Cooking Up Consciousness

Abstract

There is no doubt that the sciences of life and mind have progressed significantly since the appearance of William James's The Principles of Psychology in 1890. Indeed, despite the eclipse of James's philosophical school after the Second World War, pragmatism seems to be the modus operandi of the cognitive sciences - at least according to Jerry Fodor, the arch-Cartesian of our time. Nevertheless, many of the pragmatist insights about the nature of mind and consciousness are still unappreciated by mainstream scientists of the mind and brain. Though there are many affinities between pragmatism and new movements in contemporary theorizing about mentation, such as the enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended theories of mind, there is much work to be done when it comes to consciousness, as our Cartesian heritage still plagues our inquiries into what many consider to be the most familiar thing of all, our conscious lives.My aim here is to sketch a pragmatist view of consciousness and the science of it. Elsewhere, I have suggested an alternative metaphor for thinking about consciousness and its relation to the body and world (Solymosi 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2013a; and Solymosi and Shook 2013a and 2013b). Instead of viewing consciousness as digestion (as Alva Noe (2008) rightly sees as the orthodox view in cognitive science, well endorsed by John Searle (2004)) and to improve upon Noe's own suggestion, that consciousness is like dancing, I propose that we are better off thinking of consciousness as cooking.To elaborate this proposal, I first introduce neuropragmatism and preface my proposal with a pragmatist view of science and reconstruction. With that framework in hand, I briefly review the current status of the science of consciousness. From there, I turn specifically to two ways of viewing consciousness and cooking. The first draws from John Dewey's observation in his recently discovered book that our idiosyncratic cultural ancestry has created - one might say cooked up - the belief that consciousness is a noun, denoting substance, whereas we would be better off to use the adverb, consciously, or the gerund, minding. The second way of viewing consciousness that I present is to go through three metaphors of digestion, dancing, and cooking, in order to show that there are good evolutionary, social, and cultural reasons to conceive of consciousness - that is, conscious activity - as being more like cooking.1. Neuropragmatism, Reconstruction, and ScienceNeurophilosophical or neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism is an explicit continuation of the inquiries started by William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. This is not to say that pragmatists since the 1950s have entirely neglected cognitive science and neuroscience. Pragmatists like Mark Johnson and Jay Schulkin have been writing for many years on what I would now consider neuropragmatist themes. Philosophers of cognitive science, such as Teed Rockwell (2005) and Anthony Chemero (2009), have offered more recent perspectives that draw on some of the insights of Dewey and James. William Casebeer (2003) has utilized Dewey's ethical theory in his work on neuroethics. And David Franks (2010) has developed the new field of neurosociology by modifying Mead's work with contemporary neuroscientific findings, especially work being done on mirror neurons. Still others have developed neuroanthropology, the main tenets of which share strong affinities with the pragmatism of Dewey and Mead (see Lende and Downey 2012).Where neuropragmatism distinguishes itself from plain-old pragmatism is that neuropragmatism provides a framework for not just thinking about the nature of mentation - the process of mental living, both cognitively and noncognitively1 - but also a framework for dealing with the problems that neuroscientific advances can either resolve or bring about. That is, neuropragmatism advances the spirit of pragmatism by incorporating the data coming from the sciences of life and mind in order to better resolve the human problems with which we are already dealing or with which we will soon likely be dealing. …