The New Science of the Mind

by Mark Rowlands

  Rather than spatial containment, the ownership of subpersonal cognitive processes is more plausibly understood in terms of the essentially functionalist idea of integration. Ownership of a subpersonal cognitive process is to be understood in terms of the function of that process and, crucially, with respect to whom it fulfills that function. Digestion is a functional process, and crucial in determining ownership of a digestive process is the individual with respect to whom it fulfills this function. Similarly, the most plausible way of understanding the ownership of subpersonal cognitive processes is in terms of the idea of functional integration. Crucial in determining ownership will be the individual with respect to whom a given subpersonal cognitive process fulfills its (proper) function, rather than the individual in which the process is spatially contained.

  This sort of claim is, in fact, a familiar one, and has been the subject of well-known thought experiments in recent decades. With regard to the issue of necessity-whether it is necessary for a cognitive process to be mine that it occurs inside my body-there are various thought experiments that involve my mental life being somehow taken outside my body (brain transplants, memory downloads, etc.). With regard to the issue of sufficiency-whether it is sufficient for a cognitive process to be mine that it occurs inside my body, we find well-known variations on the "alien transplant scenario." Suppose, for example, I am abducted by aliens who modify the organization of a certain part of my brain. The function of this modification, let us suppose, is to cause me to undergo various alien thoughttransitions-alien, now, not in the sense of being put there by aliens but in the sense of being completely unconnected with the rest of my psychological life. This part of my brain is activated whenever the aliens flip the relevant switch on their mother ship. The processes occurring in this part of my brain are spatially contained within me, and in one clear sense they are, of course, my brain processes: that is, they are brain processes, and they occur in my brain. But, in another equally clear sense, these alien thought-transitions are not mine. They are not mine because they are not appropriately integrated into the rest of my psychological life. Spelling out what counts as "appropriate integration" is, of course, going to be the tricky part-but, I strongly suspect, tricky in the sense of fiddly and technical rather than intractable. If the cognitive processes in question are subpersonal ones, then it is plausible to suppose that we can spell out the relevant notion of integration in causal terms. But if the cognitive processes are personal ones, it is likely that our account will have to incorporate concepts of rational consistency and coherence. But either way, what we are talking about is a certain sort of integration into the psychological life of the subject. It is in this sort of integration that we are going to find the roots of the idea of ownership and not in the idea of spatial containment within the body of a cognizing organism. And the idea of integration is nothing more than the general functionalist idea that ownership of a cognitive process is determined by the place of that process in a causal-cum-normative network of related cognitive processes.

  It is condition (2) of the criterion of the cognitive that attempts to capture this idea. According to this, the proper function of a cognitive process is to make available, either to an individual or to subsequent processing operations performed by that individual, information that was, prior to the process, merely present but not available. The difference between a personal and a subpersonal cognitive process is determined by whether the process makes information available to an individual or only to subsequent processing operations: if the latter, then the process is a subpersonal one. This, of course, does not solve the problem of ownership, but merely pushes it back a step. Now we have to work out in virtue of what the subsequent processing operations belong to one individual rather than another. That is, the question of ownership now arises for these processes. (That, of course, is why the ownership condition is a separate, additional condition.) What it does do, however, is give us a way of thinking about the question of ownership for subpersonal processes. According to the criterion, such processes belong to an individual when they have a proper function of making information available to the processing operations performed by that individual (but not to the individual itself). This is an expression of the general functionalist idea that a cognitive process belongs to an individual when it fulfills its proper function with respect to that individual.

  3 Integration: Personal and Subpersonal

  In the case of cognitive processes, specification of the appropriate sort of integration is, notoriously, complicated by the possibility of a distinction that has no real echo in the case of biological processes such as digestion: the distinction between personal and subpersonal cognitive processes. In the case of digestive processes, it is undoubtedly possible to draw a distinction between personal and subpersonal processes. But this amounts to nothing more than the distinction between the digestive process as a whole, and its constituent parts. Digestion, as a whole, is something the organism does. The various components of digestion-peristalsis, the release of enzymes, and so on-are processes performed by subsystems of the organism. This is a legitimate distinction, although it may be difficult to apply with precision in particular cases. However, it is not the same as the personal-subpersonal distinction as this is applied to cognitive processes.

