Thought Insertion, Agency and the Ownership of Thoughts by Alessandra Tanesini

Below is an essay by Professor Alesandra Tanesini from the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy (ENCAP) at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of Inception last August. 'Compare the question: ‘Someone left the oven on. I wonder whether it was me’ with the question: ‘Someone in this room is thinking about making tea. I wonder whether it is me’ (or the question ‘Someone in this room is in pain. I wonder whether it is me’). The first question makes perfectly good sense, but the second does not. It is often said that the reason why the second question is absurd is that although one might be mistaken about what one is thinking, one cannot be mistaken whether it is oneself that does the thinking. If so, there is something special about one’s knowledge of one’s own mind. If I know of a current mental state by introspection, I cannot misidentify the owner of that state. The mental state must be mine; the owner must be me. In philosophical circles this privileged feature of knowledge by introspection of current mental states is known as Immunity to Error through misidentification. The idea that I am the owner of all those thoughts which I can currently introspect is seemingly undermined by the phenomenon of thought insertion. This is a symptom of psychosis, most commonly schizophrenia. Patients manifesting the symptom, report that there are thoughts in their head which are in some sense ‘not theirs’. Here is one such report: ‘I look out of the window and I think the garden looks nice and the grass looks cool, but the thoughts of Eamonn Andrews come into my mind. There are no other thoughts there, only his. . .He treats my mind like a screen and flashes his thoughts onto it like you flash a picture’ (Mellor, 1970, p. 17). These patients claim to be finding, by introspection, thoughts in their head which they claim not to be their own. What are we to make of this? How can we make sense of what is reported by these patients? What are they trying to convey when they say that some thoughts that they can introspect are not actually theirs? Some philosophers and psychiatrists have answered these questions by way of a distinction between ownership and authorship of mental states. These patients would retain ownership of the so- called ‘inserted thoughts’, but their ownership is alienated because they do not see themselves as the authors of the thoughts in question. Ownership in this context becomes a thin notion. An occurring thought is one’s own whenever it is experienced as being in one’s own head. Authorship, on the other hand, requires that one thinks of oneself as the cause of the thought or as in control of the thought. Subjects who report inserted thoughts, own their thoughts. What they are trying to convey is not the presence in their head of other people’s thoughts. Rather, what they are saying is that some of their thoughts have been implanted there by other people who are the authors of these thought. Thus, what the patients are reporting is a sense of passivity with regard to their own thoughts. Is this a good explanation of what is going on? First, it does not do justice to what the patients say. They report these thoughts as being not their own. For them, it would seem, it makes sense to ask of a thought they know, by introspection: is this mine? Or is it somebody else’s? Second, it cannot explain the difference between ‘inserted thoughts’ and the experience by normal subjects of thoughts that just pop into one’s head out of the blue, or thoughts one cannot stop thinking. In neither case, does the person think of herself as in control or as the author of the thought. Yet, normal subjects do not think of these thoughts as alien, as not their own. Third, the account relies on an inadequate definition of ownership of mental states. It assumes that there is a space, the space of what is illuminated by introspection, such that anything that can be found there is mine. This account strangely detaches the person from her own mental states. Contrary to this view, for a thought to be one’s own it is not enough that it can be found by introspection within one’s mind, so to speak, the thought also needs to belong to oneself in the sense of being acknowledged as one’s own. We can, thus, draw a somewhat general lesson from the ‘thought insertion’ cases. What makes a thought mine is not the fact that I can introspect it, or the fact that it is found in my mind. Further, I do not need to think of myself as the author of the thought. What makes a thought mine is that I acknowledge it as my own; I ascribe it to myself, and take responsibility for it. In other words, a thought is mine only when it is bound up with my own sense of agency, of what I am responsible for. So what are we to say of the case of ‘thought’ insertion? I think that when patients report that they have in their head thoughts which are not theirs, their claims should be taken literally at least in part. (I say in part, because their attributions of the thoughts to other people are delusional.) We could say that due to a disruption to their sense of self or agency, thoughts happen in their head which are not owned by them or anybody else. However, given the repugnancy of the idea of un-owned thoughts, the best answer is that things happen in these patients’ consciousness which they assume must be episodes of thinking, when in fact they are not. To conclude, we might be wrong about what we are thinking, and although it is not possible to be mistaken about whether it is ‘I’ that does the thinking, sometimes one might be mistaken as to whether what goes on in one’s experience is actually thinking.' References Bortolotti, L. and Broome, M. 2009: A role for ownership and authorship in the analysis of thought insertion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, 205–24. Campbell, J. 2002: The ownership of thoughts. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, 9, 35–9. Gallagher, S. 2000: Philosophical Conceptions of the Self: implications for the cognitive sciences. Trends in Cognitive Science 4, 14-21.Mellor, C. S. 1970: ‘First Rank Symptoms of Schizophrenia’ The British Journal of Psychiatry117, 15-23. Mullins, S. and Spence, S. A 2003: Re-examining thought insertion: Semi-structured literature review and conceptual analysis, The British Journal of Psychiatry182, 293-298.

