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no justification or explanation for asserting that brain cells experientially detect, rather
than merely electrochemically react to, visually related physical stimuli.
Anderson s account postulates not only unconscious cognitive processes but ones
of which we cannot be aware. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that there is no
essential or necessary connection between computation and consciousness. Anderson
extends this principle beyond cognition to emotions when he writes that computer
systems ... have been shown to be capable of.. . displaying frustration and this feeling
of frustration occurs in large patterns of bit changes (24). He offers no evidence for
the presence of this emotion, nor does he demonstrate the manner in which feelings can
become embedded in patterns of bit changes. Thus, this is one of the most flagrant
examples of neuromythology, based not on scientific evidence, but on the unquestioned
assumptions of scientific materialism.
There is a good deal of mystery surrounding the questions of how the subjective
experiences of cognition and even emotions are supposed to be achieved by the
components of the brain and the computer. Anderson deals with this mystery by
answering: it does not appear that there is anything magical about human intelligence or
anything that is incapable of being modeled on a computer (3), but he offers no
justification for divorcing cognitive and affective terms from conscious experience and
imputing them upon nonconscious, material objects and processes. Contrary to his claim,
there is, in fact, a facet of human intelligence that does not appear to have been modeled
on a computer and that is consciousness. Without addressing this issue, we are poorly
equipped to answer the question: are patterns of neural activation merely necessary for
conscious cognition to be achieved, or are they sufficient? Anderson s account not only
sheds no light on this question but obscures that there is any such problem at all.
Similar confusion occurs in this textbook s account of mental imagery. While
cognitive psychology, unlike behaviorism, commonly acknowledges the existence of
such mental qualia, Anderson explains it away with the comment that when subjects are
scanning a mental array, they are scanning a representation that is analogous to a physical
array (96). Thus, a mental image is an abstract analog of a spatial structure (98), and
certain data might seem to indicate that subjects rotate mental objects in a three-
dimensional space within their heads (93). Anderson hastens to add that subjects are
not actually rotating an object in their heads (93), but he does not explain where mental
objects are rotated. If not in the head, it is even less likely that such objects exist outside
of the head; and this raises the question: where, if anywhere, do they exist? As usual, this
mechanistic account of the mind fails to illuminate the actual nature and origins of qualia
of any kind. While scientific theories are characteristically based on and tested by means
of empirical evidence, metaphysical dogmas are based on unquestioned assumptions and
are immune to empirical evidence. Anderson s textbook account of cognition and
consciousness evidently falls into the category of metaphysical speculation, while falsely
posing as scientific knowledge.
Philosophical Confusion
An Empirical Challenge to the Taboo against Subjectivity
Many modern philosophical accounts of the mind are sophisticated expressions of
scientific materialism. However, John Searle s influential work The Rediscovery of the
Mind is more complex, for it raises fundamental experiential objections to many of the
contemporary rationalistic accounts of the mind/body problem. In a striking departure
from the more orthodox views of the mind according to scientific materialism, Searle
points out the disastrous effects resulting from the failure of modern philosophers and
psychologists to come to terms with the subjectivity of consciousness. Indeed, he declares
that much of the bankruptcy of most work in the philosophy of mind and a great deal of
the sterility of academic psychology over the past fifty years have come from a persistent
failure to recognize and come to terms with the fact that the mind is an irreducibly first-
person phenomenon.3 Searle goes further in pinpointing the rationale for the perpetuation
of that approach.
Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction
of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives. That is, the choice
we are tacitly presented with is between a scientific approach, as represented by one or
another of the current versions of materialism, and an antiscientific approach, as
represented by Cartesianism or some other traditional religious conception of the mind.
(3-4)
The disaster of this taboo of subjectivity stems from the strategy of describing the world
as completely objective, leaving out subjectivity altogether, which has been a central
premise of scientific materialism in general and modern cognitive science in particular.
This strategy, he points out, makes it impossible to describe consciousness, because it
becomes literally impossible to acknowledge the subjectivity of consciousness. Thus, for
all its purported rejection of the Cartesian framework, cognitive science has maintained
the absolute dichotomy of conscious, subjective mental processes which are not
regarded as a proper subject of scientific investigation and objective neurological and
behavioral processes that are regarded as the genuine subject matter of science.
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