Even though it came out in 1991 (first edition, 1984), I still recommend Flanagan’s book as a good read for philosophers of mind. It is a historical summary of important issues in the science of mind and could be read as an introduction to Francis Crick’s 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis.

The last chapter of Flanagan’s book deals with consciousness. Flanagan covers work from a range of philosophers who have either declared consciousness beyond our ability to explain (McGinn), described consciousness as not worth too much concern as long as we can explain behavior in functional terms (the functionalists) or who have tried to show that a materialistic explanation of consciousness is within our grasp as long as we abandon our unrealistic expectations about what consciousness really is (Dennett). I will center my comments on how Flanagan deals with Edelman’s theory of consciousness, but first I will make a few comments on Flanagan’s treatment of behaviorism.

The fourth chapter in Flanagan’s book centers on Skinner and behaviorism. {click here to skip Skinner and go to Edelman.} Flanagan’s treatment of this material is a huge step up from the bigoted trash talk that usually emanates from philosophers and social scientists. However, Flanagan cannot seem to accept the limitations of “operationism” that behaviorists like Skinner pointed out really do apply to the study of mind. The basic truth of “operationism” is that our knowledge of any topic can only be as good as the tools that we have for studying that topic. In the particular case of behaviorism, in the 1930s the only tools available for investigation of mind were subjective introspection and objective behavioral studies. Why condemn people like Skinner who in attempting to construct a scientific research program built only on the available objective method? Particularly when the only other alternative was mired in an anti-materialistic belief in “subjective mental states” that can never be explained in terms of material brain processes?

It took a few decades for the sensible yet limited research program of radical behaviorism to exhaust itself, but in the end it was clear to all that new tools were now available to open up the black box of the brain so that behavioristic stimulus/response studies could now begin to be united with the study of physical brain processes. In the 1940s, computers were invented and the brain could now be viewed as a complex control system. In the 1950s, electrical recordings and stimulation of brain cells made it possible to begin to map the circuits of the brain. Radical Behaviorism was a short-lived experimental research program which was very important for liberating a subset of psychology from the clutches of mind/brain dualism. Such liberated psychologists were free to continue to ignore the lure of over-emphasis on subjective introspection and driven to adapt new tools like computers and electrophysiology for the purpose of searching for the mind inside the brain. By the 1970s it was possible to identify the receptors for psychoactive drugs and study their roles in the functioning of neuronal circuits in the brain. Many philosophers may never have noticed, but behaviorism is alive and well within the broad umbrella of a biological research program that continues to map the material basis of mind.

At the start of Flanagan’s chapter on consciousness, he makes a fairly standard statement: that it took the “fall from power” of behaviorism for a modern science of mind to begin in the 1960’s. This is the standard historical reconstruction of those who still like to use “behaviorism” as a dirty word. I think it is more fair to say that the rise of “cognitivism” was made possible by new tools that were becoming available to scientifically probe how the physical components of brains are related to animal behavior. Of course, these tools came from outside of psychology and had to be discovered by psychologists in the work of brain physiologists and artificial intelligence researchers. Rather than emphasize the facts of the creation of modern scientific cognitive psychology as a development within psychology that was made possible by progress in other disciplines outside of psychology, it is much more satisfying for most psychologists to just spout the party line and say that once behaviorism was defeated, then psychologists could get back to their study of mind.

Why is it a part of psychology and the social sciences to condemn all behaviorism, generally without even bothering to make the distinction between the many constructive contributions of behaviorists and the known short-comings of radical behaviorism? I am not a historian, but I cannot resist suggesting a hypothesis. Early in this century there was a major trend in “educated thought” towards belief in the idea that human behavior is genetically controlled. A common fear in this country was that America was being swamped by wave after wave of immigrants who were genetically inferior. Soon the nation would sink under the burden of having to deal with all the idiots and their genes which were swamping out the limited supply of superior pilgrim genes.

Thus, the ruling class in America joined with other “enlightened” forces to move down the road towards eugenics. The alternative view, that education and socialization are the tools to use to improve human intelligence was a threat to the existing power structure. If all men (and even women) really are created equal, then it is the job of society to care for the health, education and welfare of all of its members, and as a corollary, any existing elite upper class must be recognized as existing as a stable entity only because of its ability to restrict the tools of human improvement (such as quality education) to itself. Thus, the idea of people like Skinner that behavior could be shaped and modified (and was not fixed by genes) was attacked by the reactionary right along with voting rights, public health services, quality public education, environmental protection, consumer protection, occupational health and safety, and other crazy liberal ideas.

A key aspect of Edelman’s theory of mind that many have ignored is that once a neuronal group is selected, its circuitry and behavior are modified in order to better deal with the task at hand. The search for adaptive synapse modification rules that can work within and between neuronal groups in the brain is the true core of Edelman’s theory. Thus, the on-going research program in neuroscience to identify and understand the mechanisms of synapse modification is a “fussy detail” that most philosophers ignore. In contrast, buzz phrases like “Darwin Machine” are frequently used by philosophers who imagine that human behavior can be explained by simply selecting suitable pre-programmed neuronal groups “off the shelf” to solve all behavioral challenges that a person might face. This continues the age old game of avoiding the problem of searching in the brain for the mechanisms that make learning and memory possible. Fortunately, while philosophers still play this game, neurobiologists are doing the hard work in the lab to reveal the molecular and cellular mechanism of learning that are the basis of our human behavioral plasticity. Maybe some day a philosopher like Flanagan will take up the challenge of explaining this.

The first two aspects of Edelman’s theory of mind (discussed above) are not directly concerned with consciousness. Flanagan does discuss one of the elements of Edelman’s theory of consciousness. The brain has two fundamentally distinct modes of operation. In one mode, stimuli from the environment act on sensory input pathways to create an internal representation of the environment within the brain. In the second mode, the human brain associates those representations with an internally generated measure of “value”. In Edelman’s theory, “value” is the term used to describe the operational dimension along which brains judge various sensory inputs to be good (pleasurable), neutral, or bad (painful). Animal behavior does not turn out to be very “adaptive” if animals fail to avoid behaviors that lead to pain and fail to pursue behavior that leads to pleasure. To a first approximation, brains are machines that are genetically endowed with the required systems for sorting through sense-generated internal representations and correctly assigning “value” to those representations. Edelman proposed that it is in this context of the general problem of assigning “value” to brain activity that we can best make sense of the evolutionary value of consciousness. However, since unconscious brain activity deals with the same fundamental “value” assignment problem in its own ways, there must be something more to consciousness that distinguishes it from the unconscious.

The deeper heart of Edelman’s theory of consciousness is concerned with his theory of memory and certain types of dynamic brain activity patterns within what Edelman calls “global maps”. Since the molecular and cellular mechanisms of memory are still being investigated by biologists, one can only consult Edelman’s theory of consciousness for some rather general discussion of the problems that still must be solved.

It is heartening to see Flanagan conclude by calling for getting on “with the hard work of providing the right fine-grained analysis of conscious mental life.” Towards this end we can congratulate folks like Edelman and Crick for providing an initial statement of a biological research program for the scientific investigation of consciousness. There is much hard work to be done, both in the neurobiology research lab, and by philosophers who have come to realize that consciousness is a problem that can be solved by the materialistic reductionistic approach.


“You won’t find the best philosophers shying away from reading scientific papers or working through difficult mathematics. As often as there is a story like mine--where I almost went into psychology except for the rats--many philosophers are people who were almost ready to become computer scientists or mathematicians.” And, the colleagues in other disciplines to which philosophers reach out welcome them as important contributors, notes Flanagan.
  

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