Inception: Corporate Ethics in Mind by Ken Peattie

Below is an essay written by Professor Ken Peattie, director of the ESRC Centre for Business Relationships Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS) at Cardiff Univesrity and relates to our sciSCREENing of Inception in August.

'Spying for Queen and Country in movies, and the spy as a stock movie character, has a long tradition dating back nearly 100 years to silent movies produced during the First World War. Spy movie milestones since then include Fritz Lang’s 1928 film Spies, several Hitchcock Cold War spy movies, decades from the JB Franchises (Messrs Bond and Bourne) and no shortage of spy spoofs from Get Smart to Austin Powers.

Corporate Espionage by contrast has had a lower profile and a less glamorous persona, although recent films such as Duplicity, Cypher and now Inception have begun to correct this. Curiously though, number one in the FullMovieReview chart for the heading ‘Movies About Corporate Espionage’ is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Who knew that chocolate recipes were so secret?

Perhaps because corporate espionage involves more quiet (and the quieter the better) information gathering and less guns and gadgetry, it has been considered less cinematic. Ironically the virtual antithesis of corporate espionage has been considered a better subject for movies. ‘Whistleblowing’, the revealing of inside information that companies would rather keep quiet, has been the subject of films like The Whistleblower, The Insider and The Informant. In 2009 Whistleblowing even got its own film festival launched in Washington DC. Given recent events I would be very surprised if ‘Wikileaks – The Movie’ isn’t already in development somewhere.

Another problem with industrial espionage as a topic is that it can be tricky to draw the line between it and legitimate corporate intelligence gathering. Some of the big cases are straightforward because they concern the simple theft of information, like Volkswagen’s lifting of General Motors plans which cost them $100 million after they were caught (although not following GM’s plans would probably have saved them more money). Other cases are less straightforward, and both the ethics and the legality of some corporate activities have been hotly disputed. Just this month some leading websites, including sites owned by Disney and Warner Bros, have been hit with a law suit alleging that they secretly and illegally tracked the Web movements of their users, including children.

There have been a range of corporate espionage scandals, many involving highly respected companies. In 2001, Proctor & Gamble were caught going through the rubbish at Unilever's Chicago offices in the hope of finding new shampoo formulas. That and a few other similar activities cost P&G $10 million in damages paid to Unilever. In 2006 Hewlett Packard tried to track down the internal source of leaks to journalists. They resorted to bugging their own employees and sending fake emails to journalists to install logging software on their computers. This led to the Chair of their Board, Patricia Dunn, facing criminal charges and being forced to resign for authorizing the use of espionage. Hilton hotels were hit with a corporate espionage lawsuit after hiring Ross Klein and nine other managers behind their competitor Starwood's successful W brand of luxury hotels. After Klein developed the luxury Denizen brand for Hilton in 2009, Starwood sued Hilton for going beyond poaching their managers to actually stealing their ideas.

