Wednesday, April 09, 2008

This Is Derb's Brain On Drugs   [John Derbyshire]

OK, I've arrived here in Tucson for the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.

Didn't really absorb much from the first day's meeting. I caught a really bad cold the day before leaving New York, so to protect my ears from damage when flying, I dosed up on Benadryl. Didn't work. At least, the drying properties didn't work: I have a left ear full of fluid. The soporific properties worked great, though. I was stumbling around in a half-doze all day. This didn't help a bit when trying to grasp the fine points of Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, or parsing sentences like (actual example): "A fact f necessitates a fact g if and only if a proposition q that constitutes a complete representation of g can be deduced from a proposition p that constitutes a complete description of f." Well, duh.

So today (Wednesday, second day) I'm going to forswear the Benadryl and let those little rhinoviruses run wild. There's some good stuff today. In the morning, a discussion of Benjamin Libet's astonishing results. He showed that neurophysiologically speaking, your intention to do something precedes the conscious decision to do it. Then "Sex and Consciousness," with a panel discussion of "The Varieties of Sexual Experience." Now that's more like it! (You can't get away from William James at these events, by the way. Three different speakers quoted him yesterday — the same quote in two of the cases.)

Then in the evening, a joint lecture on panpsychism, which seems to have been gaining a lot of ground with the metaphysicians recently. Very approximately, it's the notion that consciousness is just the out-cropping or concentration of a "psi field" that pervades everything. Even electrons and neutrons possess eensy-teensy little specks of consciousness, according to the panpsychists. Panpsychism seems, according to its adherents, to offer a glimmer of hope that we might resolve what they call "the hard problem of consciousness," viz.: "How do mental events arise out of matter?"

Far as I'm concerned, the hard problem of consciousness this next couple of days will be trying to stay conscious while only having one functioning ear and a couple pounds of liquid mercury sloshing around in my head.

Tucson seems like a nice place, very nice. Dry. Dry is good.

04/09 09:32 AMShare