  With respect to cognitive processes, the personal-subpersonal distinction is often understood as one between processes that are conscious, or under the conscious control of the subject, and those that are not. To a considerable extent, this tracks the distinction between processes performed by the organism and those performed by its subsystems. However, the congruence of the two distinctions is not perfect. Neither is it always entirely clear how the distinction applies in particular cases. For example, our ability to keep track of the visual world is facilitated by the presence of a low-level mechanism that automatically directs our attention to visual transients. This mechanism is not subject to our conscious control. However, the performance of its proper function does not seem restricted to any particular bodily subsystem. Saccadic eye movements are one of its most obvious effects. However, these effects can also involve gross movements of the eyes, face, head, and neck. Tracking visual transients often seems to be something that we do, as opposed to being something done by any particular bodily part or structure.

  Condition (2) of the criterion of cognition attempts to capture the distinction between personal and subpersonal cognitive processes in a somewhat different, though compatible, way. Personal-level cognitive processes are ones whose proper function is to make information available to a subject. Subpersonal cognitive processes are ones whose function is to make information available only to subsequent processing operations.

  The locution "personal" should not be taken too literally. There is no requirement that the subject or owner of cognitive processes be a person in anything like the sense sometimes countenanced by philosophers: for example, an agent capable of both reflecting on and morally evaluating its mental states and actions. Organisms that are not regarded as persons in this sense-or related senses-can be persons in the sense invoked in the personal-subpersonal distinction. In the sense employed in this distinction, there is an internal connection between something's being a person and something's owning cognitive processes: a person just is the owner of cognitive processes. And, clearly, this sense of person is far wider than common philosophical uses. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere (Rowlands 2006, 140-143) that there is not one personal-subpersonal distinction, but many such distinctions. The distinctions are relative and coreferring: what counts as a personal at one level of description can be subpersonal relative to another, and vice versa. Descriptions of the operations of mechanisms, relative to those of the submechanisms that make them up, can count as personal-level descriptions in some explanatory contexts.

  The distinction between personal and subpersonal levels of description is, therefore, not as unproblematic as is sometimes thought. However, when the personal level corresponds to s
omething like what philosophers have in mind when they talk about persons-for example, rational agents capable of evaluating their goals and actions-then it is typical to find attempts to spell out the idea of integration in terms of rational consistency and coherence. The alien thought-transitions described earlier are not integrated into the person's psychology because they are not rationally or logically consistent with the rest of that person's psychological life. I shall, shortly, cast doubt on the idea that the whole story concerning the ownership of cognitive processes can be understood in terms of this sort of integration. When the issue of ownership is properly understood, these sorts of integrationist attempts to understand it, I think, are necessarily incomplete. The attempts are, nonetheless, typical. At levels below this, where we are not dealing with an agent toward which this intentional stance (Dennett 1987) is appropriate, then issues of rational consistency and coherence do not arise (although issues of normativity obviously still can). Then the idea of integration will be spelled out in causal terms: being integrated into a subject's psychological life is a matter of standing in the right sorts of causal relations to the processes and states that realize this psychological life.

  However, although the personal and subpersonal levels are undoubtedly distinct, and although the concept of integration appropriate to each is quite different (at least when the personal level approximately converges on traditional conceptions of the person), there is a clear sense in which the personal level is more basic. Obviously, this sense of "basic" is not an ontic one. Ontically, there is a personal level only because there are subpersonal mechanisms performing subpersonal processes. Without that, there could be no such thing as a person and no such thing as personallevel processes such as thinking, remembering, reasoning, and perceiving. However, the personal level is basic in another sense: if there were no personal level, there would be no reason for thinking that there are any subpersonal cognitive processes going on.

  This claim may seem controversial, but any controversy quickly dissipates when we recall just how broadly I am using the notion of a "person." "Person," in this context, approximates to "organism capable of detecting changes in its environment and modifying its behavior accordingly." The idea of the cognitive has its home in the context of organisms of this sort. We are organisms of this sort, but so are many other things. So, there is nothing in this claim that entails that only humans or higher mammals are capable of cognition. On the contrary, the claim is simply that any process that is to qualify a cognitive must belong to an organism of this sort. This, of course, is the import of the ownership condition. If a process did not belong to an organism of this sort, then there would be no reason for regarding it as cognitive. We might be able to describe the process in information-theoretic, and even information-processing, terms. But unless they ultimately belonged to an organism capable of detecting changes in its environment and modifying its behavior accordingly, there would be no reason for regarding these processes as cognitive rather than as merely information-theoretic or information-processing operations. For an organism that was not capable of doing this, there would be no reason to regard the processes occurring in it as any different in kind from, say, digestion.

