Anomalous Presumptions

In a very useful post, Jonah Lehrer wonders:

…if banal terms like “executive control” or “top-down processing” or “attentional modulation” hide the strangeness of the data. Some entity inside our brain, some network of neurons buried behind our forehead, acts like a little petit tyrant, and is able to manipulate the activity of our sensory neurons. By doing so, this cellular network decides, in part, what we see. But who controls the network?

I posted a comment on Jonah’s blog but it took so long to get approved that probably no one will see it. So I’m posting an enhanced version here.

Jonah’s final sentence, “But who controls the network?” illustrates to me the main obstacle to a sensible view of human thought, identity, and self-regulation.

We don’t ask the same question about the network that controls our heart rate. It is a fairly well defined, important function, tied to many other aspects of our mental state, but it is an obviously self-regulating network. It has evolved to manage its own fairly complex functions in ways that support the survival of the organism.

So why ask the question “Who controls it?” about attentional modulation? We know this network can be self-controlling. There are subjectively strange but fairly common pathologies of attentional modulation (such as hemi-neglect where we even understand some of the network behavior) that are directly traceable to brain damage, and that reveal aspects of the network’s self-management. We can measure the way attention degrades when overloaded through various cognitive tasks. Etc. etc. There’s nothing fundamentally mysterious or challenging to our current theoretical frameworks or research techniques.

Yet many people seem to have a cognitive glitch here, akin to the feeling people had on first hearing that the earth was round, “But then we’ll fall off!” Our intuitive self-awareness doesn’t stretch naturally to cover our scientific discoveries. As Jerry Fodor says “there had… better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.”

I’ve written some posts (1, 2) specifically on why this glitch occurs but I think it will take a long time for our intuitive sense of our selves to catch up with what we already know.

And I guess I ought to write the post I promised back last April. I’ll call it “Revisiting ego and enforcement costs”. Happily it seems even more interesting now than it did then, and it ties together the philosophy of mind themes with some of my thinking on economics.

Filed by Jed at 2:47 pm under Mind, Philosophy
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