adapt to the environment. ‘It is the presence of this unusual plasticity’, Clark writes, ‘that makes humans (but not dogs, cats, or elephants) natural-born cyborgs: beings primed by Mother Nature to annex wave upon wave of external elements and structures as part and parcel of their own extended minds’ (2003: 31). It is just this capacity to extend and adapt the mind that has been enlarged in recent decades with the coming of computers and all sorts of media that enable human beings to record and manipulate information. Following Clark, we can see that mind and knowledge are inextricable from the material means we have to put them at work. This crucial intertwining of the brain and external resources grants technology a role center stage in the configuration and transformation of consciousness. <br><br> Moreover, this argument concerning the extension of the cognitive faculty beyond the head places in question the modern idea of the subject as an independent mind that owns unique ideas and imagination. This criticism of mind individualism thus has an highly relevant epistemological and political implication for the current stage of cognitive capitalism. In particular, the notion of ‘general intellect’ is cast in a new light under these considerations. As Paolo Virno writes: <br><br> Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the ‘objective scientific capacity’ inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor… In so-called ‘second-generation independent labor,’ but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games’. (Virno, 2004: 106) <br><br> The point Virno is calling attention to is that what Marx understood to be knowledge accumulated in machines as general intellect is today located in the very lives and bodies of workers. Knowledge, subjective experience and mindsets join the process of production set in motion by Post-Fordism. If we follow Merlin Donald and Andy Clark’s arguments regarding the plasticity of the brain and the constitutive reliance of the mind upon sign and memory technologies, then the question of the constitution of consciousness can hardly be answered by pointing to the firing of complex networks of neurons alone. Instead, consciousness appears inextricably constituted by politics, technology and the social workforce. At the same time, this approach certainly provides no definitive answers as far as the philosophical and scientific riddles of consciousness are concerned. Rather, it reminds us that a single straight answer will not be able to account for the multiple mediations in which consciousness is formed. <br>		<br> There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed. <br><br> Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states? <br><br> As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes:<blockquote>Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005)</blockquote>Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3). <br><br> This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3). <br><br> What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place. <br><br> What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment. <br><br> Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious:<blockquote>In the hybrid scheme proposed here, the functional locus of ‘consciousness’ can shift, depending upon the representational system currently in command. What we experience as basic, unreflective awareness probably corresponds somewhat to direct episodic experience, uninterpreted by any of our representational systems. Such unreflective states are probably as close as modern humans can get to the episodic cultures of higher mammals. In such a state, the absence of mimetic or linguistic representation concedes control to episodic cognitive structures, by default. (Donald, 1991: 369)<blockquote>So, along with an episodic unreflective awareness, Donald argues that there is both a mimetic and a linguistic consciousness. Mimetic states of awareness are event-oriented and generally socially interactive. ‘Above all, and in contrast with unreflective episodic experience, mimetic states take an active, modeling approach to experience. The invention and practice of sport, games, dance, ritual, and craft without the engagement of verbal thought are typical of such states’ (1991: 369). There is also a more symbolically complex and mediated linguistic consciousness. According to Donald, this is the most spread state of consciousness because most cortical regions in the human brain are tertiary: they receive great quantities of highly digested inputs from all over the brain (1991: 379). This leads Donald to a quite surprising conclusion: <br><br> In summary, the degree of consistency across individuals that has been assumed in neuropsychology may not exist in tertiary cortical regions at all. This might be expressed as the principle of singularity: the individual human brain develops a unique functional organization at the representational level. This has serious implications for optimal research strategies in neuropsychology; at the very least, it is a very strong argument in favor of the single-case approach. The regions of the brain that are most characteristically human – especially the great expanses of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes – are likely to be the most malleable neurological structures in nature, taking on many forms. They are configurable and reconfigurable to a remarkable degree, because their resources are allocated on a competitive basis to the many input paths impinging on them. In effect, the physical structure of mind has become less and less fixed as neocortical evolution has progressed. This leaves room not only for the kinds of radical reconfiguration introduced by literacy but also (presumably) for larger differences between the brains of individual human beings. (Donald: 1991: 380) <br><br> From this perspective, the brain appears to have transformed itself during human evolution according to the need to interact with others and the environment. Consciousness here has evolved along the lines of the brain's plasticity. What this implies is that consciousness is not just molded by the brain. The latter is an argument put forward by Andy Clark and labeled 'extended mind theory' (2003; 2008). For Clark, the human mind cannot be circumscribed to the 'biological skinbag': <br><br> The human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag. In fact, it has never been thus restricted and bound, at least not since the first meaningful words were uttered on some ancestral plain. But this ancient seepage has been gathering momentum with the advent of texts, PCs, coevolving software agents, and user-adaptive home and office devices. The mind is just less and less in the head.’ (Clark, 2003: 4) <br><br> This is Clark’s key idea: that the mind relies on the material means human beings have to encode and transmit information. According to Clark, this is not just a question of cultural or material human development; it is a structural neurological condition of human beings, namely, the plasticity of the brain to adapt to the environment. ‘It is the presence of this unusual plasticity’, Clark writes, ‘that makes humans (but not dogs, cats, or elephants) natural-born cyborgs: beings primed by Mother Nature to annex wave upon wave of external elements and structures as part and parcel of their own extended minds’ (2003: 31). It is just this capacity to extend and adapt the mind that has been enlarged in recent decades with the coming of computers and all sorts of media that enable human beings to record and manipulate information. Following Clark, we can see that mind and knowledge are inextricable from the material means we have to put them at work. This crucial intertwining of the brain and external resources grants technology a role center stage in the configuration and transformation of consciousness. <br><br> Moreover, this argument concerning the extension of the cognitive faculty beyond the head places in question the modern idea of the subject as an independent mind that owns unique ideas and imagination. This criticism of mind individualism thus has an highly relevant epistemological and political implication for the current stage of cognitive capitalism. In particular, the notion of ‘general intellect’ is cast in a new light under these considerations. As Paolo Virno writes: <br><br> Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the ‘objective scientific capacity’ inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor… In so-called ‘second-generation independent labor,’ but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games’. (Virno, 2004: 106) <br><br> The point Virno is calling attention to is that what Marx understood to be knowledge accumulated in machines as general intellect is today located in the very lives and bodies of workers. Knowledge, subjective experience and mindsets join the process of production set in motion by Post-Fordism. If we follow Merlin Donald and Andy Clark’s arguments regarding the plasticity of the brain and the constitutive reliance of the mind upon sign and memory technologies, then the question of the constitution of consciousness can hardly be answered by pointing to the firing of complex networks of neurons alone. Instead, consciousness appears inextricably constituted by politics, technology and the social workforce. At the same time, this approach certainly provides no definitive answers as far as the philosophical and scientific riddles of consciousness are concerned. Rather, it reminds us that a single straight answer will not be able to account for the multiple mediations in which consciousness is formed. <br>

	*<br>		*<br>

Garyhall at 11:14, 14 September 2011

2011-09-14T11:14:19Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:14, 14 September 2011
Line 1:		Line 1:
	'''From Brain to General Intellect: Commentary on the Mediations of Consciousness''' <br><br> Alberto López Cuenca <br><br>		'''From Brain to General Intellect: Commentary on the Mediations of Consciousness''' <br><br> Alberto López Cuenca <br><br>
	<blockquote>‘The modern human mind is not a simple medieval clock; it is not a radio or telephone switchboard; it is not a system of clever software; and it is most definitely not a general-purpose computing device like a Turing machine. These things are its inventions, products of its culture. They are no more than the metaphors it currently uses when contemplating itself.’ (Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the Modern Mind'' )<br></blockquote>		<blockquote>‘The modern human mind is not a simple medieval clock; it is not a radio or telephone switchboard; it is not a system of clever software; and it is most definitely not a general-purpose computing device like a Turing machine. These things are its inventions, products of its culture. They are no more than the metaphors it currently uses when contemplating itself.’ (Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the Modern Mind'' )<br></blockquote>