Of course in Inception, the issue isn’t the gathering of information (even though that is the background of Cobb and his team) instead it is about the planting of a false idea. So is that really espionage and is it wrong? The law tells us that it is wrong to misrepresent facts in order to win a contract from a customer, but is it OK for companies to tell lies in order to disadvantage a competitor? The literature on business strategy abounds with ideas about deceiving your competitors about your intentions, your strengths and your weaknesses – mostly this borrows ideas from military strategy concerning feints and ploys. Military strategy has nothing much to say about ethics, and little about laws, so perhaps that explains why otherwise ethical companies end up happily playing pretend in order to disadvantage their competitors.

Ultimately even those companies we would hold up as the best examples of ethical corporations do tell lies in order to keep things secret and prevent competitors from getting wind of their intentions. Others go further and actively try to mislead competitors about those intentions in order to get the competition to show their hand or make a tactical error. But would companies ever go so far as to try to surreptitiously plant an idea in our minds in order to gain an advantage? Well, some of the more cynical among you might conclude that I’ve just rather neatly described the activity, and popular movie subject, otherwise known as ‘advertising’.'

Disclaimer: Please note that this site is a blog. Any views or opinions presented in the essays are to be understood as those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Cardiff sciSCREEN or any constituent part or connected body.

The Architecture of Urban Reality by Rob Smith

Below is an essay written by Dr. Robin Smith of the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of Inception last August. 'My research is, in a broad sense, concerned with the city and the ways in which people navigate, interpret, and make sense of the urban environment. This formal programme of research stems from a long standing fascination with the experience of being in a particular place – the ‘feeling’ of it, the memories it might stir up, how one assesses the other people there, how one attempts to figure out how it is that you’re supposed to act in a certain setting from cues around you, and, particularly, how it is that all this complexity and subjective experience is condensed in making a place a social reality. This final issue, perhaps the most complex, may also seem straight forward, axiomatic even. The world and, indeed, the city is out there, right? Well, in some sense yes, of course it is, but tonight I want to suggest, as in Inception, that in some senses that world, and the city in which we live, is actually up for grabs. So, in the short space that I’ve got today I’d like to consider a few ideas which were planted in my head, and which took hold and grew, and consequently cause me to look at the world in a particular way. To go back to the film, I want to look at the idea that was planted in Mal’s mind; that the world in which you live isn’t real. To kick us off, consider one of the most striking scenes in the film, also used in the majority of the trailers. Cobb is in cityscape, unmistakably Parisian, with his new architect. Testing out her powers of creation in this fabricated reality, she proceeds to do the impossible and fold the city back on itself, thus ignoring the laws of physics and altering the previously concrete urban fabric. But why is this scene so striking? Well, beyond the visual impressiveness of it all, it’s striking because the city, in its built form, is so abundantly there, is so literally concrete and solid that the prospect of bending its form to our will is, perhaps, an inception beyond conception. Unless we happen to be vandals or graffiti artists we do very little to change the urban environment as we go about our day to day lives; one of the features of the human experience in the modern city as opposed to more ancient or pastoral environments is that its surfaces are hard to mark. No footprints in the sand here. But despite the fact that the city is a real environment, full of buildings, people, and a whole range of other urban stuff, this does not in anyway limit or detract from the human capacity to construct and reconstruct it with the mind and in our practical actions. Here’s a quote which captures a good deal of what I am trying to say about the ‘urban reality’: 'The city has a million faces and no man ever knows just what another means when he tells about the city he sees. For the city that he sees is just the city that he brings with him, that he has within his heart… made out of sense but shaped and coloured and unalterable from all that he has felt and thought and dreamed about before.' Now this might sound like a ‘postmodern’ interpretation: a fragmentation of the solidity and stability of modernity in to multiple narratives each as ‘real’ as the other and grounded in subjective readings. It may read like that, but in fact it was published in 1939 and captures that human capacity to construct meaning for the world around us and then, perhaps more significantly, the way in which we act in that world according to those meanings. As W.I. Thomas famously wrote – if things are considered real than they are real in their consequences. It should also be noted that whilst the language of Wolfe, in the quote above, seems to put forward a male-centric understanding of the world it should be realised that what I talking about tonight is concerned with human practice and should not be considered the preserve of either sex. We are more used to the reverse scenario and seemingly readily accept the fact that the built environment shapes our behaviour. As Winston Churchill, famously, said that “We shape our buildings and afterwards, our buildings shape us”. Indeed, the relationship between architectural form and social organisation is a fascinating one and there is arguably a fine balance to be weighed up in terms of influence. Buildings do influence the way we behave, at least in observable appearances, and they can make us feel a certain way – the significance of material forms in religious worship (the totem, the statue of the God, the cathedral) and so on produce an affect. I would suggest, however, that such affects are also part of the ‘reality producing capacity’ of human interaction. One of the underpinning assumptions of the tradition within which I am speaking from is that there is no reality existing ‘out there’ awaiting our discovery but, rather, that the reality of ‘out there’ is constructed by us, in practice and interaction with and within it. The reality which we take comfort in is, in fact, a human accomplishment which must be consistently re-accomplished. Here’s an example. Consider events in a courtroom following a traffic incident. Different versions of events will be given by witnesses, by the police, by the defendant, by the lawyers and so on and so on; multiple accounts of the event which all give different takes on a single event. The different accounts, then, pose a ‘reality puzzle’ which must be solved by the participants; namely, what was the ‘reality’ of the event that took place? The judge, over and above his legal duties, is called to provide a summation both of the evidence but also of the ‘reality’ of the event being debated. This seems like common sense, indeed this is the point; we approach reality as a matter of common sense, of ‘what everyone knows’ about the world, which is, in turn, culturally specific. A defence that an accident is caused by witchcraft is not likely to go down well in the UK, yet amongst the Azande tribe, for example, it would be perfectly rational and would see the playing out of an according process of action involving chicken’s wings, poison, and blessed water. This accomplishment of an external reality is also to be found in the way in which people account for places which pose reality puzzles; Cardiff Bay being a particularly good example with its strange mix of history, bars and restaurants, expensive flats and urban deprivation, and a political institution in the shape of the Senedd. Cardiff Bay is, again, in one sense massively there, and concrete, and all the rest of it, but it is also many places, times, and experiences at once. On top of this, an idea of what ‘Cardiff Bay’ is and how it is to be interpreted, is planted in visitors minds in the process of regeneration that has taken place and on glossy tourist websites. With all this going on in the contemporary city, for the process is repeated in many other cities, it is worth returning to the quote above and noting that the complexity of the city is reduced and rendered down when we talk about it, drawing from our experiences, memories, and knowledge and available means of expression. Yet when we talk of the city, aspects of that experience however will remain elusive, just out of reach and “no one ever knows just what another means when they tell about the city they see” – just like when you try to tell someone about that dream you had last night.'

