John Caulfield, Ph.D. Implications for Artificial Brains
Adjunct distinguished research professor at Fisk University, he authored the 1984 National Geographic cover story on holography. Business Week called him One of America's 10 Top Scientists; Byte magazine called him One of the Most Influential People in the World in Minicomputers, and Fortune magazine recognized him as, A Pioneer on Optical Processing."
Walter J. Freeman, MD The Lost World in Neuroscience
Professor, Graduate School in the Division of Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. His research investigates the biophysical properties of sensory systems revealed by electrophysiological recording of axon pulses and dendritic waves (EEGs). Among his recent books is: How Brains Make Up Their Minds (1999).
Moderator:
Stephen W. Kercel, Ph.D., P.E.
Researcher in intelligent instrumentation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Published widely, he has won research and development awards for real-time implementations of wavelet-based sensors, and conducts research on bizarre systems, among which is the human brain.
Conference Presentation Schedule
Friday, August 23rd
8:00 registration desk
8:30 Coffee
9:00-9:15 Welcome
David Smith, Ph.D., Director and Co-Founder, NEI
Robert Haskell, Ph.D., Associate Director, Cofounder, NEI
9:15-10:00 Keynote Opening Speaker
Convergence Between Mathematical and Humanistic Approaches to the Mind
Paul Werbos, Ph.D.
National Science Foundation
In the past, many thinkers imagined that progress towards scientific understanding of the mind would somehow banish the emotions, the unconscious and sub-symbolic intelligence in general. But purely symbolic designs for understanding or replicating the mind fly in the face of empirical reality, and have had limited success even in technological applications. In artificial sub-symbolic intelligence -- pattern recognition, data mining, control, etc. -- the most widespread success algorithm originated when I translated certain theories of Freud directly into mathematics. Recent developments in that school of thought have converged strongly with the views of the mind at this conference; evolutionary levels of intelligence, emotions, dreams, metaphor and empathy all have central roles in the emerging picture -- and tie into new possibilities for technology and mathematical research.
10:00 -10:15 Break
10:15-11:00
Endogenous Causes - Bizarre Effects
Stephen W. Kercel, Ph.D.
Research Fellow
Endogenous Systems Research Group
University of New England
The defining characteristic of complex systems appears to be endogeny, the quality of making themselves up as they go along. The entailment structure of an endogenous system requires a multi-level self-referential system loop of causality including both material and efficient causes. The multilevel nature of the system is reflected in the fact that at least one of its causal entailments is entangled, simultaneously serving as both material and efficient cause. Entangled causality produces semantic behavior. Semantic behavior does not occur in mechanisms or algorithms. However, inferential entailment structures that produce it have been known to mathematicians for at least a century. Such structures are called impredicative systems. Impredicative abstract structures provide a rational way to understand endogenous natural processes. Endogenous and impredicative effects are, from the reductionist perspective, bizarre. A multilevel self-referential entailment structure produces behaviors that are non-local, fully determined, but not fully predictable. Nevertheless, endogeny and impredicativity might potentially answer many perplexing questions in cognition, linguistics, protein folding, quantum entanglement, and "the measurement problem.
10:15-11:00
Self-Deception Theory from an Evolutionary Perspective.
Dori LeCroy, Ph.D.
Independent Scholar
The presentation will begin with a brief description of self-deception theory from an evolutionary perspective. It will then relate this evolved human capacity to the defense mechanisms in the Freudian sense. They both rely on material held in the psyche that is motivationally active but unavailable to consciousness. A review of the defense mechanisms, denial, reaction formation, regression, etc. will show how each of them may be adaptive and represent evolved habits of cognitive processing that serve adaptive social behavior. Finally, it will suggested that in the context of the evolutionary principles of parent-offspring conflict and discriminative parental solicitude the use of these defense mechanisms may serve the very young and be reflected in attachment styles and described by current attachment theory.
10:15 - 11:00
The Basal Ganglia System and the Cognitive Unconscious
Elizabeth Ennen, Ph.D.
Middlebury College
Department of Philosophy
Neuroscientists have identified two distinct memory systems in the brain, a hippocampal system responsible for declarative memory and a basal ganglia system responsible for habit memory (or "skill") memory. For several decades, neuroscientists have associated the hippocampal system with conscious cognition and the basal ganglia system with unconscious perceptual-motor skills. In recent years, however, scientists have discovered that the basal ganglia system is responsible for certain skills that are both unconscious and cognitive. The unconscious cognition subserved by the basal ganglia system is clearly different from conscious cognition. It is also different from various others forms of unconscious cognition such as artificial grammar learning and priming. Two claims are advanced. The first is that the unconscious cognition subserved by the basal ganglia predates other types of unconscious cognition in evolutionary time. The second claim is that the new research on the basal ganglia system is important to ongoing debates about the very nature of cognitive science. Finally, the paper will discuss the special nature of the unconscious cognition associated with the basal ganglia system and argue that its discovery has implications for our understanding of the evolution of cognition.