	<br> There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed. <br><br> Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states? <br><br> As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes: <br><br> Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005) <br><br> Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3). <br><br> This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3). <br><br> What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place. <br><br> What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment. <br><br> Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious: <br><br> In the hybrid scheme proposed here, the functional locus of ‘consciousness’ can shift, depending upon the representational system currently in command. What we experience as basic, unreflective awareness probably corresponds somewhat to direct episodic experience, uninterpreted by any of our representational systems. Such unreflective states are probably as close as modern humans can get to the episodic cultures of higher mammals. In such a state, the absence of mimetic or linguistic representation concedes control to episodic cognitive structures, by default. (Donald, 1991: 369) <br><br> So, along with an episodic unreflective awareness, Donald argues that there is both a mimetic and a linguistic consciousness. Mimetic states of awareness are event-oriented and generally socially interactive. ‘Above all, and in contrast with unreflective episodic experience, mimetic states take an active, modeling approach to experience. The invention and practice of sport, games, dance, ritual, and craft without the engagement of verbal thought are typical of such states’ (1991: 369). There is also a more symbolically complex and mediated linguistic consciousness. According to Donald, this is the most spread state of consciousness because most cortical regions in the human brain are tertiary: they receive great quantities of highly digested inputs from all over the brain (1991: 379). This leads Donald to a quite surprising conclusion: <br><br> In summary, the degree of consistency across individuals that has been assumed in neuropsychology may not exist in tertiary cortical regions at all. This might be expressed as the principle of singularity: the individual human brain develops a unique functional organization at the representational level. This has serious implications for optimal research strategies in neuropsychology; at the very least, it is a very strong argument in favor of the single-case approach. The regions of the brain that are most characteristically human – especially the great expanses of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes – are likely to be the most malleable neurological structures in nature, taking on many forms. They are configurable and reconfigurable to a remarkable degree, because their resources are allocated on a competitive basis to the many input paths impinging on them. In effect, the physical structure of mind has become less and less fixed as neocortical evolution has progressed. This leaves room not only for the kinds of radical reconfiguration introduced by literacy but also (presumably) for larger differences between the brains of individual human beings. (Donald: 1991: 380) <br><br> From this perspective, the brain appears to have transformed itself during human evolution according to the need to interact with others and the environment. Consciousness here has evolved along the lines of the brain's plasticity. What this implies is that consciousness is not just molded by the brain. The latter is an argument put forward by Andy Clark and labeled 'extended mind theory' (2003; 2008). For Clark, the human mind cannot be circumscribed to the 'biological skinbag': <br><br> The human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag. In fact, it has never been thus restricted and bound, at least not since the first meaningful words were uttered on some ancestral plain. But this ancient seepage has been gathering momentum with the advent of texts, PCs, coevolving software agents, and user-adaptive home and office devices. The mind is just less and less in the head.’ (Clark, 2003: 4) <br><br> This is Clark’s key idea: that the mind relies on the material means human beings have to encode and transmit information. According to Clark, this is not just a question of cultural or material human development; it is a structural neurological condition of human beings, namely, the plasticity of the brain to adapt to the environment. ‘It is the presence of this unusual plasticity’, Clark writes, ‘that makes humans (but not dogs, cats, or elephants) natural-born cyborgs: beings primed by Mother Nature to annex wave upon wave of external elements and structures as part and parcel of their own extended minds’ (2003: 31). It is just this capacity to extend and adapt the mind that has been enlarged in recent decades with the coming of computers and all sorts of media that enable human beings to record and manipulate information. Following Clark, we can see that mind and knowledge are inextricable from the material means we have to put them at work. This crucial intertwining of the brain and external resources grants technology a role center stage in the configuration and transformation of consciousness. <br><br> Moreover, this argument concerning the extension of the cognitive faculty beyond the head places in question the modern idea of the subject as an independent mind that owns unique ideas and imagination. This criticism of mind individualism thus has an highly relevant epistemological and political implication for the current stage of cognitive capitalism. In particular, the notion of ‘general intellect’ is cast in a new light under these considerations. As Paolo Virno writes: <br><br> Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the ‘objective scientific capacity’ inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor… In so-called ‘second-generation independent labor,’ but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games’. (Virno, 2004: 106) <br><br> The point Virno is calling attention to is that what Marx understood to be knowledge accumulated in machines as general intellect is today located in the very lives and bodies of workers. Knowledge, subjective experience and mindsets join the process of production set in motion by Post-Fordism. If we follow Merlin Donald and Andy Clark’s arguments regarding the plasticity of the brain and the constitutive reliance of the mind upon sign and memory technologies, then the question of the constitution of consciousness can hardly be answered by pointing to the firing of complex networks of neurons alone. Instead, consciousness appears inextricably constituted by politics, technology and the social workforce. At the same time, this