Finding a Conceptual Framework, or How I Lost My Mind
A Need for Answers
At the end of August I started researching several theories of consciousness. My goal was to not only discover how other's interpreted consciousness but also how this concept fit into their framework of ideas. The universe is filled with an infinite amount of data in perpetual motion, but we are limited by the capacities provided to us as humans which allow us to discover and understand this information. We work in communities to increase our rate of discovery and build tools to understand more information, but when we are unable to use resources within the public environment we are left only with the private environment - the mind. Introspection, the observation of one's own mental processes, is a resource which must be used when analyzing the human body but is flawed by the reality that the human body performs several behaviors automatically without the need for consciousness, and, consequently, the self as an observer is not given any information about how the body practically functions. Thus, what could have been one of life's easiest questions becomes one of it's hardest: How does the human body work?
So we are limited by our own biology and do not possess the physiology needed to introspect with complete accuracy and reliability. Furthermore, technology is still limited to such an extent where a full record of the body and it's intricate functions can not be documented. Thankfully, nerds for centuries have been keeping a public record of researched phenomenon and have put forward a plethora of theories. These theories help simplify the complexity of the world. What do we do now? At this point, most people will adopt a conceptual framework. This is where I become completely lost.
When Did I Lose My Mind?
When researching consciousness, I came across several theories - Global Workspace theory, Panpsychism, Integrated-Information Theory, etc. - and I latched on most strongly with the attention-schema theory put forward by Michael Graziano. The theory provided an operational definition for consciousness which could be shared amongst a consensus of scientists from concerned disciplines, so it had the potential to be observable, measurable, and researchable.
So now I am writing a review for Graziano's book, Rethinking Consciousness, and note that his schema is built from a model-construction theory for compositing information which is heavily inspired by engineering. So the framework Graziano has adopted utilizes models - how is this different from what my discipline, radical behaviorism, does? Well I look it up and (no surprise here!) Skinner outright rejected the notion that consciousness even existed, with the most credit he ever gave the concept being in About Behaviorism where consciousness was implied to be a product of socially-mediated behavior. So that's a dead-end - but hang on! Marvin Minsky has his book The Society of Mind and that might use models, I don't know I haven't read that in a while I should get a refresher...
It has been two months now: Graziano and consciousness have somehow left the equation entirely and the focus for the blog post has now shifted to a comparative analysis of the different conceptual frameworks adopted by Minsky, Chomsky, and Skinner to explore cognitive science. What happened? Why this, Why now? I am unsure of myself at all times, skeptical of my very existence. I think, therefore I am ⊨ I think?
Travel Down the Rabbit Hole?
In my possession is a rough draft and an outline of the key points I want to write about: History of each professor's CV; Each professor's relationship with one another; Each professor's cognitive science framework; The lasting influence of their work. The reader who has gotten this far and is likely smarter than the author has already realized that each of these points could fill an entire paper on their own. Consequently, the blog post which I thought would be "quick and easy" has proven to be about as difficult as writing a book.
Like usual, the search for answers produces more questions. As always, life does not afford enough time to answer every question. Moving forward, what is to be done? If I continue to pursue this research topic, I should divide the work up into smaller bits. Maybe dedicate an entire post to each of their respective works to build background information and then produce a comparison of the cumulative works.