11:00- 11:45
Blindsight and Unconsciousness
A. Minh Nguyen, Ph.D.
Georgia State University/University of Louisville
This paper argues that blindsight involves unconscious experience. Blindsight subjects are patients with visual field defects caused by occipital lobe (more precisely, striate cortex) damage. According to Lawrence Weiskrantz, blindsighters "can in fact detect and discriminate certain types of visual events within their 'blind' fields by pointing or, less well, by eye fixation without, however, being aware that they can do so: they think they are only 'guessing'." Blindsight will be explored as a model for unconscious cognition.
11:00-11-45
Evolutionary Psychology and the Selectionist Model of Neural Development: A Combined Approach
Bence Nanay, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy
University of California, Berkeley
Evolutionary psychology and the selectionist model of neural development are usually regarded as two unrelated theories addressing two logically distinct questions. The focus of evolutionary psychology is the philogeny of the human mind, whereas the selectionist theories of neural development analyse the ontogeny of the mind. The paper will combine these two approaches in the explanation of the human mind. Doing so might help overcome some of the criticisms of both theories. The first part of the paper mentions three standard objections to evolutionary psychology, then three philosophical problems of evolutionary psychology address a solution. In the second part the paper will show that an approach combining evolutionary psychology and the selectionist theory of neural development may overcome some objections.
11:00-11:45
The Role of the Unconscious in A Dynamic Structuralist Viewpoint of Psychic Systems
Gertrudis Van De Vijver, Ph.D.
Neuro-Psychoanalysis Research Unit
University of Ghent
In this paper, the emergence of psychic structures is conceived of within a dynamic structuralist framework, which is developed in dialogue with the biological viewpoint on the emergence and the maintenance of living structures. More in particular, it is suggested (i) to consider organizational closure as a minimal condition to be fulfilled in order for dynamic systems to be stable, self-maintaining and self-producing, (ii) to conceive of living systems in terms of intricate organizational closures that set the stage for meaningful interactions ,and (iii) to situate the psychological realm in continuity with this viewpoint. The latter point implies an articulation of the relation between biological and psychic systems in terms of (i) their internal organization, (ii) their evolutionary dynamics, (iii) the developmental mechanisms at work in both types of systems. In analogy with the organizational closure of living systems, the mechanism of psychic closure is presented as the key mechanism for the constitution of psychic structures. Special attention will be paid to the role of the unconscious in the processes of psychic closure. Our focus will be in particular on the relation between unconscious and drive-related processes.
11:45- 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:45 Special Panel Presentations and Moderated Discussion
1:00 - 1:20
Non-Synaptic Communication in Brains
Paul Bach-y-Rita, MD
University of Wisconsin
Depts. Of Bioengineering and Rehabilitation Medicine
Professor of rehabilitation medicine and of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. He is also Chief Scientist and chairman of the board of Wicab. His discoveries have enabled the blind to see, the victims of leprosy to feel, and the quadriplegic to enjoy sex.
Implications for Artificial Brains
John Caulfield, Ph.D.
Department of Physics
Fisk University
Adjunct distinguished research professor at Fisk University, he authored the 1984 National Geographic cover story on holography. Business Week called him ‘One of America's 10 top scientists’; Byte magazine called him ‘One of the most influential people in the world in minicomputers’, and Fortune magazine recognized him as ‘A pioneer on optical processing."
1:40- 2:00
The Lost World in Neuroscience
Walter J. Freeman, MD
Department of Molecular Biology
University of California, Berkeley
Professor, Graduate School in the Division of Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. His research investigates the biophysical properties of sensory systems revealed by electrophysiological recording of axon pulses and dendritic waves (EEGs). Among his recent books is: How Brains Make Up Their Minds (1999).
