the decoding continues

I'm convinced that substance dualism is a losing proposition. Here's yet another reason why: we're now decoding visual information.

Professor Philippe Schyns, Director of the Institute of Neurosciences & Psychology and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, who led the pioneering study, said: “It’s a bit like unlocking a scrambled television channel. Before, we could detect the signal but couldn’t watch the content; now we can.

“How the brain encodes the visual information that enables us to recognise faces and scenes has long been a mystery. While we are able to detect EEG activity in certain areas of the brain when particular tasks are performed, we’ve not known what information is being carried in those brainwaves.

“What we have done is to find a way of decoding brainwaves to identify the messages within.”

A somewhat related post at Conscious Entities here. From Peter's entry:

Well, to begin with, says Churchland, it’s not the case that we’re dealing with two distinct realms here: objective and subjective overlap quite a bit. Your subjective inner feelings give you objective information about where your body is, how it’s moving, how full your stomach is, and so on. You can even get information about the exhausted state of certain neurons in your visual cortex by seeing the floaty after-image of something you’ve been staring at. Now that in itself doesn’t refute the qualophiles’ claim, because they go on to say that nevertheless, the subjective sensations themselves are unknowable by others. But that’s just nonsense. Is the fact that someone else feels hungry unknowable to me? Hardly: I know lots of things about other people’s feelings: my everyday life involves frequent consideration of such matters. I may not know these things the way the people themselves know them, but the idea that there’s some secret garden of other people’s subjectivity which I can never enter is patently untrue.

The above echoes my own sentiment from my long-ago essay on philosophy of mind, in which I point out that soft drink manufacturers operate on the assumption that a single formula will produce similar gustatory experiences in different people: our internal wiring is similar enough for us to assume we experience the world in similar-- very similar-- ways.


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