Category: Blog

 

During my visit to the London Book Fair, I interviewed Nicholas Humphrey for the BookBaby eBook release of the 20th anniversary edition of his great work A History of the Mind.

In this clip, I ask him about what philosophers mean when they say that it feels “like” something to have subjective experience, and why he makes a distinction between perception and sensation.

Nick believes that perceptual knowledge, by itself, lacks qualitative information.  I perceive that the door is closed, but it doesn’t feel “like” something that it’s close; I may know that Paris is the capital of France, but knowing that doesn’t feel “like” anything in the way that eating a peach or hearing a siren does.  That’s because there’s a sharp distinction between perceptual knowledge and sensory expression.

Humphrey argues that we perceive in parallel with sensation, rather than building perception up from nested levels of sense data.  His experiments in blindsight show that higher level perception can go on without sensation – for blindsight sufferers, they can, in a sense, see, but it’s not “like” anything for them and doesn’t enrich their lives.  Nick’s take is that we have an ancestral pathway which supplies us the rich sense of being touched by light, smells, etc., and the experience of what’s happening to me at the moment, the thick moment in which stimuli are touching me and I’m responding to them.  This activity generates a reverberating loop which extends the moment of consciousness beyond the physical instant so that we feel that we’re living in “thick time,” the “thick moment of consciousness.”

I asked Nick why, it feels “like” something when I’m working on a difficult math problem.  He replied that while we’re working out of problem, we’re working not just with our brains, but with our bodies too: often we’re clenching fists, hunched over, and generating somatic sensations that are part of sense of working on the problem – they’re genuine sensations with qualitative dimension supplied by feedback from bodies.  So it’s not the cogitation producing that feeling – it’s the way our bodies are involved in almost everything we do.  For Humphrey, it may be “like” something  to solve a math problem, but not “like” something in the same way as it is when, for example, seeing red.

The idea of it feeling “like” something to have subjective experience was introduced by the philosopher Thomas Nagel to get at the qualitative dimension of sensory consciousness.  Nick believes that seeing red is “like” something because it has a time dimension it couldn’t have – it seems to outlast the physical moment, flowing on in subjective time from thick moment to thick moment, each one seeming to outlast its physical presence.  But while sensation is flowing on it’s not happening in physical time but instead in subjective time, from thick moment to thick moment which seems to outlast its own presence.  While that’s a physical impossibility, we feel it’s “like” that – it *couldn’t* be that, but seems to be “like” that.

Here’s the clip:

It’s a joy to be releasing the 20th anniversary edition of Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind through BookBaby.  I had the great pleasure of writing the forward for the book and interviewing him at the London Book Fair this year.

It’s available on Amazon, Apple, B&N –

http://www.amazon.com/History-Mind-Evolution-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B00BPYNDCM/

https://itunes.apple.com/ie/book/a-history-of-the-mind/id615087276

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-history-of-the-mind-nicholas-humphrey/1111871984

– and dozens of other retailers.  Get it!

 

During my visit to the London Book Fair, I interviewed Nicholas Humphrey for the BookBaby eBook release of the 20th anniversary edition of his great work A History of the Mind.

In this clip, he discusses how religion is parasitic on the human impulse to spirituality. Humphrey considers “spirituality” to stem from the “mind-body problem” which still dogs science and philosophy: how can our qualitative experiences be produced solely from the material substance of the brain? The fact that our sensory functions provide us with such rich experiences give rise to the notion that we have a “soul” as the seat of experience.

Every day, we awake to amazing sensations, a new universe we create within ourselves which is essentially unshareable – and the idea that we’re focal singularities of consciousness gives rise to the feeling of “spirituality” – that we’re special because we’re hosts to internally generated, out-of-the-world phenomena.

Humans are therefore profoundly individualist, and they discover the importance of selves through private experiences which they can glory in, develop, and feed, as a bubble of consciousness which no one else can enter. And when we attribute similar experiences to others, it changes our relationship to the world in ways which are hugely productive. So the notion that we have “souls” has transformed society – leading us to empathize with others whom (we assume) also feel as the centers of their own private experience.

For Humphrey, those impulses have been subjugated and captured by religious systems , which are parasitic on human spirituality. The real problem of having a “soul” which matters so much to us is that we invest so much in it. Our experience is that this “soul” disappears every night, but we’ve always had it come back. A primary driver of human achievement is the illusion – and mistake – that it will go on forever.

Here’s the clip:

 

It’s a joy to be releasing the 20th anniversary edition of Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind through BookBaby.  I had the great pleasure of writing the forward for the book and interviewing him at the London Book Fair this year.

It’s available on Amazon, Apple, B&N –

http://www.amazon.com/History-Mind-Evolution-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B00BPYNDCM/

https://itunes.apple.com/ie/book/a-history-of-the-mind/id615087276

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-history-of-the-mind-nicholas-humphrey/1111871984

– and dozens of other retailers.  Get it!

 

During my visit to the London Book Fair, I interviewed Nicholas Humphrey for the BookBaby eBook release of the 20th anniversary edition of his great work A History of the Mind.

In this clip, he discusses the phenomenon of blindsight as evidence of there being different internal pathways of sensation and perception. For Nick, perception is time-independent judgment of what’s “out there” in the world, and sensation is sensation involves the subject’s own interaction with stimuli, an active process which is an emotion-laden and which accrues through time.

An experiment showed him the reality of the distinction. The visual cortex in the back of a monkey’s brain was removed, but while the monkey believed she couldn’t see, she managed quite well visually, picking up objects and navigating through the world, although she had to be continually persuaded to do it. Some humans with damage to their visual cortex have “blindsight” as well – they will say they’re blind and feel no visual sensations, but if you ask them questions, they have access to a fair amount of visual information.

Humphrey’s conclusion is that information alone is not enough to create the feeling, the joy, the sense of presence and involvement in the act of “seeing.” These blindsight patients are lacking the dimension of sensation and cannot react internally to the stimuli’s qualities with emotional bodily expression. And that expression – that active response – is the basis for the “qualia of sensation,” the qualities we value so much when talking about consciousness.

Here’s the clip:

It’s a joy to be releasing the 20th anniversary edition of Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind through BookBaby.  I had the great pleasure of writing the forward for the book and interviewing him at the London Book Fair this year.

It’s available on Amazon, Apple, B&N –

http://www.amazon.com/History-Mind-Evolution-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B00BPYNDCM/

https://itunes.apple.com/ie/book/a-history-of-the-mind/id615087276

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-history-of-the-mind-nicholas-humphrey/1111871984

– and dozens of other retailers.  Get it!