2:00-2:15 Break
2:15 - 3:15
Discussion
Moderator: Stephen W. Kercel, Ph.D., PE
Researcher in intelligent instrumentation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
3:15 - 4:00
The New Unconscious: A Cognitive and Psycho-linguistic Framework and Validation Methodology for the Analysis of Sub-literal meaning in Verbal Language
Robert E. Haskell, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology, NEI
University of New England
Historically lacking adequate methodological controls, the existence of unconscious meaning in everyday conversational language and behavior remains controversial in mainstream cognitive science. He will outline a novel set of unconscious psycholinguistic and cognitive operations derived from his specifically developed analysis and validation methodology based on a natural everyday language approach. A cognitive and psycholinguistic framework will be described leading to a new theoretical formulation of invariance relations involved in unconscious cognition. Both related experimental, and illustrations from everyday settings will be presented along with their cognitive implications, including the automatic activation of racial stereotypes. Direct practical therapeutic applications will also be noted.
3:15-4:00
On the Emergence of Consciousness Between the Biological and the Social
Filip Geerardyn, Ph.D.
Neuro-Psychoanalysis Research Unit
University of Ghent
It is argued that notwithstanding the fact that the so-called ‘hard problem', that is, the question as to how consciousness emerges, remains unsolved, at least some answers have been given with respect to the question where consciousness emerges. Starting from research on the neurological substrates of mental processes, neuroscience has situated the emergence of consciousness in the brain. By contrast, both from a psychoanalytical and a phenomenological viewpoint, it has been argued that its emergence is to be situated between the organizational levels of the biological on the one hand and the social on the other hand. The psychoanalytical viewpoint will be developed with reference to Freud's Project for a scientific psychology (1895), whereas the phenomenological viewpoint will be dealt with in reference to Merleau-Ponty's Structure of behavior (1942). Secondly, it will be argued that Freud's viewpoint was suggested to him by the very phenomena he tried to explain (e.g. screen memories, dreams, symptoms, the after effect of a trauma). Thirdly, it will be argued that in this way, Freud firmly anchored his metapsychology in biology. Returning to Freud's metapsychology therefore can help to bridge the gap between actual neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
3:15-4:00
Unconscious Reactions Towards Children’s Faces:
The Effect of Resemblance
Steven M. Platek, Ph.D.
(With, Gordon G. Gallup Jr., Ph.D. & Rebecca L. Burch, Ph.D.)
Department of Psychology,
SUNY at Albany
Because of internal fertilization and the possibility of female infidelity males face the problem of uncertain paternity. We predicted that during our evolutionary history males would have been selected for the ability to detect subtle instances of physical resemblance as a means of assessing paternity. Our prediction posits that males possess an affective cognitive module that is triggered by physical resemblance and those males who invested in offspring that resembled them left more offspring. A series of three studies conducted in our lab support these predictions as well as generate a number of other interesting predictions. From these data we suggest that the male brain has been designed in such a way that an affective module is ‘turned on’ in response to seeing a child’s face that resembles him. Additional predictions generated from these studies will also be discussed.
430-5:30 Reception
6:00 Special Conference Dinner
Saturday, August 24th
8:00 Registration desk
8:30 Coffee
9:00-9:15 Opening
9:15-10:00 Keynote
Unconscious Selection: The Very Idea!
James H. Fetzer, Ph.D.
Distinguished McKnight Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Minnesota, Duluth
We find human behavior fascinating not only because it is behavior displayed by conspecifics, but because it is intrinsically complex. In the case of actions understood as deliberate or as intentional behavior, for example, it appears to result from the causal interaction between factors of various different kinds, such as motives, beliefs, ethics, abilities, and capabilities, where our success or failure tends to depend upon and vary with the extent to which we have properly appraised our opportunities, understood as the way things are. Beliefs that are true thus provide appropriate guidance for attaining our goals, while those that are false tend to misguide us in inappropriate ways. Some of the factors exerting influence upon our behavior, moreover, may be ones of which we are not ourselves aware, possibly because they are unconscious or subconscious or merely because we were not paying sufficient attention to what we were doing or were otherwise distracted. Certainly, a factor can exert causal influence whether or not we are aware of it. This presentation thus considers unconscious cognition from the point of view of the nature of selection to address the question, What factors may have promoted the evolution of consciousness by conferring an adaptive advantage upon organisms who possess it? Which appears to find an answer in the semiotic character of consciousness and of cognition.
10:00 -10:15 Break
10:15-11:00
The Time Course of Consolidation of Implicitly Held Knowledge
Arthur S. Reber, Ph.D. and Leib Litman, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology,
Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of CUNY.
