my mind on books

Our relation to our past is no more passive than is our relation to what we presently visually perceive; we are not the containers of memory-images that a true narrative would accurately describe. Rather, we are in a continual process of reconsideration, … of reflective restructuring, and of repositioning the actions, events, occurrences, interactions, efforts, aspirations, achievements, intentions — in short, our words, deeds, and everything in between that, taken together, form the teleological trajectories, the narrative threads, of our selves. … Memories, understood in this way, are not inert visual images filed into storage by time and date. They are remembered experiences of all composite kinds, and, like works of art and like human selves, they take on and cast off relational properties, networks of interconnections to other experiences both similar and different. (Hagberg,Describing Ourselves, p. 236)

Garry L. Hagberg, in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2008), explores Wittgenstein’s views on the self in relation to autobiographical writing.

The ‘Cartesian’ view of introspection as an internal act of inspecting determinate mental “objects” exerts a pervasive influence on concepts of the mind and self. According to Hagberg, Wittgenstein opposed this view without falling into the contrasting behaviorist camp that shares the presuppositions of the Cartesian, dualistic account. “Wittgenstein’s position … cuts beneath the metaphysical presuppositions of both of these polarized, antithetical theories of the self.” (p. 185) However, Wittgenstein’s own position resists any simple capsule formulation. As Hagberg states (p. 240), “the very phrase ‘Wittgenstein’s method’ can easily prove… misleading” but he points to a convergence between therapeutic philosophy and autobiography:

To see autobiography as philosophy is to see it as an ineliminable source of language-games of narrative self-description, and to see philosophy as autobiography is to see it, in turn, as the distinctive kind of self-analysis — the intricate, layered disentangling of the mind’s grammatically fueled impulses to misspeak, to mischaracterize itself — that Wittgenstein’s remarks on therapeutic philosophy articulate. (p. 256)

A UC Berkeley course on “Scientific Approaches to Consciousness” has just begun and is available as an audio podcast. The instructor is John F. Kihlstrom.

The first lecture discusses required and recommended texts near the beginning, followed by administrative details about the course, with some substantive discussion of consciousness starting at around 30 min.

Upcoming lecture topics include introspection; the mind-body problem; attention and automaticity; the explicit and the implicit; anesthesia and coma; sleep and dreams; hysteria and hypnosis; daydreaming, absorption and meditation; consciousness and the self; and the origins of consciousness.

Texts for the course:

• The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness
• The Mystery of Consciousness by John Searle



• Thinks . . . by David Lodge

Other recommended titles:

• Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore
• Exploring Consciousness by Rita Carter
• The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates ed. by Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere
• Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness ed. by Bernard J Baars, William P Banks, and James B Newman

Also mentioned was The Psychology of Consciousness by William Farthing, a book that would have been a good text, but is unfortunately out of date.

Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count by Richard E. Nisbett (Norton, 2009).

Product Description

A bold refutation of the belief that genes determine intelligence. Who are smarter, Asians or Westerners? Are there genetic explanations for racial differences in test scores? What makes some nationalities excel in engineering and others in music? Will math and science remain a largely male preserve. From the damning research of The Bell Curve to the more recent controversy surrounding geneticist James Watson’s statements, one factor has been consistently left out of the equation: culture. In the tradition of The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, world-class social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett takes on the idea of intelligence as something that is biologically determined and impervious to culture–with vast implications for the role of education as it relates to social and economic development. Intelligence and How to Get It asserts that intellect is not primarily genetic but is principally determined by societal influences. Nisbett’s commanding argument, superb marshaling of evidence, and fearless discussions of the controversial carve out new and exciting terrain in this hotly debated field.

What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith Stanovich (Yale University Press, 2009).

Product Description

Critics of intelligence tests—writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman—have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important in the cognitive domain. In this book, Keith E. Stanovich challenges this widely held assumption.

Stanovich shows that IQ tests (or their proxies, such as the SAT) are radically incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning. They fail to assess traits that most people associate with “good thinking,” skills such as judgment and decision making. Such cognitive skills are crucial to real-world behavior, affecting the way we plan, evaluate critical evidence, judge risks and probabilities, and make effective decisions. IQ tests fail to assess these skills of rational thought, even though they are measurable cognitive processes. Rational thought is just as important as intelligence, Stanovich argues, and it should be valued as highly as the abilities currently measured on intelligence tests.

Coming later this year: Intelligence 101 by Jonathan Plucker (Springer, August 2009).

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending is new or coming soon from Basic Books, with a publication date listed as Jan. 26; as of today (Jan. 18) Amazon doesn’t have it as a pre-order or in stock, but “ships within 7 to 11 days.”

Product Description

Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years.

Scientists have long believed that the “great leap forward” that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked end of significant biological evolution in humans. In this stunningly original account of our evolutionary history, top scholars Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending reject this conventional wisdom and reveal that the human species has undergone a storm of genetic change much more recently. Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilization arose, they contend, and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews’ rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the early Indo-Europeans that allowed for a new way of life, increased disease resistance among the Europeans settling America, and new versions of neurological genes among European Jews.

Ranging across subjects as diverse as human domestication, Neanderthal hybridization, and IQ tests, Cochran and Harpending’s analysis demonstrates convincingly that human genetics have changed and can continue to change much more rapidly than scientists have previously believed. A provocative and fascinating new look at human evolution that turns conventional wisdom on its head, The 10,000 Year Explosion reveals the ongoing interplay between culture and biology in the making of the human race.

The book has a website with chapter summaries and related information.

Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules and the Problem of the External World by Jack Lyons, coming Jan. 20 from Oxford University Press (with zombies in the title! But the index shows just about eight zombie references in the text.)

Amazon has “Search Inside” for this title, so a preview is available.

Product Description
Perception is our main source of epistemic access to the outside world. Perception and Basic Beliefs addresses two central questions in epistemology: which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., noninferentially justified) and where does perception end and inferential cognition begin. Jack Lyons offers a highly externalist theory, arguing that what makes a belief a basic belief or a perceptual belief is determined by the nature of the cognitive system, or module, that produced the beliefs. On this view, the sensory experiences that typically accompany perceptual beliefs play no indispensable role in the justification of these beliefs, and one can have perceptual beliefs–justified perceptual beliefs–even in the absence of any sensory experiences whatsoever. Lyons develops a general theory of basic beliefs and argues that perceptual beliefs are a species of basic beliefs. This results from the fact that perceptual modules are a special type of basic belief-producing modules. Importantly, some beliefs are not the outputs of this class of cognitive module; these beliefs are therefore non-basic, thus requiring inferential support from other beliefs for their justification. This last point is used to defend a reliabilist epistemology against an important class of traditional objections (where the agent uses a reliable process that she doesn’t know to be reliable).
Perception and Basic Beliefs brings together an important treatment of these major epistemological topics and provides a positive solution to the traditional problem of the external world.

The author’s homepage includes links to some of his recent papers.