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Instructor: Alva Noë
Office: Moses 303A
Telephone: 510 643 8412
Email: noe@socrates.berkeley.edu
Web: socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe
Course web site: socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/phil290-2.html
Office Hours: Thursday, 1:30 - 3 pm
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The aim of this seminar is to investigate the nature of consciousness. A guiding assumption is that consciousness is, at least in substantial part, a biological phenomenon. We begin by investigating neurobiological approaches to consciousness, in science and philosophy, and explore limits to current thinking. We will examine recent work in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. In the second part of the course we'll turn to the nature of life and the question of what the problem of life and its origins can tell us about consciousness. We will consider emergence and reduction, the self, and artificial intelligence, among other topics.
REQUIREMENTS [ top ]
This is a research seminar designed primarily for graduate students or for students with interest and background in theoretical issues in the study of mind in philosophy or in science. Students with little background in these areas should consider reading
Jaegwon Kim, The Philosophy of Mind. Westview Press, 1998.
Andy Clark, Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy
of Cognitive Science. Oxford University
Press.
Patricia Churchland, Brain-wise: Studies in
Neurophilosophy. MIT Press.
A useful sourcebook of writings on consciousness is The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, edited by Ned Block, Owen Flanagan and Guven Guzeldere. The MIT Press.
This seminar is an opportunity for collaborative investigation. For this reason, active participation is required. All students (including auditors, except with the express permission of the instructor) must write short essays (of around 2 pages in length) every week of the course except for three weeks of their own choosing. These short papers are to be handed in at the beginning of each meeting. A small number will be asked to read their papers aloud to the class. Students enrolled for credit will be required to write a term paper due no later than the last day of class. Late daily papers will not be accepted. Term papers can be handed in late only by prior arrangement. To pass the course, all requirements must be met.
READINGS [ top ]
Many readings for this course are available on the web from computers with Cal ip addresses, or from computers with proxy authorization. In most cases, links are available on the course web site (see above). Some of the readings are not available on the web, but are available to students in this course in electronic form as downloads from the course web site. These readings are password protected. Some readings are available only in book form. All books have been placed on reserve in Doe Library. A moderate number have also been ordered at the campus bookstore. Some students may want to consider ordering books online.
The following books have been ordered at the campus bookstore:
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, Scribner, 1995.
Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown & Co., 1991.
Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Simon and Schuster.
Susan Hurley, Consciousness in Action, Harvard, 1998.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press.
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, Northwestern University Press.
Other good books we may read from are:
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World, The MIT Press.
John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, New York Review of Books.
John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, The MIT Press.
Stuart Kaufman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press.
Humbert Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition,
Kluwer.
Alva Noë (ed.) Is the visual world a grand illusion, Academic Imprint.
Alva Noë and Evan Thompson, Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, The MIT Press.
Ricard Sole and Brian Goodwin, Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology, Basic Books.
Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System, The MIT Press.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Avon.
Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. The MIT Press.
John Haugeland, Having Thought, Harvard University Press.
Charles Siewert, The Significance of Consciousness, Princeton University Press.
Walter Freeman, How Brains Make Up their Minds, Columbia University Press.
Note: all these books are on reserve.
SCHEDULE [ top ]
This is a preliminary schedule and is subject to change as we move along.
IMPORTANT NOTE: There will be no class meetings on 2 September or 11 November.
August 26: Introduction
September 2: NO CLASS
September 9: Consciousness and the Brain
Required readings:
Francis Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis, part I;
Christof Koch, Quest for Consciousness, chs 1-5;
Geraint Rees, Gabriel Kreiman, Christof Koch, Neural correlates of consciousness in humans,
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, 2002;
Nancy Kanwisher, Neural events and perceptual awareness, Cognition 79, 2001;
David Chalmers, What is a neural correlate of consciousness? [in Noë & Thompson, ed. Vision and
Mind].
Recommended readings (that may not get discussed in class):
Crick, part II;
John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, especially chapter 9;
Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman, Consciousness and complexity,
Science 282, December 1998;
Ned Block, Paradox and cross-purposes in recent work on consciousness, Cognition 79, 2001.
September 16 The NCC program criticized: Interpretationism
and the attack on Cartesian Materialism
Recommended readings (that may
not be discussed in class):
September 23: The NCC program criticized: Are there NCCs?
September 30: The enactive approach
Recommended reading:
October 7 Explanatory gaps
October 14 Active externalism
October 21: Emergence I
Recommended:
October 28: Emergence II: The problem of life
Recommended reading:
November 4: Evolution
Recommended:
November 11: NO CLASS (Veteran's Day)
November 18: The self in biology and neuroscience
November 25: Minds and machines
Recommended reading:
December 6: Conclusion
Required readings:
DC Dennett, Consciousness
Explained, Part I, Part II, and chs 10 and
11 of Part III;
DC Dennett, Evolution, error
and intentionality in The Intentional Stance;
Alva Noë, Is the visual world a grand illusion? Journal of Consciousness StudiesVolume 9, No 5/6, 2002;
Charles Siewert, chapters 3 and 4 of The
Significance of Consciousness.