approach certainly provides no definitive answers as far as the philosophical and scientific riddles of consciousness are concerned. Rather, it reminds us that a single straight answer will not be able to account for the multiple mediations in which consciousness is formed. <br>		<br> There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed. <br><br> Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states? <br><br> As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes:<blockquote><br><br> Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005)</blockquote><br><br> Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3). <br><br> This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3). <br><br> What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place. <br><br> What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment. <br><br> Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious: <br><br> In the hybrid scheme proposed here, the functional locus of ‘consciousness’ can shift, depending upon the representational system currently in command. What we experience as basic, unreflective awareness probably corresponds somewhat to direct episodic experience, uninterpreted by any of our representational systems. Such unreflective states are probably as close as modern humans can get to the episodic cultures of higher mammals. In such a state, the absence of mimetic or linguistic representation concedes control to episodic cognitive structures, by default. (Donald, 1991: 369) <br><br> So, along with an episodic unreflective awareness, Donald argues that there is both a mimetic and a linguistic consciousness. Mimetic states of awareness are event-oriented and generally socially interactive. ‘Above all, and in contrast with unreflective episodic experience, mimetic states take an active, modeling approach to experience. The invention and practice of sport, games, dance, ritual, and craft without the engagement of verbal thought are typical of such states’ (1991: 369). There is also a more symbolically complex and mediated linguistic consciousness. According to Donald, this is the most spread state of consciousness because most cortical regions in the human brain are tertiary: they receive great quantities of highly digested inputs from all over the brain (1991: 379). This leads Donald to a quite surprising conclusion: <br><br> In summary, the degree of consistency across individuals that has been assumed in neuropsychology may not exist in tertiary cortical regions at all. This might be expressed as the principle of singularity: the individual human brain develops a unique functional organization at the representational level. This has serious implications for optimal research strategies in neuropsychology; at the very least, it is a very strong argument in favor of the single-case approach. The regions of the brain that are most characteristically human – especially the great expanses of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes – are likely to be the most malleable neurological structures in nature, taking on many forms. They are configurable and reconfigurable to a remarkable degree, because their resources are allocated on a competitive basis to the many input paths impinging on them. In effect, the physical structure of mind has become less and less fixed as neocortical evolution has progressed. This leaves room not only for the kinds of radical reconfiguration introduced by literacy but also (presumably) for larger differences between the brains of individual human beings. (Donald: 1991: 380) <br><br> From this perspective, the brain appears to have transformed itself during human evolution according to the need to interact with others and the environment. Consciousness here has evolved along the lines of the brain's plasticity. What this implies is that consciousness is not just molded by the brain. The latter is an argument put forward by Andy Clark and labeled 'extended mind theory' (2003; 2008). For Clark, the human mind cannot be circumscribed to the 'biological skinbag': <br><br> The human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag. In fact, it has never been thus restricted and bound, at least not since the first meaningful words were uttered on some ancestral plain. But this ancient seepage has been gathering momentum with the advent of texts, PCs, coevolving software agents, and user-adaptive home and office devices. The mind is just less and less in the head.’ (Clark, 2003: 4) <br><br> This is Clark’s key idea: that the mind relies on the material means human beings have to encode and transmit information. According to Clark, this is not just a question of cultural or material human development; it is a structural neurological condition of human beings, namely, the plasticity of the brain to adapt to the environment. ‘It is the presence of this unusual plasticity’, Clark writes, ‘that makes humans (but not dogs, cats, or elephants) natural-born cyborgs: beings primed by Mother Nature to annex wave upon wave of external elements and structures as part and parcel of their own extended minds’ (2003: 31). It is just this capacity to extend and adapt the mind that has been enlarged in recent decades with the coming of computers and all sorts of media that enable human beings to record and manipulate information. Following Clark, we can see that mind and knowledge are inextricable from the material means we have to put them at work. This crucial intertwining of the brain and external resources grants technology a role center stage in the configuration and transformation of consciousness. <br><br> Moreover, this argument concerning the extension of the cognitive faculty beyond the head places in question the modern idea of the subject as an independent mind that owns unique ideas and imagination. This criticism of mind individualism thus has an highly relevant epistemological and political implication for the current stage of cognitive