Plants Under Sress: Why Should We Worry? by Hilary Rogers

Below is a short piece written by Dr Hilary Rogers of the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University writing on plant stress and sustainability. Hilary was one of five presenters speaking at our sciSCREENing of 'The Garden'. 'The green revolution of the 1970s reduced chronic hunger from 40% to 20% of the world population while the population has doubled, but 840 million people are still chronically undernourished. Environmental stress accounts for up to an 80% loss in crop yields which translates into a massive loss of food worldwide. Since plants cannot move, they have developed a complex network of responses to stress that help them survive. Some of these strategies are not necessarily geared to crop productivity though, but rather are the product of evolutionary pressures for individual survival. We are trying to understand the internal signals that help plants survive stress so that we can transfer these mechanisms to crop plants and try to reduce crop losses from environmental stress. This is critically important now and increasingly so in the face of climate change. A key factor in plant’s response to stress is the duration and severity of the stress. For a short period a plant can switch on protective mechanisms, for example to drought, and switch them off again once in rains. However if the stress is too severe or too long, it may be better to allow some of the leaves to die for the benefit of the whole plant. Plants respond to stress at many levels, but ultimately they need to protect their cells from damage. To do this they need to switch on the genes that make the right proteins for the job. New technologies allow us to look at thousands of genes at once and get a read-out of which genes are responding to stress. It can help us to find out which genes respond specifically to one stress, which are generic responses and which are in fact a sign that the plant is giving up and the cells are destined to die. Once we have a grip on the genes that are most useful in protecting a plant from stress and that can also help a crop plant to be more productive under stress we can try to bring about a new green revolution to get the most out of the crops we grow wherever we want or need to grow them!'

sciSCREEN on Sustainability

A reminder about tonight's event that kicks-off at 6pm where we will be screening 'The Garden', in Cinema One of Chapter Arts Centre. We have an array of speakers from various backgrounds and disciplinary positions so please do come along. We also have five extra bottles of wine, which is surely an attraction in its own right. For a list of speakers, topic themes, and ticket prices please click here.

