conscious experience arise?’ And this he puts into
his category of ‘Problems we may never solve’. If we
are to have any chance of a solution, we must think
comparatively: about cognition across species and
across levels of explanation about the brain.
For their part, Noë and Thompson conclude their
discussion of the hunt for the NCCs by observing
that this quest relies on a specific and contro-
versial notion of conscious content. For them,
the moral to be drawn from all this research ‘is
that neuroscience, far from having freed itself of
philosophy, needs the help of philosophy now
more than ever’ (Noë and Thompson, 2004, p.
26). Certainly the claim to be tackling one of the
easy problems without begging any conceptual
questions seems hard to sustain based on what
we have seen so far, and the need for careful
research that crosses disciplinary boundaries
seems obvious.
In the next chapter we will take another step into
the neural labyrinth by asking how the idea of
mind maps on to that of brain – or fails to – and
what kinds of metaphors may help or hinder our
attempts to think about how they fit together.‘philosophers often ask
good questions, but they
have no techniques for
getting the answers’
(Crick, in Blackmore, 2005, p. 74)
‘neuroscience, far from
having freed itself of
philosophy, needs the
help of philosophy now
more than ever’(Noë and Thompson, 2004, p. 26)ACtIVItY 4.1
The rubber hand illusionThis demonstration requires two paint brushes and a
dummy hand. The hand can be a life-like rubber model
bought specially, as used in the original experiments
(Botvinick and Cohen, 1998), or a cheap rubber glove filled
with water or blown up and tied like a balloon. This illusion
is one of many that provide insight into our body schema
(Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005; and see Chapter 15).
The demonstration needs a participant and an
experimenter and can be done at home or as a class
demonstration. The participant sits and rests their arms
on a table, with a screen of some sort to conceal one
hand. The dummy hand is then placed in full view, either
above or to the side of the real hand. The experimenter
takes two paint brushes and gently strokes both the
participant’s concealed hand and the dummy hand in
exactly the same way at exactly the same time. The
experimenter should practise this first and then keep
doing it, trying to keep the strokes identical, for a few
minutes. The participant, who can see only the dummy
hand, should soon begin to feel the sensations as though
in the dummy instead of in their own real hand.FIGURE 4.10 • If the experimenter brushes the hidden real hand and
the visible dummy hand in synchrony the dummy
hand should start to feel like the participant’s own.