capitalism. In particular, the notion of ‘general intellect’ is cast in a new light under these considerations. As Paolo Virno writes: <br><br> Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the ‘objective scientific capacity’ inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor… In so-called ‘second-generation independent labor,’ but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games’. (Virno, 2004: 106) <br><br> The point Virno is calling attention to is that what Marx understood to be knowledge accumulated in machines as general intellect is today located in the very lives and bodies of workers. Knowledge, subjective experience and mindsets join the process of production set in motion by Post-Fordism. If we follow Merlin Donald and Andy Clark’s arguments regarding the plasticity of the brain and the constitutive reliance of the mind upon sign and memory technologies, then the question of the constitution of consciousness can hardly be answered by pointing to the firing of complex networks of neurons alone. Instead, consciousness appears inextricably constituted by politics, technology and the social workforce. At the same time, this approach certainly provides no definitive answers as far as the philosophical and scientific riddles of consciousness are concerned. Rather, it reminds us that a single straight answer will not be able to account for the multiple mediations in which consciousness is formed. <br>

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	'''From Brain to General Intellect: Commentary on the Mediations of Consciousness''' <br><br> Alberto López Cuenca <br><br>		'''From Brain to General Intellect: Commentary on the Mediations of Consciousness''' <br><br> Alberto López Cuenca <br><br>
	<blockquote>‘The modern human mind is not a simple medieval clock; it is not a radio or telephone switchboard; it is not a system of clever software; and it is most definitely not a general-purpose computing device like a Turing machine. These things are its inventions, products of its culture. They are no more than the metaphors it currently uses when contemplating itself.’~~</blockquote><br><br>~~ Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the Modern Mind'' <br><br> There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed. <br><br> Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states? <br><br> As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes: <br><br> Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005) <br><br> Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3). <br><br> This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3). <br><br> What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place. <br><br> What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment. <br><br> Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious: <br><br> In the hybrid scheme proposed here, the functional locus of ‘consciousness’ can shift, depending upon the representational system currently in command. What we experience as basic, unreflective awareness probably corresponds somewhat to direct episodic experience, uninterpreted by any of our representational systems. Such unreflective states are probably as close as modern humans can get to the episodic cultures of higher mammals. In such a state, the absence of mimetic or linguistic representation concedes control to episodic cognitive structures, by default. (Donald, 1991: 369) <br><br> So, along with an episodic unreflective awareness, Donald argues that there is both a mimetic and a linguistic consciousness. Mimetic states of awareness are event-oriented and generally socially interactive. ‘Above all, and in contrast with unreflective episodic experience, mimetic states take an active, modeling approach to experience. The invention and practice of sport, games, dance, ritual, and craft without the engagement of verbal thought are typical of such states’ (1991: 369). There is also a more symbolically complex and mediated linguistic consciousness. According to Donald, this is the most spread state of consciousness because most cortical regions in the human brain are tertiary: they receive great quantities of highly digested inputs from all over the brain (1991: 379). This leads Donald to a quite surprising conclusion: <br><br> In summary, the degree of consistency across individuals that has been assumed in neuropsychology may not exist in tertiary cortical regions at all. This might be expressed as the principle of singularity: the individual human brain develops a unique functional organization at the representational level. This has serious implications for optimal research strategies in neuropsychology; at the very least, it is a very strong argument in favor of the single-case approach. The regions of the brain that are most characteristically human – especially the great expanses of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes – are likely to be the most malleable neurological structures in nature, taking on many forms. They are configurable and reconfigurable to a remarkable degree, because their resources are allocated on a competitive basis to the many input paths impinging on them. In effect, the physical structure of mind has become less and less fixed as neocortical evolution has progressed. This leaves room not only for the kinds of radical reconfiguration introduced by literacy but also (presumably) for larger differences between the brains of individual human beings. (Donald: 1991: 380) <br><br> From this perspective, the brain appears to have transformed itself during human evolution according to the need to interact with others and the environment. Consciousness here has evolved along the lines of the brain's plasticity. What this implies is that consciousness is not just molded by the brain. The latter is an argument put forward by Andy Clark and labeled 'extended mind theory' (2003; 2008). For Clark, the human mind cannot be circumscribed to the 'biological skinbag': <br><br> The human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag. In fact, it has never been thus restricted and bound, at least not since the first meaningful words were uttered on some ancestral plain. But this ancient seepage has been gathering momentum with the advent of texts, PCs, coevolving software agents, and user-adaptive home and office devices. The mind is just less and less in the head.’ (Clark, 2003: 4) <br><br> This is Clark’s key idea: that the mind relies on the material means human beings have to encode and transmit information. According to Clark, this is not just a question of cultural or material human development; it is a structural neurological condition of human beings, namely, the plasticity of the brain to adapt to the environment. ‘It is the presence of this unusual plasticity’, Clark writes, ‘that makes humans (but not dogs, cats, or elephants) natural-born cyborgs: beings primed by Mother Nature to annex wave upon wave of external elements and structures as part and parcel of their own extended minds’ (2003: 31). It is just this capacity to extend and adapt the mind that has been enlarged in recent decades with the coming of computers and all sorts of media that enable human beings to record and manipulate information. Following Clark, we can see that mind and knowledge are inextricable from the material means we have to put them at work. This crucial intertwining of the brain and external resources grants technology a role center stage in the configuration and transformation of consciousness. <br><br> Moreover, this argument concerning the extension of the cognitive faculty beyond the head places in question the modern idea of the subject as an independent mind that owns unique ideas and imagination. This criticism of mind individualism thus has an highly relevant epistemological and political implication for the current stage of cognitive capitalism. In particular, the notion of ‘general intellect’ is cast in a new light under these considerations. As Paolo Virno writes: <br><br> Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the ‘objective scientific capacity’ inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor… In so-called ‘second-generation independent labor,’ but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games’. (Virno, 2004: 106) <br><br> The point Virno is calling attention to is that what Marx understood to be knowledge accumulated in machines as general intellect is today located in the very lives and bodies of workers. Knowledge, subjective experience and mindsets join the process of production set in motion by Post-Fordism. If we follow Merlin Donald and Andy Clark’s arguments regarding the plasticity of the brain and the constitutive reliance of the mind upon sign and memory technologies, then the question of the constitution of consciousness can hardly be answered by pointing to the firing of complex networks of neurons alone. Instead, consciousness appears inextricably constituted by politics, technology and the social workforce. At the same time, this approach certainly provides no definitive answers as far as the philosophical and scientific riddles of consciousness are concerned. Rather, it reminds us that a single straight answer will not be able to account for the multiple mediations in which consciousness is formed. ~~<br>~~<br>		<blockquote>‘The modern human mind is not a simple medieval clock; it is not a radio or telephone switchboard; it is not a system of clever software; and it is most definitely not a general-purpose computing device like a Turing machine. These things are its inventions, products of its culture. They are no more than the metaphors it currently uses when contemplating itself.’ (Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the Modern Mind'' )<br></blockquote>
			<br> There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed. <br><br> Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states? <br><br> As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes: <br><br> Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005) <br><br> Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3). <br><br> This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3). <br><br> What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place. <br><br> What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment. <br><br> Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious: <br><br> In the hybrid scheme proposed here, the functional locus of ‘consciousness’ can shift, depending upon the representational system currently in command. What we experience as basic, unreflective awareness probably corresponds somewhat to direct episodic experience, uninterpreted by any of our representational systems. Such unreflective states are probably as close as modern humans can get to the episodic cultures of higher mammals. In such a state, the absence of mimetic or linguistic representation concedes control to episodic cognitive structures, by default. (Donald, 1991: 369) <br><br> So, along with an episodic unreflective awareness, Donald argues that there is both a mimetic and a linguistic consciousness. Mimetic states of awareness are event-oriented and generally socially interactive. ‘Above all, and in contrast with unreflective episodic experience, mimetic states take an active, modeling approach to experience. The invention and practice of sport, games, dance, ritual, and craft without the engagement of verbal thought are typical of such states’ (1991: 369). There is also a more symbolically complex and mediated linguistic consciousness. According to Donald, this is the most spread state of consciousness because most cortical regions in the human brain are tertiary: they receive great quantities of highly digested inputs from all over the brain (1991: 379). This leads Donald to a quite surprising conclusion: <br><br> In summary, the degree of consistency across individuals that