This sciSCREEN is sponsored by the ESRC Centre BRASS.

Der Golem and Vitalism by Chris Groves

Below is a piece written by Chris Groves - one of the speakers at the Der Golem sciSCREEN'S sciSCREAM - on the Philosophy of Vitalism and Der Golem. Please feel free to let us know your thoughts on the Der Golem event and/or on Chris Groves' talk by adding a comment below: Der Golem appears, at first blush, to be very different from other roughly contemporary films – such as James Whales’ version of Frankenstein - in which “dead” matter is reanimated. For a start, it features kabbalistic magic, not science (or rather perhaps a “spectacle” of science). Nonetheless, there is perhaps more, at a deeper level, that unites the two films than is immediately obvious. Frankenstein, with its humming lab apparatus and its evocation of galvanism, and Der Golem’s depiction of the uncanny power of the Word, both depict their cinematic worlds from a vitalist perspective. This is one of the reasons, perhaps, why both films continue to have profound cultural resonance today, as vitalism is still all around us –in mass-market magazines’ astrology pages, in new age evocations of “energy”, in alternative medicines such as homeopathy. Vitalism, as a fundamental metaphysical view of how the world works, is a constant temptation to the philosopher inside all of us, who wants to explain why things, in the most general sense, are as they are. It is also a temptation for science itself, as I discuss later. So what is vitalism? Its history is particularly lengthy, and also embraces along its route a wide variety of cultural manifestations. In the Book of Genesis (II, 7) and the Koran, Adam (from the Hebrew for earth or mud, and the original golem) is formed of dust or earth by God, who brings him to life by breathing the spirit or breath of life into his nostrils – literally “in-spiring” him. Greek philosophy contains examples of vitalism, such as that proposed by the 1st century BC Stoic thinker Posidonius who proposed that it is the sun which provides all living beings with an energy which differentiates them from non-living matter. In Chinese philosophies, yin and yang produce qi or vital energy which animates the universe. Vitalism is therefore a metaphysical theory which views matter itself as inert, but explains the difference between non-living and living beings with reference to an additional, non-material “life principle” which inhabits, or is made to inhabit, matter and thus bring it to life. Vitalism, in this sense, inspires both magical views of the world, which live on in popular culture in a variety of forms, and, as we shall see, continues to haunt modern science. Magical beliefs and practices, such as those depicted in Der Golem, were viewed by some 19th and 20th century anthropologists, like James Frazer, as an undeveloped form of science, as both were designed to manipulate and control the external world. Although this view has since been much criticized by anthropologists, it is arguably true that what science and technology do in relation to matter that is subject to mechanistic physical laws, magic attempts to do for the hidden life principle. Just as science and technology enable us to control, to some extent, the observable, measurable physical world, magic attempts to control, channel and manipulate the life principle itself. Where science is exoteric, concerned with the material world and what can be concluded about how it works through rational reflection, magic is esoteric, concerned with mystical, intuitive knowledge of the unobservable world. Language is important to both forms of knowledge, but magic operates with symbol and allegory, viewing the world as a script which has to be deciphered, as when Rabbi Loewe interprets the configuration of stars at the beginning of Der Golem as a portent of catastrophe. God breathing life into the original golem, Adam, might be interpreted as speaking the Word, logos, that represents the power of creation in the Greek translation of the Bible. The creation of the golem in Wegener’s film, and in other literary and folkloric versions of the Rabbi Loewe legend, typically involves the inscription of the Hebrew word for truth, Emet, whether onto the golem’s forehead or on a charm, which apes the original creation. Der Golem and Frankenstein run parallel to each other once again when it comes to the consequences that result from hubristic attempts to control the world. Whether magic or science is used, the result is an imperfect creation, lacking completeness: the golem cannot smell the flower it holds, cannot fully participate in life. It is the imperfection of the reanimated being, and the implied failure of the practitioner of science or magic to fully understand and/or control the principle of life, which ultimately produces unintended consequences. I mentioned at the outset that vitalism, as well as being associated with magical beliefs, is also a companion