Stephen Palmer, Color, Consciousness and the Isomorphism Constraint Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26, 1999;
DC Dennett, Are we explaining consciousness yet? Cognition 79, 2001;
DC Dennett, True believers, in The
Intentional Stance.
Luiz Pessoa, Evan Thompson and
Alva Noë, Finding out about filling in: a guide for visual science and philosophy of perception,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21: 6, 1998: 723-748;
Alva Noë, Luiz Pessoa and Evan Thompson,
Beyond the grand illusion: what change blindness really teaches us
about visual perception, Visual Cognition7, 2000;
Eduard Marbach, Troubles with heterophenomenology. In R. Casati, B. Smith, & S. White, eds
Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences. 1994 Holder-Pichler-Tempsky.
Required readings:
A. Noë and E. Thompson, Are there neural correlates of consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, forthcoming;
Critical commentary on Noë and Thompson by
Baars,
Bayne,
Freeman,
Hardcastle,
Haynes & Rees,
Hohwy & Frith,
Jack and Prinz,
McGlaughlin,
Metzinger,
Myin,
Roy,
van Gulick.
John Searle, Consciousness, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2000, 23.
Required reading:
Alva Noë, Action in Perception, chs 1-4 ;
J. Kevin O'Regan and Alva Noë,
A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24/5, 2001.
Andy Clark, Is seeing all it seems, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 9, No 5/6, 2002;
John Haugeland, Mind embodied and embedded, in Haugeland's Having Thought;
Randall D. Beers, Dynamical approaches to cognitive science, Trends in Cognitive Science 4/3, 2000;
Andy Clark, An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Science, 3/9, 1999;
Dana Ballard, On the function of visual representation, in Noë and Thompson Vision and Mind;
Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson, Knowing how, Journal of Philosophy, 98, 8, 2001.
Required reading:
Susan Hurley and Alva NoNoë, Neural plasticity and consciousness, Biology and Philosophy 18:131-168 [2003];
Jeffrey Gray, How are qualia coupled to functions, Trends in Cognitive Science 7/5, 2003;
Ned Block, Tactile sensation via spatial perception, Trends
in Cognitive Science 7/7, 2003;
Alva Noë and Susan Hurley, The deferential brain in action: reply to Jeffrey Gray, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7/5, 2003;
Susan Hurley and Alva Noë, Neural plasticity and consciousness: reply to Block, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7/8, 2003.
Required reading:
Andy Clark and David Chalmers,
The extended mind, Analysis58:10-23, 1998;
Alva Noë, Experience without the head, manuscript.
Required readings:
Michael Silberstein and John McGeever, The search for ontological emergence, Philosophical Quarterly, vol 49, 195, 1999;
Timothy O'Conner, Emergent properties, American Philosophical Quarterly, 31, 2, 1994;
Richard Campbell and Mark Bickhard, Physicalism, emergence and downward causation,;
J. Kim, The sense of emergence,
Philosophical Studies Vol. 95 (1-2), pp.3-36, 1999;
Evan Thompson, Emergence (chapter 3 of Radical Embodiment, manuscript
Jaegwon Kim's, Mind in a Physical World,
Alicia Juarrero's Dynamics in Action.
Required reading:
Evan Thompson, chapters 5 and 6; of Radical Embodiment;
Hannah Ginsborg, Two kinds of mechanical inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle;
Hans Jonas, Is God a mathematician, in his The Phenomenon of Life.
Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, chs 4-7;
Stuart Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe, chs 1-3;
Humbert Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, pp 73 to end;
Ricard Sole and Brian Goodwin, Signs of Life;
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, parts one and two.
Required reading:
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, chs 1-4;
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, part III;
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, The spandrels of San Marco and the panglossian paradigm: a critique of adaptationism,
Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1979 Sep 21;205(1161):581-98.
Evan Thompson, chapters 7 - 10; of Radical Embodiment;
Required readings:
Susan Hurley, Consciousness in Action, chs 1, 2, and 3;
Patricia Churchland,
Self-representation in nervous systems,Science Vol 296, April 2002;
DC Dennett, Consciousness Explained, chapter 13.
Recommended reading:
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error;
Rick Grush, The emulation
theory of representation, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, forthcoming .
Required reading:
John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Programs.Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 417-424, 1980
[version available online at the BBS web site];
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, chapter 14 [on reserve];
Humbert Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, pp 73 to end.
Jonas, Phenomenon of Life, fifth essay;
Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do, new introduction.
Term papers are due at the
last meeting on 6 December 2003.