"...when Marc was in Australia, the university came in and seized his hard drives and videos because some students in his lab said, ‘Enough is enough.’ They said this was a pattern and they had specific evidence.”I'm actually quite glad that a) his students had the nerve to report him and b) Harvard took them seriously.
Recent advances have led to the manufacture of monitors of awareness. Typically these monitor the EEG, which represents the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex, which is active when awake but quiescent when anesthetized (or in natural sleep). The monitors usually process the EEG signal down to a single number, where 100 corresponds to a patient who is fully alert, and zero corresponds to electrical silence. General anesthesia is usually signified by a number between 60 and 40 (this varies with the specific system used). There are several monitors now commercially available. These newer technologies include the bispectral index (BIS),[14] EEG entropy monitoring, auditory evoked potentials, and several other systems such as the SNAP monitor and the Narcotrend monitor.Far from this being a metaphysical subject, the issue is front and center for anesthesiologists. Interestingly, the demand for commercial tools to detect consciousness are explicitly designed for environments where the subject is "locked in", can't talk, can't communicate, but boy are they aware.
Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.Toward a science of other minds: escaping the argument by analogy
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posted by kmz at 3:47 PM on August 10, 2010 [15 favorites]