I enjoyed this article. It’s about how surprisingly little progress cognitive scientists and philosophers are making towards an understanding of consciousness. I like its story of how the Hard Problem of consciousness came to be thought of as such. I like the image of some of the finest scientists and philosophers cruising among the Greenland icebergs, at an oligarch’s expense, and yet failing to agree.
      Not long ago I realised I had missed this talk at Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH: quality acronym; Oxford’s TORCH is a good effort but not quite on the same level). Luckily there’s video so one prominent philosopher’s point of view can still be heard. John Searle is pretty categorical that consciousness is real, and not just an illusory by-product of cognitive processes, and he also seems optimistic that neuroscientists will pin something useful down soon. (I wonder if a deeper understanding of the Default Mode Network — mentioned more than once in this blog already here and here — and other things like it yet to be discovered, will help. But that may prove to be an over-interpretable red herring in due course…)
      As the Guardian article says, some people think that consciousness may just be something that won’t be explained, any more than certain basic laws of the electromagnetic world can be questioned. I think it seems rather early in the history of neuroscience to go that far. The article also mentions a new play by Tom Stoppard called The Hard Problem, which looks like it’s going to broach the topic. How was this the first I’d heard of it? And now it’s all sold out until April.
      Once at a conference I went to a panel that spent some time discussing ‘cognitive approaches’ to literature — basically any attempt to understand literature in the light of cognitive science, the kind of thing I am doing in this blog. One speaker made two key complaints about the field, (i) being that it was not offering anything therapeutic, and (ii) being that it was not saying anything about consciousness. I wasn’t sure what to think about either point. The first seems to expect a cognitive criticism to be too much like a psychoanalytic criticism; the second seems a bit harsh since it’s not cognitive criticism, but cognitive science itself, that is struggling with the topic.
      Literature might be something that depends on consciousness: it seems to rely on reflective awareness, or at least to give us a strong sense of it. It also represents other consciousnesses, and up to a point, it allows us to think we are experiencing them. These consciousness may be quite different from our own (psychotic humans, animals, gods, aliens, androids, etc.). My daughter () wrote a story recently from the point of view of a literary character, aware of her own special vulnerability at the hands of an author, and her own particular existence in time, and imagining how she’d shape her life if she could. And if she can do it, Joyce and Proust and all can’t be too far behind. Indeed, one of the very first posts in the blog looked at how Shakespeare’s fairies talk about — and thus by inference we suppose they think about — time in a special way.
      This aspect of literature may not really have much chance of solving the Hard Problem(s), but one of the most remarkable thing that consciousness can do is to simulate other consciousnesses and imagine their differences. Literature knows a lot about that, in practice at least.

I have mentioned Edinburgh’s ‘History of Distributed Cognition‘ seminars before, but they are being posted regularly now, and they are exceeding my already high expectations. The most recent one (at the time of writing) is by John Sutton, and the ‘ecologies’ of memory he discusses are a superb example of how humanities research can work with the idea of distributed cognition, or indeed a wide range of scientific ideas about the mind. The series in general is excellent, and freely available to all. Highly Recommended!

Christopher Summerfield and Konstantinos Tsetsos, ‘Do Humans Make Good Decisions?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 27-34.

It is possible to make humans seem like good decision-makers, Summerfield and Tsetsos explain, if you put them in an orderly experimental context and invite them to undertake a perceptual classification task. However, in real-world scenarios, such as when making economic decisions, humans prove to be ‘irrational’, and their choices vary according to context. Drawing together experiments wherein subjects experience ‘variable or volatile’ decisions even in the laboratory, and their decisions are shown to veer away from the ideal, Summerfield and Tsetsos propose that we have evolved an ‘efficient coding of decision-relevant information’.
      The point is that in a rapidly changing environment, and with a remarkable but nevertheless limited capacity to manage information, the human mind is all too ready to respond to expected rather than unexpected information, and to act along an expected path. This is consistent with the cognitive biases – especially confirmation bias – that are widely observed. However, I like the fact that Summerfield and Tsetsos are ready to question whether the resulting decisions are really bad: they don’t conform to ‘statistical optimality’ but they are designed for, and serviceable in, situations where statistical optimality simply cannot be calculated.

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This made me think about whether literary works are orderly or disorderly environments in which decisions are made. It also made me think about how identifying the particular decision as such, in a complex literary plot or life situation, is not always straightforward. Hamlet has a reputation for indecisiveness: his decision, much delayed, is whether to kill Claudius. Or perhaps his decision is only a decision when he moves to kill Claudius; not killing him is not a decision, it’s an extension of the resting state.
      The hero’s predicament could be seen as a highly complex one, ‘variable and volatile’ in all sorts of ways. Hamlet has to weigh the ghost’s words against the way Claudius and Gertrude are acting, how they are viewed by others, Hamlet’s feelings for his mother, his other emotional entanglements, the problem of whether ghosts can be trusted, and so on. All of this would surely create a situation in which decision-making might revert to the ‘expected inputs’.
      In a revenge tragedy expectation points ruthlessly in one direction: eventually the hero will carry out the necessary act, and then die (or similar). For the audience, then, the ‘expected input’ is manifestly anything that points towards destruction. However, we are often, as in the case of Hamlet, presented with heroes for whom things seem less clear-cut. Hamlet is ill at ease, at odds with his mission in his cast of mind and his tone of voice. The ‘expected inputs’ still point strongly at a decision, but the experience of the individual is out of tune.
      I don’t have a lot more to say about this at this point, not least because the ‘a’ key on my computer (or the ‘’ key as it would rather be called) appears to be in terminal decline. This makes typing very annoying for the time being (until my complete vocabulary refit kicks in). Nonetheless, it seems interesting and productive that literature may configure ‘expected inputs’ and decision points in complex ways that may propose further nuances about these evolved mechanisms.