has been assumed in neuropsychology may not exist in tertiary cortical regions at all. This might be expressed as the principle of singularity: the individual human brain develops a unique functional organization at the representational level. This has serious implications for optimal research strategies in neuropsychology; at the very least, it is a very strong argument in favor of the single-case approach. The regions of the brain that are most characteristically human – especially the great expanses of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes – are likely to be the most malleable neurological structures in nature, taking on many forms. They are configurable and reconfigurable to a remarkable degree, because their resources are allocated on a competitive basis to the many input paths impinging on them. In effect, the physical structure of mind has become less and less fixed as neocortical evolution has progressed. This leaves room not only for the kinds of radical reconfiguration introduced by literacy but also (presumably) for larger differences between the brains of individual human beings. (Donald: 1991: 380) <br><br> From this perspective, the brain appears to have transformed itself during human evolution according to the need to interact with others and the environment. Consciousness here has evolved along the lines of the brain's plasticity. What this implies is that consciousness is not just molded by the brain. The latter is an argument put forward by Andy Clark and labeled 'extended mind theory' (2003; 2008). For Clark, the human mind cannot be circumscribed to the 'biological skinbag': <br><br> The human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag. In fact, it has never been thus restricted and bound, at least not since the first meaningful words were uttered on some ancestral plain. But this ancient seepage has been gathering momentum with the advent of texts, PCs, coevolving software agents, and user-adaptive home and office devices. The mind is just less and less in the head.’ (Clark, 2003: 4) <br><br> This is Clark’s key idea: that the mind relies on the material means human beings have to encode and transmit information. According to Clark, this is not just a question of cultural or material human development; it is a structural neurological condition of human beings, namely, the plasticity of the brain to adapt to the environment. ‘It is the presence of this unusual plasticity’, Clark writes, ‘that makes humans (but not dogs, cats, or elephants) natural-born cyborgs: beings primed by Mother Nature to annex wave upon wave of external elements and structures as part and parcel of their own extended minds’ (2003: 31). It is just this capacity to extend and adapt the mind that has been enlarged in recent decades with the coming of computers and all sorts of media that enable human beings to record and manipulate information. Following Clark, we can see that mind and knowledge are inextricable from the material means we have to put them at work. This crucial intertwining of the brain and external resources grants technology a role center stage in the configuration and transformation of consciousness. <br><br> Moreover, this argument concerning the extension of the cognitive faculty beyond the head places in question the modern idea of the subject as an independent mind that owns unique ideas and imagination. This criticism of mind individualism thus has an highly relevant epistemological and political implication for the current stage of cognitive capitalism. In particular, the notion of ‘general intellect’ is cast in a new light under these considerations. As Paolo Virno writes: <br><br> Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the ‘objective scientific capacity’ inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor… In so-called ‘second-generation independent labor,’ but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games’. (Virno, 2004: 106) <br><br> The point Virno is calling attention to is that what Marx understood to be knowledge accumulated in machines as general intellect is today located in the very lives and bodies of workers. Knowledge, subjective experience and mindsets join the process of production set in motion by Post-Fordism. If we follow Merlin Donald and Andy Clark’s arguments regarding the plasticity of the brain and the constitutive reliance of the mind upon sign and memory technologies, then the question of the constitution of consciousness can hardly be answered by pointing to the firing of complex networks of neurons alone. Instead, consciousness appears inextricably constituted by politics, technology and the social workforce. At the same time, this approach certainly provides no definitive answers as far as the philosophical and scientific riddles of consciousness are concerned. Rather, it reminds us that a single straight answer will not be able to account for the multiple mediations in which consciousness is formed. <br>

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	What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment.		What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment.
			<br><br>
	Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious:		Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious:
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	Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the modern Mind''		Merlin Donald, ''Origins of the modern Mind''
	<br><br>		<br><br>
	‘The modern human mind is not a simple medieval clock; it is not a radio or telephone switchboard; it is not a system of clever software; and it is most definitely not a general-purpose computing device like a Turing machine. These things are its inventions, products of its culture. They are no more than the metaphors it currently uses when contemplating itself.’ Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind		There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed.