to science. This has its roots in the concept of teleology and its applicability to some areas of natural science. Teleology is the idea, championed by Aristotle among others, that to understand living systems, it is necessary to understand them as not only pushed along by mechanical or efficient causes, but as pulled along by purpose. Much of modern science, since Galileo and Newton, has sought to exorcise teleology from scientific explanation, yet it has proven difficult to fully banish, particularly where the study of biology has provoked philosophical reflections on the limitations of the new mechanistic science. For example, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) argued that, in order to understand what differentiates living and particular sentient living systems from non-living ones, one had to affirm that matter, living matter and mind are different degrees of organization of the same vital principle, implying that the universe therefore develops from a less organized to a more organized state overall, reflecting perhaps some overall teleological order to things. The idea that there had to be something outside matter that breathed life into it soon came under increased attack, particularly from Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesis of the organic compound urea from inorganic ammonium cyanate in 1828. The to and fro between vitalism and mechanism in science has nonetheless continued, to some extent, ever since. The advent of complexity science as an approach to understanding living systems reintroduces the idea that matter is, under certain circumstances, self-organising. But here the idea is that simple, iterative processes, which may themselves be entirely mechanistic, can give rise to self-regulating processes (such as metabolic systems). The question then might be: do we still need to think teleologically in order to understand such systems – does the frequent call to “think holistically” about natural systems constitute a call for a more esoteric, intuitive kind of knowledge which cannot be captured by exoteric, mechanistic science? In addition, the ghost of vitalism has returned in a very unexpected shape in the latest technological application of molecular biology, namely the “synthetic biology” championed by scientific entrepreneurs like Craig Venter. Venter’s claims about his company’s creation of a new, entirely synthetic unicellular organism rest on a particular view of how biological information incarnated in DNA functions. For Richard Jones, professor of physics at Sheffield University, this evokes a new form of vitalism: "The idea that his cells are entirely synthetic depends on a particular view of the flow of information – we have the sequence of his genome stored on his computer, this information is given physical realisation through the synthesis of the information carrying molecule DNA, and it is this information, when inserted into the lifeless husk, the shell of a bacteria whose own DNA has been removed, that sparks that cell into life, re-animating the cell under the control of the new DNA. In language Venter and others often use, the cell is “booted up”, as a dead computer with a corrupted operating system is restored to life with a new system disk. This idea that the spark of life is imparted by the information of the DNA seems perilously close to another kind of vitalism – let’s call it 'digital vitalism'." Richard Jones (2010), Soft Machines, “Digital Vitalism?” 6 June, softmachines.org/wordpress.

The Garden sciSCREEN: Tuesday November 9th.

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN will be on Tuesday November 9th from 6pm when we will be screening ‘The Garden’ in Cinema One at Chapter Arts Centre. Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy and nominated for the Best Documentary Academy award, the film highlights the plight of a community of people who built a 14 acre garden in South Central Los Angeles, growing their own food and feeding their families. The Garden tells the story of a struggle between these urban farmers, and the City of Los Angeles and a powerful developer who wants to evict them. We will use the film to discuss ideas of sustainability, class and food consumption, biodiversity, urban food growing and vulnerable communities. Confirmed speakers include:

Dr. Hilary Rogers (School of Biosciences)
Dr. Diego Vazquez (The ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society)
Jess Paddock (The School of Social Sciences)
Arthur Getz (The School of City and Regional Planning)
Steve Garrett (Riverside Market)

This sciSCREEN is funded by the ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS) as part of Cardiff University Sustainability Week. Tickets are available here or by contacting Chapter Arts Centre directly on 02920 304400.

To be added to sciSCREEN's mailing list please contact sciscreen@cardiff.ac.uk and/or find us on facebook by searching for cardiff sciscreen.