Recent work on the time course of consolidation of memory suggests that the underlying representations of newly acquired sensorimotor skills show a rather intriguing time course. The newly learned skills are extremely labile and easily disrupted by new tasks that interfere with the first-learned task. However, if participants are permitted to enjoy a period free from any competing tasks, a rather robust consolidation of knowledge takes place. Indeed, roughly 5 to 6 hours appears to be sufficient for the memorial representation of the initial skill to be able to resist interference from the subsequent task. In this study we extend this research into a novel domain: the acquisition of implicitly acquired knowledge. Unlike most other research on consolidation of memory, our participants are unaware of what they have acquired. In fact, most are not aware that they have acquired any knowledge at all. However, the time course of consolidation appears very similar. Interfering secondary tasks presented immediately disrupt consolidation. Delays permit robust representations to develop. Additional evidence suggests that once these representations are established they are, for all practical purposes, permanent.
10:15-11:00
The Proper Role of Know How in Epistemology
Charles Wallis, Ph.D.
California State University, Long Beach
Department of Philosophy
From it's earliest beginnings with Plato and Aristotle western epistemology has been fundamentally, if not exclusively, concerned with knowledge as belief. Particularly, philosophers have formulated theories of knowledge in terms of consciously represented propositions. The primary framework for most contemporary epistemology is to define knowledge in terms of justified true belief. Even the relatively few treatments of know how in the philosophical literature have focused on consciously represented statements about how to carry out a practice. In this paper I argue that western epistemology has been deeply mistaken in its almost exclusive focus upon propositional models of knowledge. I argue that work in Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, and Neuroscience strongly support the notion that the vast percentage of know how is neither consciously represented nor propositional in nature. Furthermore, current theories of neuroevolution demonstrate that know how is evolutionary prior to and necessary for knowledge in the form of belief.
11:00-11:45
Thinking Without Words
Temple Grandin, Ph.D.
Department of Animal Science
Colorado State University
Author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic and Thinking in Pictures, the paper will describe her first-hand experiences of autistic thinking: thinking in pictures rather than in words. She will explain how it is possible to form concepts by thinking with pictures and suggest that this method of thinking is present in all people but is normally covered up by language and abstract thought. Neuroimaging and studies of temporal lobe dementia support the idea that visual and musical thinking is hidden deep within all human beings, and that musical and artistic talent may emerge as disease destroys the higher cognitive centers of the brain.
11:45- 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 145 Keynote
The Language of Emotions: An Evolutionary Perspective
Wilma Bucci, Ph.D.
Adelphi University
Department of Psychology
The Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies
The paper presents Bucci’s method of referential process. Humans appear as a transitional species - trying to overlay the new symbolic system of language, with its own powers, on the sub-symbolic analogic mental and emotional processes that constitute the dominant sectors of our experience. The field of evolutionary psychology has provided wide ranging evidence concerning a distinction between categorical and continuous processing systems in all species where such organization has been investigated. Cognitive science has provided models for the operation of such diverse nonverbal systems..The basic mechanism of connecting sub-symbolic information to nonverbal and then to verbal symbols operates in the child's development of the symbolizing process and, in parallel form as the individuals attempt to express inner experience in the shared verbal code. The process is bi-directional; language may then feed back to facilitate reorganization and recategorization in all nonverbal systems, including somatic and motoric as well as sensory and perceptual modalities.
1:45 -2:30
A Breast of Flesh Air: The Evolution of Unconscious Verbal Communication
David L. Smith, Ph.D.
Director, NEI
University of New England
Deception is widespread amongst organisms, including human beings. According to sociobiological theory the human capacity for self deception emerged from the coevolutionary arms race between ever the capacity for deception and the cognitive capacity to penetrate deception. By hiding our true intentions from ourselves, we are better able to conceal them from others. In this presentation I will suggest that the evolution of self-deception has created selection pressures which have given rise to sophisticated forms of unconscious social cognition and communication. Human beings unconsciously scan one another's behavior for subtle signs of deception. This information is unconsciously analyzed and the perceptions are conveyed by means of verbal communications that carry unconscious or 'sub-literal' meanings.
1:45-2:30
Language as the Source of Human Unconscious Processes
Ariane Bazan, Ph.D.