  Indeed, we can make a stronger claim. Not only must a process belong to an organism in order to qualify as cognitive, it must, at some point, and perhaps in combination with many other processes of a similar sort, make some contribution to the ability of the organism to detect changes in its environment and modify its behavior on the basis of this. We can make this stronger claim because this is precisely what the idea of "belonging" amounts to in this context. That is, a subpersonal cognitive process belongs to an organism when it makes some appropriate contribution to the organism's detection of the environment and/or subsequent behavior modification. These are personal-level abilities-something that the organism does in virtue of its various subsystems rather than something that can be attributed to the subsystems themselves. Therefore, ultimately, a subpersonal process will count as cognitive because, at some point, and, perhaps in combination with many other subpersonal processes that are also cognitive, it makes some contribution to the personal-level cognitive life of the subject. Of course, specifying the precise nature of this contribution in the form of necessary and sufficient (or even merely sufficient) conditions for a subpersonal process to be integrated into the personal-level cognitive life of a subject is no easy matter (to say the least). There is, however, every reason for supposing that it can be done if we assume, as it seems we must assume, that personal-level cognitive processes supervene on subpersonal cognitive processes.

  If this is correct, however, it leaves us with another problem. If the strategy is to explain the ownership of subpersonal cognitive processes in terms of the ownership of personal-level cognitive processes, then we must now supply an account of ownership for the latter. It is to this task that we now turn.

  4 Ownership: Criteriological versus Constitutive Problems

  An account of ownership might take one of two forms. Both are, in their own way, legitimate. The first attempts to provide a criterion of ownership: a set of conditions necessary and sufficient (or perhaps just sufficient) for a personal-level cognitive process to be owned by a subject. We can call this, for obvious reasons, the criteriological approach. I shall be concerned, however, with a distinct project. The question I am looking to address is this: what constitutes ownership of cognitive processes? The criteriological question is one of specifying the conditions under which a cognitive process can be owned by a subject. The constitutive question, on the other hand, is one of explaining what the ownership of such processes consists in.

  Typically, attempts to answer the criteriological question appeal to norms of logical consistency and rational coherence. Roughly, a personallevel cognitive state or process belongs to a subject to the extent that it is rationally or logically integrated into the psychological life of that subject. Even understood as attempts to answer the criteriological problem, these attempts are problematic. In particular, they suffer from a type of doppelganger objection. It seems metaphysically possible for there to exist two distinct individuals that are psychological duplicates.' If so, considerations of rational or logical consistency on their own cannot suffice to answer questions of ownership for a given psychological state or process: these considerations would license ownership equally to both individuals. This is not, it is important to realize, an epistemic problem. That is, it is not a problem about how you ascertain to which individual a given process belongs. Rather, it is a metaphysical problem: a problem of identifying in virtue of what a given process belongs to one subject rather than another. The worry is that considerations of logical or rational consistency by themselves supply no fact of the matter that license attribution of a psychological state or process to one individual rather than another. If the possibility of two psychological duplicates is indeed a genuine metaphysical possibility, then it seems we are going to have to factor in some further considerations. Spatial considerations are obvious ones-but we have already seen the problems in thinking of ownership in terms of spatial containment. Causal considerations are also obvious contenders. But this raises further formidable problems-such as how to appropriately combine considerations pertaining to the space of reasons with those of the space of causes, determining priority principles when these conflict, and how to respond when the rather nasty problem of deviant causal chains rears its ugly head.

  I should emphasize that I am not claiming that these problems are insurmountable. Some may fancy their chances here; personally, I don't. My point, however, is that even if these problems can be eliminated in a way that everyone would accept, we have still made no headway on a more basic problem. The integrationist approach to explaining the ownership of cognitive processes turns on identifying what we can regard as a fixed frame of reference. Bluntly put, we need to know what is to be integrated into what. We have certain psychological items, for which there is a question of their owners
hip. We seek to answer this question by appealing to their logical or rational integration into the psychological life of a subject. But this strategy will work only if the question of ownership of that psychological life has already been answered. That is, in order for the integrationist to even proceed, let alone succeed, we need to be able to identify something that can be regarded as unproblematically belonging to the subject, and then work out the conditions under which its cognitive processes can be legitimately regarded as integrated into this. This is what I mean by a fixed frame of reference: items for which the question of ownership is unproblematic. Historically, of course, this allegedly unproblematic fixed frame of reference has been provided by a specification of the inputs and outputs for an organism.

  We have already seen this general strategy at work in our earlier discussion of digestion. There, I suggested that a digestive process qualifies as mine if and only if its function is to break down food that I have ingested, and release resulting energy to power respiratory processes that are mine. Here, ingestion provides the input to digestion, and respiration provides the output. This strategy is entirely typical. However, it is going to work only if the question of ownership for ingestive and respiratory processes is unproblematic or has already been settled. If, however, there is a question of ownership for such processes, then we cannot hope to explain the ownership of digestive processes in terms of them until we have settled this question.