There's alot of problems with this whole area right now. Not the least of which is that it's purely speculative: nearly every premise in the proposed theory is an assumption. This isn't to say nothing will come of it; interdisciplinary consciousness research is exciting and promising.
One of the main problems with Orch OR models is that they're so withdrawn from psychological and neurological findings on the topic. For instance, consciousness isn't evenly distributed throughout the brain, and we can, at least in some cases, demonstrate with considerable confidence where consciousness is compared to where it is not. It would be promising if microtubule composition could be correlated with these conscious zones, but I've never heard of such a thing proposed. This alone is fairly damning.
Regarding the panpsychist theory, a serious conceptional problem with this approach is that it completely ignores features which many researchers believe to be primary to consciousness - such as intentionality and self.
Generally, in both cases we have theories that can, at best, offer a speculative description of how consciousness arises. However, the standard reductive neuroscience approaches can do this as well. The difficult issues in consciousness (the ones where the standard reductive approaches fall short, impelling us to look for alternatives) are not how it can be generated, but how it becomes associated with precisely those features these theories ignore (eg. intentionality and self).
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2003-12-31 04:52 am (UTC)One of the main problems with Orch OR models is that they're so withdrawn from psychological and neurological findings on the topic. For instance, consciousness isn't evenly distributed throughout the brain, and we can, at least in some cases, demonstrate with considerable confidence where consciousness is compared to where it is not. It would be promising if microtubule composition could be correlated with these conscious zones, but I've never heard of such a thing proposed. This alone is fairly damning.
Regarding the panpsychist theory, a serious conceptional problem with this approach is that it completely ignores features which many researchers believe to be primary to consciousness - such as intentionality and self.
Generally, in both cases we have theories that can, at best, offer a speculative description of how consciousness arises. However, the standard reductive neuroscience approaches can do this as well. The difficult issues in consciousness (the ones where the standard reductive approaches fall short, impelling us to look for alternatives) are not how it can be generated, but how it becomes associated with precisely those features these theories ignore (eg. intentionality and self).