Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

180 Chapter 7
problem is the constructive argument of the present chapter, but before that
discussion, some dirty linen needs to be hung out.
A. Scandal
There is a long-standing, unacknowledged “scandal” in the field known as consciousness
studies. It can be simply stated, but not easily explained. The scandal
is that, although the phenomenon of “awareness” is known for a certainty to
arise in animal organisms with nervous systems, hypotheses concerning causal
mechanisms have included everything except the neuron. There have been a
few notable exceptions to the general neglect of neuronal properties and, to
be fair, much of the theoretical work in consciousness studies has rightly been
concerned with the configuration of neural systems (multineuron neural networks),
but there has been scandalously little focus on the properties of neurons
themselves. Simply to state the problem is to suggest that there may be
some naked emperors loose in the academy, but it needs to be said yet again: As
every healthy 10-year-old fully understands, animals exhibit signs of awareness,
but plants and minerals donot.Ifweareinterestedinmoresubtlequestions
concerning, for example, the differences between sleeping brains and awake
brains, or between infant and adult brains, or in clarifying the types of awareness
exhibited by different animal species, then the configuration of multicellular
neural systems rather than single-cell neuron physiology is undoubtedly
the right level at which to start. But for first-order issues concerning why there
is a psychology of animals, but not of other material entities, surely the neuron
should be on stage front-and-center.
There are perhaps not many tips to be taken from 10-year-olds on the topic
of consciousness, but the fact of the matter is that few scholars have focused on
neurophysiology, while many have been led astray by, for example, fantasies
about robot “awareness”. Unfortunately, the fictitious AI arguments do not reflect
a sophisticated understanding of CPU design, cache memory or recursive
programming, but rather a Hollywood-style inattention to basic science. Eventually,
we may want to address questions about what behavioral capabilities
inorganic “brains” caninprincipleachieve,butthefirst order of business lies
in the life sciences. Since awareness is present in animals with nervous systems,
but absent elsewhere, and since it is known that the types of neurons found in
all animal species are generally indistinguishable from those in other species,
the subtle difference between, for example, monkey and human awareness is
not likely to be due to cell types or minor differences in neurotransmitter bio-