Neuro-Psychoanalysis Research Unit
University of Ghent
A neuropsychoanalytic framework is presented for the understanding of unconsciously determined human behavior as revealed in psychic symptoms and in unconscious productions like dreams. The proposed framework for a comprehensive approach essentially conceives human language as the one object of two evolutionary radically different neurological processing circuits, acting partially in parallel. The first and oldest pathway processes the ‘objective’ or phonemic qualities of language input while the second and typically human pathway processes language lexically on its semantic qualities. It is proposed that (1) meaningful access to language is essentially a(n articulatory) motor event in which the proprioceptive feedback from muscles and joints is the key informative elements; (2) the affective processing of raw phonemic material operates in relative autonomy in the subcortical thalamus-amygdala-hippocampus axis; and (3) the conscious semantic experiencing of language is accessed after a prefrontally mediated lexical selection of pendent phonemic material in the ‘articulatory’ loop of short-term memory. This selection process is then conceived as an active inhibitory process, which ‘represses’ contextually non valid semantic alternatives. Since, however, affective signification is not subject to this cortical inhibition process, it is speculated that this ‘unrepressible’ affect is experienced in the ‘wrong’ semantic context and therefore gives rise to ‘falsely connected’ symptoms in psychopathology. Finally, some possible experimental operationalizations for the testing of these hypotheses are proposed.
1:45-2:30
Some Remarks on the Organization of Human Speech: The Unconscious Structured as a Language
David Van Bunder, Ph.D.
Evolution & Complexity Research Unit
Ghent University
In his attempt to understand the functioning of the human mental apparatus, Lacan tried to combine Freudian psychoanalysis and structural linguistics. This combination is expressed in his sally The unconscious is structured as a language. The central idea behind this expression is that our autobiography has a specific organization that is characterized by the repetitive appearance of certain signifiers. If one is allowed to associate freely, the verbal account one produces will organize itself over and again around the same signifiers. The paradigmatic example here is Freud’s case study of the Rat Man. We consider the human psychic apparatus as a dynamical system and we would like to examine the way in which human speech is organized as a dynamical system. To that end we will explore the parallels between these master signifiers and what dynamic systems theory calls attractors. An attractor is considered to be a region of a dynamical system’s state space that the system can enter but not leave and which is thus crucial in understanding the behaviour of a dynamical system.
2:30 - 3:15 Break
3:15- 4:00
How to Psychoanalyze a Robot: Unconscious Cognition and the Evolution of Intentionality
Donald Levy, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy
Brooklyn College, CUNY
According to a common philosophical distinction, the 'original' intentionality, or 'aboutness' possessed by our thoughts, beliefs and desires is categorically different from the 'derived' intentionality manifested in some of our artifacts; our words, books and pictures, for example. Those making the distinction claim that the intentionality of our artifacts is 'parasitic' on the 'genuine' intentionality to be found in members of the former class of things. In Kinds of Minds, Daniel Dennett criticizes that claim and the distinction it rests on, and seeks to show that "metaphysically original intentionality" is illusory by working out the implications he sees in the practical possibility of a certain type of robot, i.e., one that generates "utterances" which are "inscrutable to the robot's designers" so that we, and they, must "consult the author [i.e., the robot]" to discover the meaning of its utterances. I argue that the implications he finds are erroneous, regardless of whether such a robot is possible, and therefore that the real existence of metaphysically original intentionality has not been undermined by those implications.
3:15-4:00
Genomic Imprinting and Deception Within the Adapted Mind
William Michael Brown, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Dalhousie University
Genomic imprinting is the differential expression of genes depending upon the parent of origin in which the gene was inherited. Specifically it appears that father’s genes are predominantly expressed in the hypothalamus (involved in homeostasis, for example hunger) while mother’s genes are predominantly expressed in the neocortex (involved in flexible decision making). Haig, Trivers and Brown have suggested that genomic imprinting could mediate conflicts over information transmission and reception within the brain. Keverne has further hypothesized that maternal genes may have been selected for the ‘emancipation’ from endocrinological determinism mediated by paternal gene expression. It is a tantalizingly (albeit speculative) idea that the occurrence of genomic imprinting approximately 135 million years ago (MYA) in mammals may have indirectly facilitated coevolutionary conflicts between genes and culture. Genomic imprinting may be implicated in the origin and maintenance of the cognitive architecture required for cultural transmission. Relatedness asymmetries are expected to lead to increases in the receptibility of matrilineally transmitted information. This may help explain why maternal genes contribute preferentially to the neocortex. That is, maternal genes could influence biases in the transmission and/or acquisition of information. This perspective is complementary to gene-culture coevolutionary approaches. This paper will outline the basics of manipulative and cooperative interactions between brain components and the evolutionary rationale for such interactions (e.g. reliable signalling theory). Finally I will outline clear methodological paradigms for testing predictions regarding genomic conflicts and deceptive communication within the adapted mind.
3:30 -4:30 Concluding Plenary Session