	~~<br><br>~~		<br><br>
	There is an overwhelming amount of literature about the nature of consciousness and its riddles. Yet one must necessarily work through this literature if one is interested in the philosophical and scientific details of the related debates. However, this means that this short book can be neither an exhaustive introduction nor a developed stance on the issue of consciousness – the problem of the mind-body relationship, the reduction of mental states to brain states, or the attribution of consciousness to single individuals. Something of that kind can be found elsewhere.* As far as these issues are concerned, this book is more of a call to pay attention to the current ways in which some of the scientific discussions about consciousness are framed. Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states? As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes:		Almost any introduction to the subject of consciousness holds that the philosophical history of the modern mind starts with the strict distinction René Descartes made between ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’. Here, a mental and a physical realm were established that are sharply separated from the one another while at the same time being weakly linked by the pineal gland - what Descartes thought to be the physical seat of the mind. This dualism set both the stage and the characters that have subsequently played out the still unfinished story of modern and contemporary consciousness. If these realms are so distinct, how can the mental affect the physical? On the other hand, if the mental is conditioned by the physical, how is free will possible? How can physical states of the brain account for such phenomenologically distinct states as mental ones? How can it be shown that accessible third person descriptions of physical facts are descriptions of inaccessible first person mental states?
			<br><br>
			As a result of developments in clinical psychology and neuroscience, the dominant trend throughout most of the 20th century has been to explain the nature of consciousness, not in terms of a dualism, but rather in terms of different sorts of materialism. Consciousness here is either reduced to, identified with, or caused by, brain states or neural connections. These various explanations converge on the basic point of making the brain a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. However, a number of criticisms have been made of these forms of materialism. For example, if being in pain is identical to being in a certain brain state, why can’t the person in pain identify such a brain state? If the brain causes the mental state of anger, how can two such different conditions be related? Moreover, that the brain is in a certain state or neurons are connected in a determined way does not seem to explain how one feels what one feels. As Steven Harnard writes:
			<br><br>
	Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005)		Now what about the ‘how’? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. We don’t know how brain activity could generate feeling. Even less do we know why. (2005)
	Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3).		<br><br>
			Amid these puzzles, Colin McGinn (1993) has put forward a quite challenging argument. McGinn admits that as far as consciousness is concerned he is a naturalist. Basically, he has no doubt the brain is the causal basis of consciousness. The problem is we do not seem to understand ‘how this can be so’. The distinctive point of McGinn’s stance is that he believes we cannot determine how it is that the brain is responsible for consciousness. According to him, we are precluded from ever understanding this link given the way we form our concepts and develop our theories (1993: 2-3).
	This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3). What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place. What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment.		<br><br>
			This does not mean McGinn is a constructivist. He actually holds a realist conception of the world, although he admits we have to have a cognitive and perceptive closure to understand it all. For him, there is a state of affairs in the world that human beings can neither perceive properly nor understand. ‘But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind’ (1993: 3).
			<br><br>
			What seems to be missing in the materialist account of consciousness, and in McGinn's 'cognitive and perceptive closure' argument, is an evolutionary and thus historical approach to consciousness. For those hegemonic materialist theories that were popular in the late Twentieth Century, and are still powerful today, the resolution of the question as to how the brain produces consciousness is a discrete and synchronic one. It is an issue that can be resolved by pointing to brain states or complex neural connections. This is apparent from the spread of representations of the brain through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalography (EEG). Every now and again a digitally produced image of the brain presented in the media claims to be showing where consciousness, language, pain or love take place.
			<br><br>
			What is misleading about this particulate kind of image is the way consciousness is represented as static: as if it is detached from the environment and has not changed in the course of human evolution. It is as though being conscious has always activated the same parts of the brain. This representation leaves aside the fact that consciousness has evolved biologically and interacted socially and technologically with the environment.

	Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious:		Consequently, a diachronic and contextual approach must be stressed in order to make sense of the complexity of consciousness. There has been some very insightful work done in this field. For instance, Merlin Donald (1991) has argued that the evolution of consciousness has gone through at least three stages and, more to the point, that we have come to accumulate the three of them. That is, we normally switch between different states that can be regarded as conscious: