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Announcing a New Series: The Ontology of Mind“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” - T. H. Key The ontology of mind is an important subject because it concerns that aspect of our being that distinguishes mankind from all other forms of life. How we choose to understand our own mind and its products must inform our politics, metaphysics, worldview, and identity. Unfortunately, the mind cannot be subjected to the same kind of investigation that allowed us to uncover the fundamental forces of nature as revealed in physics, and while it is true that we have been able to discern some things about the relationship between mind and brain these usually touch upon the secondary phenomena of our mental life and don’t directly inform an ontology of mind. Hence the reason for why the study of mind has been able to maintain its philosophical character over the years and remain as one of the most active subfields in philosophy today. The Overall Structure of this SeriesThroughout this series I will be focused on the following four views concerning the ontology of mind:
The first three can be thought of in terms of an overarching materialistic paradigm that grew out of the phenomenal success of the Western reductionist program and are not unusually assumed as being foundational to a scientific worldview in our time. The last position is typically identified with a perspective that is more traditional and premodern, where the mind is commonly conceived in terms of an immaterial soul (or spirit) that belongs to an invisible realm and is capable of surviving death. Amongst the first three materialistic views there is an implicit dependency relation of Materialism ▶ Determinism ▶ Mechanism which I will now try to briefly explain. To say that something is mechanical is to say that its processes can be theoretically modeled by a physical contraption, which is made up of separate physical components that are otherwise independent from each other. More generally, determinism is the view that there is a causal materialistic chain that accounts for how physical states evolve over time. Ergo, to say that something is mechanical is also to say that it is deterministic, for the contraptions of mechanism have inherent to their workings the logic of a causal chain that explains how one state of the contraption transitions to the next. Lastly, both of these views presuppose materialistic accounts (the contraptions of mechanism and the causal chains of determinism are both materialistic). In this series I will challenge this dominant materialistic paradigm of the mind’s ontology by examining the following arguments:
The Dominant Argument But before considering these in future installments I would like to first examine what I believe to be the dominant argument in favor of this paradigm:
First a reminder for the reader, philosophical argument is not the same thing as mathematical proof and shouldn’t be judged by the same standard. Good philosophical arguments are those that manage to be both logically sound and are supported by premises that seem more plausible than their negations; except in the case of tautologies, there is no such thing as a philosophical argument that manages to be both non-trivial and airtight. Analysis of the Dominant Argument Returning to the dominant argument, statement (1) is clear and statements (3), (5), and (7) are just simple consequences of preceding statements so all that leaves for discussion are statements (2), (4), and (6). The justifications for statement (2) are inductive, the idea that the mind is a product of brain processes is a good explanation for two important facts that were also known to the ancient Greeks. First, and most importantly, a productive theory of mind explains why individual minds seem tethered to individual brains, and secondly, why alterations to the brain usually effect the mind in some way. Furthermore, this statement also has the additional benefit of metaphysical economy, thereby satisfying Occam’s razor, for there are no immaterial substances nor invisible realms that need to be accounted for. However, there are at least two serious difficulties with this statement and at least one other model for the mind-brain relationship other than that of production. The first difficulty arises in trying to explain how biochemical processes in the brain can produce the unified realm of subjective experiences that characterize our mental life. As the American psychologist William James observed in his famous lecture on immortality: “The production of such a thing as consciousness in the brain, they will reply with the late Berlin professor of physiology, is the absolute world-enigma - something so paradoxical and abnormal as to be a stumbling block to Nature, and almost a self-contradiction. Into the mode of production of steam in a teak-kettle we have conjectural insight, for the terms that change are physically homogeneous one with another, and we can easily imagine the case to consist of nothing but alterations of molecular motion. But in the production of consciousness by the brain, the terms are heterogeneous natures altogether; and as far as our understanding goes, it is as great a miracle as if we said, Though is ‘spontaneously generated’, or ‘created out of nothing’.” The second difficulty arises in trying to explain the kinds of incredible experiences that seem to occur in every generation, and by that I mean experiences of an essentially mystical, telepathic, clairvoyant, or otherwise miraculous nature that seem to defy any strictly materialistic explanation. On this view it would seem that we would have to dismiss all of these experiences in some way as being invalid, or at the very least not what they claim to be - thus the need for “professional” skeptics. Lastly, there is the matter of this alternative model, which William James identified in the same lecture as being that of transmission. In other words, our mental lives might possibly be the output of an immaterial substance (Dasein?) passing through brain structures, or coterminous with them, in a somewhat analogous way as colorful refractions are the output of light passing through a prism, or like wind passing through an organ and creating musical tones, or that of electromagnetic waves passing through a radio and creating programmed sound. If you damage either the prism, organ, or radio then the output of these will be effected. Moreover, under a theory of mind that is more transmissive (and/or extensive) it becomes much easier to imagine how we might go about explaining the more incredible experiences of our collective mental life in a way that is non-dismissive. However, this model is not without problems of its own as it cannot give an account of why individual minds are tethered to individual brains, except in a very speculative way, nor can it give an account of where the immaterial source of our mental being comes from. The primary justification for statements (4) and (6) is also inductive as it hearkens back to the success of classical physics, where the objects of study are always material and subject to mathematical principles that are essentially mechanical and deterministic. In other words, regardless of the physical configuration it was believed that you could always know how that configuration would evolve over time solely by considering the mechanical procedures of classical physics. This perspective was so successful that it was assumed, for quite some time, that the kind of mathematics that worked for classical dynamics would eventually be made to work for all physical phenomena. It is a perspective that took a significant blow in the 20th century with the development of Quantum Mechanics (abbreviated as QM), which is a theory of physics that is not complete - you cannot completely know the evolution of physical configuration over time under QM - and whose dominant interpretations are neither mechanical nor deterministic. Of course, the blow may not be fatal as it is still theoretically possible that QM could be expanded into a complete theory that would have these properties of determinism and mechanism. Furthermore, even if such cannot be done it’s not at all clear if the more perplexing aspects of QM should have any bearing on the relationship between mind and brain, regardless of the doubt that they cast on the correctness of the Dominant Argument. Posted by Notus Wind on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 06:23 PM in The Ontology Project Comments:2
Posted by Notus Wind on August 04, 2010, 11:09 PM | # GW, Yes, we should have some fun with this.
You’re right, I didn’t do justice to the “materialism begets mechanism” argument because I didn’t know that I’d be writing about it until I started to do just that. Hence my thoughts weren’t as organized as they should have been.
I can accept the organization that you’ve laid out here.
Just to be clear, I can pretty much accept all the statements that you’ve made here as well.
Now the claims that you’ve made here (emphasis in bold) - about how consciousness is a mechanistic state and that its construction of the self is an illusion born out of the evolutionary process - I can’t accept because I don’t believe them. I could accept them but that would demand some sort of argument that you’ve yet to put forward. This claim that consciousness is mechanistic is highly non-trivial in that it strongly goes against the evidence of everyday life. For example, when I make decisions or mull over philosophical matters it certainly doesn’t seem as if there is any kind of mechanical process guiding my thoughts nor does it seem to be the case that my sense of self is illusory. These incredible ideas that you’re advancing could be true but they demand good arguments.
It’s comical how much I already agree with you here. Those of us who (as a philosophical matter) take seriously the idea that there is an immaterial component to our lives fully appreciate the duality of the human experience. 3
Posted by Hohenstaufen on August 05, 2010, 12:52 AM | # I think GW and NW might be talking about two slightly different things here, yet are calling them both essentially “mechanicity.” GW’s mechanicity seems like Heidegger’s Zuhandenheit, where the mind goes about its routines in the world without explicitly thinking about them. Only when a “problem” in a normally unproblematic activity interrupts the autopilot do we turn our attention to the activity itself, in Vorhandenheit. Sometimes things might otherwise be going smoothly, on autopilot, and we interrupt that flow simply by objectifying our actions. i.e. Golfers might ruin their swing by “overthinking” it. This is not to say that thinking explicitly about the world is always a tragedy. It can be a tool, too. But I thought NW was using the term mechanistic in a Newtonian sense, wherein we are all ALWAYS passive and governed by material processes, which we can never escape, whether we attend to the prison or not. I thought NW was looking for how “mind” might arise, at least in part, elsewhere, as an independent dynamism rather than just as a fatalist cog driven by materials in mechanistic causality. In other words, NW wonders if the mind (or the will) is immaterial and free to dictate to the brain’s physiology, or are mind and will always dictated to by the—“chauffeur” of—physiology? It seems clear that one’s willing to think about a given subject does have material or dynamic consequences in the brain synapses. So this isn’t so far-fetched as it might seem. Ultimately these seem to be related mechanicities, yet perhaps GW is speaking more in terms of utility whereas NW is addressing aetiology? Are these the two things GW says should never be mixed? But isn’t that the point of this thread, picking at the barrier between origin and use, between coming and going? Still, I agree: This should be fun. 4
Posted by Notus Wind on August 05, 2010, 12:23 PM | # Hohenstaufen,
Yes, you are absolutely correct about where I am coming from in my use of the term “mechanism”. Very nicely put by the way.
Interesting, thank you for sharing this as I am not familiar with Heidegger’s thought. Practically all of my reading and writing on these matters has been within the style of analytic philosophy so I can’t recognize ideas that come out of the continental tradition.
I hope you’ll enjoy the series as well. It’s really nice to see people like yourself come out of the woodwork and engage in this kind of discussion. 5
Posted by Silv on August 05, 2010, 04:35 PM | # Yes, you are absolutely correct about where I am coming from in my use of the term “mechanism”. Very nicely put by the way. Very nicely put, yes, but a conflation of ‘mind’ with ‘free will.’ If that conflation is allowed to stand there should be four categories, such that the last two read: “Mind is essentially immaterial and mechanical” and “Mind is essentially immaterial but not mechanical.” 6
Posted by God on August 05, 2010, 04:59 PM | # I don’t even know the meaning of the word “ontological”. But some of what I see being discussed has to do with the origin and nature of “me” or “me-ness”, which is nothing about which I claim insight, with the exception of speculating on the meaning of certain words attributed to the Christ figure: “l and the Father am one”. Christians have imagined that whoever uttered these words was, in fact, God. But couldn’t it just as easily be a reference to this “me” of which we have been writing? And what ramifications would this line of reasoning have for Europeans, who, through Christianity, have long labored under the yoke of its antithesis? 7
Posted by Jimmy Marr on August 05, 2010, 06:02 PM | # Excuse me for posing as God in my previous entry. I don’t comment very much on this blog because I generally feel outmatched by the erudition of others writing here. Even in the name of God, I have felt qualified only to pose questions. As long as I have mustered the courage to do so, I will ask a couple more under my own name: When consciousness interprets “I and the Father am one” as “Me-ness is God”, is that what I have heard Mr. Renner refer to as “Subject Without Confines”? And if so, is “Jesus is God” an example of “Object Without Confines”? If so, the required shift in cognition between these two perspectives seems extremely slight. A simple exchange of foreground and background by which Christendom could become Imperium Europa almost overnight. Dah. I guess that’s why it was selected as a topic? 8
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 05, 2010, 06:09 PM | #
Not just when a problem arises but in the process of learning the activity i.e. driving a car, swinging a golf club or playing the piano, does attention arise. After a certain point it abates becoming habitual and any interjection of attention becomes obstructive. However, learning itself does not necessarily always require attention. Some hint at the evolutionary origin of consciousness by positing the example of the Spaniards and the Mesoamericans. How was it that 150 Spaniards were able to conquer an entire Mesoamerican empire? Some suggest it is because the Indians did not possess consciousness. When they met that Spanish bump in the road, they were unable to react. However, that suggests the evolutionary model is not biological. It suggests subjective consciousness is learned via language, expressed metaphorically. Guessedworker disagrees. However, some suggest that deceit requires subjective consciousness and it, apparently is seen in elephants, amongst others. Those capable of deceit, arguably, are more able to survive and thus produce more offspring. It suggests subjective consciousness produces a fitness benefit. This is not Darwin’s view. The language model suggests conscious thought requires metaphors. It aids in visualization. “Me” is a metaphor and “I” an analog. There is also ”the analogic simulation of actual behavior” allowing, for example, a visualization of God. 9
Posted by PF on August 05, 2010, 06:58 PM | # Notus Wind wrote:
Here’s an area where I am not at all confident to answer for GW. But I try to absorb his understandings of things, and here is what I make of this. The degree to which your thought process appears mechanistic to you is determined by your own ability to hold in your mind a comprehensive knowledge of the outer circumstances which determined your existence. If you can hold all these in your mind it will be immediately clear that there is no choice - but we have gaps, dark areas, where we are manifesting effects within ourselves as a result of unknown causes. In these dark spaces we posit a freedom from cause-and-effect, which is merely our lack of knowledge, and here the illusion of choice arises. Also the illusion of possibility. Because there is no such thing as possibility, until evolution created a symbol system which runs parallel to the world and is under selective pressure to mirror it to produce fitness outcomes. Within the alternative reality of this symbol system, itself entirely “wrong” in the absolute sense, because it does not contain within itself one truly absolute reality descriptor - within this alternative reality, possibility exists. Good enough for us, if it gives us a leg up over the guy who doesn’t have this cauldron of maybes bubbling in his brain. Very unsure of myself on these issues, must admit! 10
Posted by Notus Wind on August 05, 2010, 07:04 PM | # Silv,
In folk psychology the mind exercises free will, so there is no conflation of these concepts. I felt like Hohenstaufen did such a good job getting at the general thrust of my use of the term “mechanism” that I didn’t want to quibble over such details. Jimmy Marr, This series will be about exploring certain aspects of the mind-body problem in the philosophy of mind and won’t have anything to do with either Christian theology or the interpretation of Biblical scripture. If you’d like a good primer on what the philosophy of mind is all about just follow the link to the wiki page. 11
Posted by Notus Wind on August 05, 2010, 07:32 PM | # PF, This is definitely a difficult subject and I don’t claim any great expertise on all matters pertaining to the philosophy of mind, only familiarity with the arguments that I’ll be presenting. You can never tread too carefully when discussing the ontology of the thing that is creating the discussion!
As an abstract matter, I can understand how one can see his thoughts as a product of mechanism and how concepts like “choice” and “maybe” are just illusions. But only as an abstract matter because that is not the world that we experience! The world that we experience is one of self, choice, will, etc.; and to claim that these are illusions that only exist within an alternative reality of our own making is highly non-trivial. Hence, my call for GW to put forward arguments that demonstrate these sorts of statements. 12
Posted by Guessedworker on August 05, 2010, 08:02 PM | # First of all, I must acknowledge the fact that, like PF, Notus Wind is intellectually qualified to venture into these areas in a way that I am not. I find science papers a struggle, and neurological ones especially so. The breezy certainty of my statements, then, should be taken with a pinch of salt. In fact, nobody knows with any certainty some of the things which we will now speak about. We are speculating ... PF from a professional perspective, Notus from a philosophical and mathematical perspective, me from, well, a lifetime of just looking, Desmond from the vasty deep of his database, Hohenstaufen from I know not what. Yet. Anyway, Notus Wind writes:
... and our perceptive and religious-named friend Hohenstaufen writes:
This is the focus then: the motive nature of consciousness as it is ordinarily manifest in the workings of the brain. Well, how is the state of ordinary waking consciousness formulated? As our sense of self and the world beyond self, and as self in the world, obviously. But it seems to me that consciousness in the mind has the same quality as light in any enclosed space, namely, that it is visible only on the surfaces it reveals. Our sense of self in the world is, if one troubles oneself to look, constituted not on some ghostly golden immanence, but upon the too-too real trinity of mechanicity, absence, and suggestibility. These are the objects in the room, the real shapers of ordinary waking consciousness. As to what these terms definitively mean and how they interact as forces in the mind, perhaps another time. For now, it is enough to know that in absence and under the extraordinary power of an evolved suggestibility, the way of working that is available to us is mechanical. The delayed ascription of decision and will to actions already commenced upon by the motor, emotional and, sometimes, even the super-slow mentational system - look, and I promise you will see it is so - really is the best we can do. We call it consciousness because we have already suggested to ourselves that we are conscious ... that we are. If it were true, of course, then the real would be the life we know all the time, our being would be our acquired personalities, and liberation would be the self-authorship every deluded liberal insists it is! Sadly, none of it is true. But at least we can take from that a cause of our collective entrapment, and the hint of a release. 13
Posted by Notus Wind on August 06, 2010, 07:29 PM | # GW,
Wasn’t he a surprise! Hohenstaufen, if you are still with us, feel free to step out of your Black Forest and share with us your erudition whenever you like.
I would like to take a moment and say that the “world as mechanism” is a distinctly European idea that, so far as history tells, begins in ancient Greece with Thales of Miletus, who starts the Western scientific tradition of trying to explain the natural world without reference to mythology. In contrast, the ancient Far East and Babylonian civilizations were content to observe and record the natural world with a precision far exceeding their Greek counterparts; however, they seem to have never considered the possibility of accounting for the natural world through the development of abstract rational concepts. Food for thought when considering an ontology of nationalism. From Thales we get Heraclitus and the development of the concept of a universal logos, which is the idea that there is an invisible rational order that governs the world. And lastly, from this concept of a universal logos we get mechanism, the imposition of an invisible rational order on distinct and unrelated material components to form a machine. I’ll note, somewhat ironically, that the idea of mechanism is at least partially responsible for man’s predilection for a belief in God - the world is filled with unrelated material components that must be governed by an external rational order (Logos is translated as Word). Nevertheless, we should reject the temptation to say that all explanations must be of a certain kind because that is the only kind of explanation that we can fully understand. If for no other reason than the fact that this notion has already failed with the advent of a non-mechanical quantum theory. So here is what I propose, let us philosophically approach this concept of mind as gingerly as we can and see what we naturally uncover in the course of our investigation. Like blind men stumbling around our homes at night, we will rediscover the placement of our tables and chairs by bumping into them and then carefully reconsidering our steps.
We have two extremes, either the mind is completely dependent on the brain or is completely independent from the brain. Now, we already know that the latter isn’t the case (for obvious reasons) so we can be confident that the status of the deluded liberal won’t change. 14
Posted by danielj on August 07, 2010, 01:59 AM | # For the purpose of the continuity of the organism Purpose? The organisms genes conspire for a purpose? Certainly you didn’t mean that? 16
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 07, 2010, 04:17 AM | # The theory of the lateralization of the bicameral brain is an attempt to explain the evolution of suggestibility. It suggests that as the left hemisphere evolved it’s language capabilities it, the left brain, gave voice to the anxieties, fears, dreams and nightmares of the right brain. The ancient man was strictly mechanical, so the theory goes, taking guidance from the auditory hallucinations that compelled obedience. The Old Testament provides some evidence to support the position. The prophet Amos, an uneducated shepherd, gave voice to the ‘word of God’ without ever realizing the voices directing him originated in his own mind. Yet Ezekiel, while still hallucinating, is aware of his subjective consciousness (or at least the illusions of subjective consciousness). Ezekiel 1:1 says…
Ezekiel’s consciousness derives from the metaphors saw and visions. His consciousness is an illusion based upon language. 17
Posted by Guessedworker on August 07, 2010, 05:09 AM | # Notus Wind,
Some observations. 1. Extremes yes, but these are mutually exclusive only because they are states of consciousness, not competitive views of Mind. Consciousness can pass from one state into the other and back again. An intention or determination can arise in the mentational system, and although it is not qualitatively different in itself from the habitual workings going on around it, it can be a facilitator of a certain effort of attention. It is that which can change the quality of consciousness, if perhaps only fleetingly. This effort of attention has the effect of re-associating the systems (or probably just two of them, which is enough to start something). Re-association brings change from the state of mechanicity, in which the ascription of self-hood to the habitual and disassociated working of the three systems is all there is, to a more holistic consciousness of self. This comes in as a discovery and then habitation of the self, and leads upward through possession to unity and will and even, very, very rarely, to a degree of permanence. Not that we need trouble ourselves with that, or the Thousand Year Reichers will start haranguing us. 2. Let’s not get pulled into discussing “the mind”. The view of Mind as an amorphous entity robs us of the distinctions by which we can model and understand it. Keep the focus narrow, and on:
The key word here is “ordinarily”. Here it is again, this time from my first comment on the thread, which had an important addition:
Now let’s take a quick look at something Desmond wrote:
At this point I’m going to make a distinction between intention, as the narrow-focus direction of consciousness upon an object for some purpose like learning, and attention, which is this much more powerful but difficult and holisticising action that bleeds into a non-mechanical state. (Obviously, I am not using intention here in the strict phenomenological sense, which belongs to the amorphous view and is a far too blunt instrument to be of use). 3. We are still firmly in the Darwinian universe here. The most efficient condition for the motor system is one in which neither the newer emotional and much newer mentational systems interject in its operation. As Desmond says, any interjection becomes obstructive (because the system functions, brain media, operating speeds and so on differ so massively). So, for the motor system a state of habituation is not only inevitable but is necessary and, of course, evolutionarily adaptive. Disassociation of the systems is at least neutral and probably positive from an evolutionary perspective. This, in my highly speculative opinion, is why the quality of suggestibility exists and is so powerful. It is adaptive for the organism to distinguish a self, even though the reality in ordinary waking consciousness is absence. 18
Posted by Guessedworker on August 07, 2010, 05:19 AM | # Desmond, language is not god. Why are you stuck on it? 19
Posted by Guessedworker on August 07, 2010, 08:06 AM | # Welcome back, Daniel,
Your lack of intellectual generosity is noted. Function, then ... action .... work. But I don’t see why I should eschew the use of the word “purpose”. The brain is a tool which predicts hundreds of times a second. There is a spark of purposivity in this process, the purpose being in the factors which govern each very, very infinitesimal choice. This cannot be a solely mechanical process. It is what you may call a “happenstance of futurology” out of which comes everything that is not done involuntarily - and evolution requires this for selection to operate. Teleology, on the other hand, is a gross and lumpen issue, usually emotional. 20
Posted by PF on August 07, 2010, 02:16 PM | # Notus Wind wrote:
You appear to frame the ‘mechanized universe’ by saying it would be ‘rational’. To me, the word ‘rational’, is a word we use to describe a reasoning process, or something derived from or conformable to a reasoning process, which by necessity would happen in the mind. I’m slightly confused to see it applied here. This is how I see it: every system/thing we’ve looked at, is subject to the laws of cause and effect. Some observable manifestation triggers the appearance of another manifestation, with regularity, because the one causes the other to happen. Another way of saying this is that, in the unfolding of phenomenon in time and space, some things naturally follow others. Child-birth follows conception, or conception precedes child-birth. Autumn precedes the falling of the leaves. We can look at these with finer and finer lenses: for example, we might discover that changes in the amount of sunlight exposure regulate a certain molecule X, which triggers a change in the gene expression of the tree when light levels fall below a certain threshold. So in that case we have refined the understanding of the original causal relationship, and yet not overturned it. On a cruder level, we can still say that autumn causes leaves to fall. We just know we will be using shorthand, and within the concept-sphere ‘autumn’ we will have included the factor ‘falling light levels’, which is the actual causative factor at this level of resolution. The idea of the mechanistic universe follows from the idea that all reality is amenable to such causal relationships, though we may never understand all of them, or even most of them. When something is unregulated by a cause, it appears to the human mind as something that can move through many degrees of freedom: we can then posit that the causative factors are a singularity. A singularity is something that is not subject to the laws of cause and effect, something unknowable or infinite or moving through too many degrees of freedom for us to understand it. Such a singularity is something we naturally look for, it appears to me, since we naturally want to insert our ‘God’ into it. Even if we do not consciously wish to do this. We have two ways of understanding the universe: cause-and-effect, and ‘mysterious thing’. When the first explanation cannot be had, we insert ‘mysterious thing’ - which explanation exerts a pull on us, for the reason that it calls on us to use other aspects of our Being - such as emotions, feelings, intuition - to make up where our logic is faltering. My opinion is that human beings love to exercise intuition, feelings and emotions - and they would love a world-view that called on them to do this, in order to interface with it. A fully mechanistic view is inherently repulsive, for the reason that it causes us to remain within brain structures that are only recently evolved, resonate shallowly, and demand enormous energy to maintain in operation. On a level deeper than the observer is able to acknowledge (I am not even talking about religious types, or people who have an articulated vested interest, but all men), he is drawn to ‘mysterious thing’ explanations. This is also because man is naive enough to interpret a resonance felt within himself, as a clue that he has arrived at a deeper abstract understanding of the universe. Such resonances can be simply the activity of emotions when shown a beautiful conceptual framework with great generalizing power. As long as he remains in abstraction, which is required for cause-and-effect understandings, nothing will ever resonate deeply. That is a fact of the way the mind works. If he posits a singularity then, at the end of his great reasoning expedition, he can get the experietial validation of an ‘am’ experience, by calling his intuition and emotions in to experience with him the thing that is not amenable to ‘is’-understandings, but which lies at the end of his ‘is’-investigation. In other words, we follow our reasoning processes out to where the picture breaks up and we hit a wall - and on that wall, we paint God. That is what idealism is, in my view, and here it is encroaching into the ontological investigation process. Since we have benefited so much from our abstract understandings - sitting here using a computer to talk to gentlemen hundreds of miles away from one another is a demonstration - I think we are indebted enough at this point to take the mechanistic view as the null hypothesis: that everything is amenable to cause-and-effect understandings, even if many things aren’t in 2010. If your (Notus Wind’s) understanding of non-mechanical quantum theory seems to go against this, please tell me. It seems like one area that could prove to be a counter-example. ::::
I think the mind is the collective activity of the nervous system at any given time. Studies of people with brain lesions indicate this for me. I have never seen a study of someone who was leisoned, that showed anything ‘miraculous’ happening. By this I mean to say that, we could have a patient X, in a world without ethical principles, and remove bits of his brain piece by peice, and watch each function disappear from his behavioral repertoire after we removed it. Take out his language center and he really can’t process language. Take out his MLR and he really cant walk, run, or swim. Where then is the function that is retained absent the brain structure? ::::: GW wrote:
I don’t feel that you can assert that NW’s examples are two states of consciousness. The mind being independent of the brain is *not* something that exists on this planet. Of that I’m quite sure. Do you mean to say that a Gurdjieffian ‘I am’ experience or moment of Being, does not occur in the brain, or occurs semi-independently of it? My view is that it is likely that these experiences use much more mental circuitry and syncopacate mental rhythms in a way that give the user an enhanced consciousness of being alive, heightened alertness, etc. I nevertheless believe that everything happens in the brain. ::::::
Granted, but how subjective is your view of what ‘unity’, ‘will’, and ‘permanence’ are? Even if these are experientially validated more deeply than anything we are now discussing can be validated - would you assert that you actually understand what is going on in a Gurdjieffian moment of ‘I am’? I thought all that lingo was a relative framework to move one towards the experience, not a scientific description of what actually happened. Are you cool with me putting some grains of salt on that stuff? Until more people have that experience, the scientific understanding of what it is will not be available to us. What do you think? :::::: GW wrote:
One other way of saying this, the view copped from Michael Brown’s teachings (of which I’m fond, as will have become clear), is that man uses his mentation as a way to escape from unpleasant emotional states. He does this by creating stories in his mind, sedating himself with feel-good information or perspective changes, and anything to avoid feeling the negative emotions. These negative emotions, in not being felt, begin to be stored within the body and are cyclically re-experienced. They lead to a situation where thought-world and emotion-world are operating like two completely different households, in ignorance of one another. A man views a WN website, because he wants to feel pissed off, and yet is unaware that this pissed-offness is driving his thoughts. And his thoughts have nothing to do with the reasons why he is pissed off, he is pissed off because of something he experienced 5 years ago. So thought and emotion are constantly lying to one another. Emotion brings up things that dont exist, but havent been processed so they remain in the emotional body, and thought is both an unconscious escape mechanism from this, and the helplessly wielded tool of the emotional currents that drive its conclusions and corrupt its reasoning. Suggestibility then, in this view, is the hollowness that comes from living a life where no experience has resonated deeply. Experiences that resonate deeply leave some kind of mark and create a place where the person, as an internal observer, is content to stay and be present with himself. Experiences that dont, or that cause much dissonance, cause the observer to flee into another ‘system’ until the system currently making a wracket, calms down. He flees into the physical until the emotional calms down, flees into the mental until the emotionally-triggered physical calms down, and we need not mention all the addictive substances and experiences by which he distracts himself from all these processes. 21
Posted by Notus Wind on August 07, 2010, 02:53 PM | # GW, A few remarks to lay the groundwork for future discussions.
[chuckles] Indeed.
While you are absolutely correct here I would remind you that I will be writing about philosophical matters pertaining to the ontology (or ultimate nature) of mind, hence it will not be my intent to develop any kind of specific model per se, which is more of a scientific problem in any case and best settled through empirical investigation. Of course, these two tasks are fundamentally related as the philosophical problems of ontology must inform the scientific problems of modeling and organization. Furthermore, I would say that this more general and abstract approach to the study of mind (at MR) is justified for at least four reasons: (1) The ontology of the mind is far from settled terrain as it continues to motivate all kinds of published work and other lively discussions between philosophers and theoreticians of various backgrounds. The past twenty years alone have seen an incredible flowering of scholarship on just this subject. (2) Questions of ontology typically get right to the root of what some leading academics call the “hard problem of consciousness”; whereas one might go about keeping a narrow focus and slowly develop a model of the mind without ever making real headway on this problem, as it is fundamentally different from the other “easy problems” and the one to which most lay people are drawn. (3) Inclusiveness. Regardless of how deep or shallow one’s interest in this problem lies everyone must address the ontology of mind. (4) The general and abstract approach plays into those strengths that I’ve cultivated over the years.
Very interesting. 22
Posted by Fred Scrooby on August 07, 2010, 03:22 PM | #
Regarding the form of societal Zyklon-B known as “inclusiveness” here’s also Jim Kalb’s laserlike illumination of the subject: http://turnabout.ath.cx:8000/node/5 . For any newbies who may not know of Kalb, 1) he ranks as a philosopher of our age; 2) you cannot remain unfamiliar with a good cross-section of his stuff so sooner or later you have to read him even if you disagree with certain approaches of his as I have come to do; 3) his home page is at http://www.JimKalb.com and is packed with a ton of important links, conveniently embedded all through the page so you don’t even have to go searching around the site to get right to the best meat, just click away. Kalb is so good that you can remain a Kalb addict even when you disagree with Kalb’s fundamental approach. 23
Posted by PF on August 07, 2010, 03:36 PM | # Thanks for the Kalb link, Scroobs. His legally-honed reasoning is just so perfect. 24
Posted by Thorn on August 07, 2010, 04:24 PM | #
Ditto. One of my favorite Jim Kalb essays is “Anti-Racism.” 25
Posted by Notus Wind on August 07, 2010, 04:25 PM | # PF,
Good catch. In those paragraphs of mine that you quoted I was trying to wear the hat of a historian and so my use of the terms “rational” and “mechanism” was slightly different from how I would use them if I were to put on my philosopher hat. Historians of science have developed their own meaning for these terms because they are trying to identify the historical antecedents that developed into the modern concepts that we use today. Sorry for the confusion.
It’s more than that, the physical universe with all of its cause and effect relationships may be rational but not mechanistic (this is actually the view of some physicists). The difference is that we understand a process to be mechanical if it can be finitely represented by a set of logical relations that can be carried out by an effective procedure, hence forming an algorithm. However, it is still possible to have a rational cause and effect relationship that isn’t determined by an effective procedure.
This whole paragraph of yours was pretty good and I hope you don’t mind if I proceed on without too much comment. It is very tempting for me to get into a debate about the metaphysics of God’s existence but I’ll refrain as it would be off-topic, we can always get into these matters later if you’re interested.
I must now channel GW in saying that we are only indebted to the truth. For those of us who are seekers life is too short otherwise.
Yes, the scientific programs of reductionism and mechanism crashed twice in the 20th century. The first time was in an attempt to give a purely syntactic account of analytic truth, which was proven impossible by Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. The second was in the development of a non-mechanical quantum theory. The reason that quantum theory is considered non-mechanical is that the math that is at the heart of the theory can’t be reconciled to a mechanistic framework, many brilliant minds have attempted this task and they have all largely failed by their own admission. Ergo, most of the interpretations of quantum mechanics are not mechanistic (including the standard interpretation).
The short answer is, “I don’t know.” My recommendation is that you wrestle with the arguments that I’ll be presenting in the coming weeks and we’ll see what comes out of this process. 26
Posted by Notus Wind on August 07, 2010, 04:46 PM | # I just want to second Scrooby, PF, and Thorn in that Kalb writes great stuff. 27
Posted by Guessedworker on August 07, 2010, 07:13 PM | # PF,
I did wonder whether that might grate. It was a leap. But Hohenstaufen is right. Notus and I are observing the peak of Everest from different countries. He gazes upward and sees the ontology of Mind, magnificent to behold. I see the utility of a given route to the top, which focuses on consciousness. He is saying let’s survey this. I am saying let’s climb. Obviously, I sowed confusion. We’ll sort it out.
No, of course not. For brain, read “mechanical processes”. I want to make people think. Specifically, I want them to think about what it means from the perspective of consciousness and self for, to quote Notus, “the mind to be completely dependent on the brain”, and what it would mean if it ever was, or just seemed to be, “completely independent from the brain”. It does not matter to me if the language isn’t exact, just so long as people start to strive after truth which, in any case, cannot be given out like lollipops.
Good question. Not subjective at all. By my understanding, an educated man in this respect would be able to “do”, which means to have the power to create certain effects in the world without the aid of prior historical structures, without the power of money or powerful men or ideas at his back. Obviously, this does not mean that every man who produces anything at all in such circumstances is educated. Thomas Edison was not educated, but then light bulbs are of no metaphysical interest.
You mean what is going on neurologically in those rare, non-ordinary moments when one is in the world, in life, in the Real? No. Your field. Metaphysically? Perhaps, a little. Or what would be the point of writing about it? But ...
I am not, NOT interested in esoterism for the masses! I am interested in an ontology of nationalism which treats of Truth, of the collective discovery and habitation of self, and of possession of same, and liberation from all our many psychological, philosophical and political chains, and out of which will come a new art, a new politic, and a new life for European Man in all the places in this world he graces. Do I think ideas can be created around that interest. Yes, of course. Do I think they will catch on. Yes. Do I think they will work? Yes.
No, this is not simply an observation about personality formation, though suggestibility certainly does apply in that respect. But I’m trying to go deeper to the thing itself, down into the Libet vacuum and the internally broadcast idea of “me” which it posits. Suggestibility is the organism’s evolved mechanical capacity to respond to that broadcast with really, really total conviction. Now, I think this is quite an important idea about what keeps us fixed in our place. In Sufic philosophy there are two kinds of “entities”, one is “found” and the other “fixed”. “Found” entities are possibilities which are actualised in the Real, so to speak, and known to themselves. But “fixed” entities are non-actualised possibilities which will remain forever unknown to themselves. I am positing suggestibility as what we do, albeit it totally mechanically, to be “fixed” entities. It might not be quite the same, but my word for “found” is “present”. My word for “fixed” is “absent”. Absence does not imply non-existence, only non-actualisation. I am sorry if I do not make myself clear at the first attempt. I hope I have corrected that. But these are elusive little fishes.
Definitely not. I’m trying to get at the brain architecture and processes which dictate the human experience. I will try to find the time to look again at Michael Brown, as I promised. My first impression was that he is a self-help guru, and, generally speaking, self-help gurus are not interested in the abstract intellectual search which interests me. If there is something universally true and of creative value in his ideas, beyond the appeal to people trying to find a way out of their personal maze, then let’s hear about it. 28
Posted by Guessedworker on August 07, 2010, 07:48 PM | # Notus Wind,
Ah yes, theory and practise. Theoretically, we should be practically parallel rails with practically the same destination.
Our “Dasein” sent me a link a while back about a group of young philosophers - convened, I think, across various European universities - specialising in problems of ontology. Academically, it is one of the sexier fields of philosophical enquiry, if not the sexiest. Because I am no academic, and had never set foot in a lecture hall until I had to attend university open days with my daughter this year, it was always my intention to piggy-back the formal presentations of others. Your posts, then, will receive the very closest attention. I very much hope our little group will be able to brainstorm a few problems as we progress, and others with similar interests will learn of it and come aboard. 29
Posted by PF on August 08, 2010, 01:36 AM | # GW,
I’m willing to grant that you have knowledge that I don’t, so I will continue to try to understand what you are conveying. As is, I have not understood your ‘me’-critique, your insistence on the depth of your suggestibility definition, what you intended to suggest with the mind operating independent/dependently of the brain, or your 1:1 recapitulation of Gurdjieffian metaphysical ideas into our observation of human beings - the statement you made about people who are able to “do”. On this last point, I’m skeptical that an educated man creates things in a void - “without the aid of prior historical structures, without the power of money or powerful men or ideas at his back.” Now taking Gurdjieff as the prototype of an educated man - he is piggy-backing off the huge western interest in eastern esotericism that found articulation in the Theosophist society, from which many of his ideas are derived (According to Webb’s The Harmonious Circle). Where is the great change that he effected? I see him as being dependent on wealthy patrons who funded him - not independent of the flow of money. You say that Edison’s lightbulbs are of no metaphysical interest - what has G. created which is of metaphysical interest? And how is the mechanism for the creation of this unique or fundamentally different from, how a man creates a lightbulb? If these are so germaine to your worldview, then perhaps we should discuss these issues. 30
Posted by PF on August 08, 2010, 02:06 AM | # Notus Wind,
Thanks for explaining this! Obviously people have thought more about this than I have. However the effective procedure is not something I had considered when talking about the universe being ‘amenable to being understood through cause-and-effect relationships’. Why does it have to work through an effective procedure? Because assuming the possibility of an effective procedure means assuming that all aspects of the relationship are observable/known to us - which may not be the case. Perhaps I am disqualified by my ignorance of this, having only thought through it on my own. Describing something as an effective procedure would be one way of exhaustively describing a cause-effect relationship. I think we have lots of cause-effect relationships where there is no known effective method. The guys you mention will no doubt have anticipated this, but probabilistic causal relationships can’t be represented as an effective procedure. Most of our understandings of complex biological systems, at least the brain, are probabilistic. This is what you’ve already said and meant, no doubt, with your “it is still possible to have a rational cause and effect relationship that isn’t determined by an effective procedure”.
Wrestle is indeed what I do with your arguments, Notus Wind. Very challenging and more to my benefit than many another thing. If I may say one general thing: given the limitations of our sensory and nervous systems, isn’t a knowledge domain like quantum physics exactly the place where we would expect our ability to model causal relations to break up? At some point we will necessarily reach a realm where there are things we can’t observe - in fact every scientific act of ‘looking’ in history has always seen non-effective procedure-obeying and potentially-non-rational elements within the relationships it discovered, which were later revealed by subsequent refinements of the observing apparatus to be amenable to cause-and-effect understandings. If the point at issue is whether these relationships can be rationally understood… we might want to ask: by what system? with what perception and modeling capacities? Understanding our observation of a ‘singularity’ at the level of quantum physics as a limitation imposed by our own nervous systems rather than something unique in the structure of reality, is the first thing that occurs to me as someone interested in neuroscience. But I am at a loss to name the perspective (even of a putative nervous system of our imagining) which would be able to accurately model the causal ‘nonlinearities’ at the level of quantum physics and declare it ‘business as usual’. Just by habit, I always attribute ‘big surprises’ to blindspots within our perspective. Anyway, thanks for the clarification. 31
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 08, 2010, 04:10 AM | # Why language? It’s because those that believe subjective consciousness evolved from language assert that in the earliest writings of the ancients. the Iliad for example, their is no evidence of subjective consciousness. Hector and Achilles were not self-aware but were responding to auditory hallucinations. They were mechanistic men taking direction from the voice(s) of their Gods. An interesting theory because, unlike others, it is falsifiable. 32
Posted by Notus Wind on August 08, 2010, 05:08 PM | # GW,
I’d like to see that as well. PF,
You’re welcome!
I am afraid that I don’t understand your question here. Did you mean to ask something like, “Why does a mechanical process have to work through an effective procedure?” or were you probing me along different lines?
Correct, but that’s not quite what I have in mind as I don’t believe that probabilistic causal relationships are anything other than an expression of man’s imperfect attempt to model phenomena that he does not entirely understand. Don’t worry there will be more on this later when I get around to covering the Godelian argument (my most difficult task in this series).
Practically, yes. For there are natural limits to our powers of empirical investigation (crossing my fingers here). Theoretically, no. Specifically, I can’t think of any philosophical reason for why we should expect concepts like rationality, causality, or mechanism to suddenly break down at a certain scale. 33
Posted by Notus Wind on August 08, 2010, 05:48 PM | # GW,
If you don’t mind me asking, what’s that process like for a family in your whereabouts? I hope it’s nothing like what we have in the U.S. where families spend outrageous amounts of money so that their kids can attend the right kind of schools and agonize over the usual metrics (standardized test scores, class rank, etc) all for the privilege of spending even more money on overinflated tuition. It’s a demeaning extortionist racket that doubles as a form of psychological warfare directed against the middle classes. 34
Posted by Guessedworker on August 08, 2010, 08:53 PM | # PF,
Well, this is very formative but also very difficult to talk about. But, ok, let’s try to tie things together on this question. We can begin with a new life, even prior to birth, at the point where the first psychological impression is made on one of the three externally-oriented mind systems by a single data point arriving through the senses from the world outside … that is, from any source that is not of the organism itself (ie, from environment, culture, nurture, not from heredity). We cannot determine how early in the embryonic existence that moment comes. But it heralds a life-long process which is especially influential during the earliest period. So … the process soon advances. The impacts of data accelerate. After a little time the data becomes a veritable sand-storm, wholly disorganised and serendipitous but with very extensive shaping-power over the workings of the systems, laying down behavioural patterns, associations, memories, feelings (mostly negative), appetites, values, everything. Early in the process - we don’t know when, exactly - something new happens. There arises a claim of self-hood in the form of an identification with the “shaped” workings of the systems. Note the workings … the entire stream of mental activity, wherever the focus of ordinary waking consciousness happens to be at any given time. Because there is nothing else there. Now, how did the claim arise in the first place? My presumption is that all sentient beings (possessors of one or more of the systems) are self-interested, and all higher life forms (possessors of two or, in the case of Man, all three) are significantly self-aware. The claim to self-hood appears to be a function of the systems themselves. After all, they exist to situate the organism in the world, to which a sense of separateness is obviously integral. The fact of the claim, therefore, is not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is how an endless process containing so much that is temporal and cultural and does not belong to us, and which has no possibility, in Heideggerian terms, to present in-Being as authentic Dasein, comes to be identified as and with self. Speaking for “the whole of Western European thinking”, Heidegger writes in Identity and Difference that “the unity of identity forms a basic characteristic in the Being of beings”. After a short dissertation on belonging and being together, he arrives at a definition of the unity of identity as “the same as itself with itself”. If this is accurate and not merely a kind of idealism, we have to explain how the psychological reality is not the same at all. The problem comes down to this: how is the claim or suggestion responded to? How come “what doesn’t belong to us” or “what isn’t the same” isn’t identified as foreign material? Where is the fidelity of the process? Well, let’s return to the scene of the crime. The suspect arrested at the scene was the claimant, a process server by calling. Now he’s claiming that he can’t be blamed because in a correctly functioning organism there would be “consciousness” and, therefore, “presence” … oodles of that peculiarly warm and familiar, Heideggerian feeling of “belonging” and “being together”. He was, he said, never told what to do if it wasn’t there, never told to discriminate for it. There was meant to be nothing to discriminate against. He just had to stick like glue to whoever was in the neighbourhood. From his point of view it’s all just a case of mistaken identity. As it turns out, in the inappropriate working conditions of mechanicity and absence all discriminative power is lost. The familiarity of the authentic and real is forgotten. Any emotion however negative, any physical sensation, any thought crossing the mind … anything convinces, anything holds the attention. And that anything is, for the moment anyway, “me”. Where there should be “the same as itself with itself”, permanent, familiar and profound, there is any amount of suggestion and any amount of suggestibility. That is more or less the nature of my “me critique”. I think it is sound and it opens out to a profitable critique of the collective European mind in the postmodern age. I accept that is unfamiliar to people, and may be impossible to communicate adequately to anyone who doesn’t already possess most of the pieces. But I am doing my best.
Notus wrote to me:
I explained to you that:
Thus:
It is both. But that was a clumsy way to make the point.
Well, I did not use the word void. I said that such men have the capacity to create, using the materials that are in the world. Of course, we are talking about effecting a greater consciousness among men, not the availability of light bulbs.
You should ask Langden that question. He is qualified to answer it.
The uniqueness is in its effecting a greater consciousness among men. Light bulbs do not touch upon this, do they? 35
Posted by Guessedworker on August 09, 2010, 05:37 AM | # Notus, Universities in England and Wales are certainly going in the direction you indicate. The last government sought to force greater admissions of “the underprivileged” and applicants from “the inner city”. Fees were introduced for all others. Now the number of places is under threat. Budgets are being constricted and the admission requirements are being inflated. At the end of it is unemployment for a disturbing number of graduates. As a family facing all this we have grown quite cynical. I am still in favour of my daughter taking up a place because, as I know to my cost, these are important years for intellectual development, and the experience would benefit her all life long, irrespective of any economic or professional outcomes. 36
Posted by danielj on August 09, 2010, 08:49 AM | # Welcome back, Daniel Thank you sir! Warmest regards to you as well. Your lack of intellectual generosity is noted. Function, then ... action .... work. Don’t be so sensitive But I don’t see why I should eschew the use of the word “purpose”. Because genes just happen to do what they do. They don’t even “work” since work implies final cause and therefore implies teleology. The brain is a tool which predicts hundreds of times a second. The brain isn’t a tool. There isn’t a craftsman using the brain to form some piece of art or some finished product for sale. There is a spark of purposivity in this process, the purpose being in the factors which govern each very, very infinitesimal choice. This cannot be a solely mechanical process. It is what you may call a “happenstance of futurology” out of which comes everything that is not done involuntarily - and evolution requires this for selection to operate. How do entirely mechanical genes add up to form of a non-mechanical organ? I’m fairly certain we are entering fallacious territory here. 37
Posted by Guessedworker on August 09, 2010, 09:14 AM | # Daniel,
My car works.
The brain systems are tools.
Living organisms adapt to increase their fitness and their survival. Adaption is not mechanical. It is possible to make maladaptive as well as adaptive choices. There is, therefore, an element of free will at work here. But it is free will constrained within a limited and recondite sphere. It is not of an order that would validate philosophical claims to free will. 38
Posted by PF on August 09, 2010, 11:50 AM | # GW wrote:
Interesting. I see where you are going now. Or rather, this is something I can recognize from life. Isn’t one always present, yet simply not aware of it? The Self that is real is waiting in the wings, even when not experienced, even when covered over with distraction, it is still there. Is it not? One’s attention simply isn’t in it. And the real Self still works through people, informing their gut instincts and wishes, and giving them felt hints about where to go, and what is right. It leads people slowly, through their integrity and ‘that voice in the back of their head’, towards a greater recognition of themselves - even if it is only to smooth the dissonance and contradictions between the many things they have identified with. This thing, never leaving but merely being ignored, therefore *does* contribute to the assembly of the personality, and it does leave ghostly traces in it. The claim that it is represented in the personality is wrong, but isn’t your claim of complete absence likewise incorrect? (or have you not made that claim?) 39
Posted by Gorboduc on August 09, 2010, 12:41 PM | # What the hell is a “recondite sphere”? More ineffability. No, I MAY NOT call anything a “happenstance of futurology”. Nor may anyone else. The need for clear speech forbids us. It’s as silly as calling something “a vagary of uncertainty”. Yes, if Dawn Gloria Postlethwaite, the Prophetess-Seer of Balham says that she’s going to address a meeting and then she doesn’t show up, I suppose you could jokingly say to the punters who were angrily and fruitlessly demanding their money back that a “happenstance of futurology” had occurred. But, GW, you happen to require some precise technical language, for God’s sake. I wasn’t going to comment at all on this thread, as the whole thing so far seems meaningless: there’s no definition of terms, things are “what you may call them”, the whole thing is so confused I can’t tell if we’re discussing neurology (is there a properly-qualified doctor in the house? - no, but I’m sure I can detect a few PhD’s), or psychology, or causality, politics, or physics or metaphysics, and there seems to be a regular little game of pat-a-cake going on with exchanges of smugly mutual flatteries, and just too much of the “Please excuse me, but I’m only a beginner…” and unsurprisingly there’s no clear agreement as to what the terms “mechanical” and “mechanistic” actually mean… I feel I’ve been invited into a sitting-room where a performance of the Hammerklavier has been promised, by the gifted daughter of the house: “And she’s going to play it ALL with ONE FINGER” Thank God that danielj has reminded contributors of the need for intellectual coherence. I’m afraid that philosophy isn’t something that can be extemporised, as it were, on the hoof. (I’d say it reminded me of an embarrassingly contrived “brainstorming” session at work. “Hey, you guys, let’s throw some more spaghetti at the wall…”) The materialists here always seem to be forced to admit purpose and design into their mindless universe. Can’t they see how many questions they seem to be begging? Can’t they see that they are continually covering their bare arses with bits of rag they’ve stolen from the I won’t add anything to this tangled skein of futility, beyond saying that the only bit of fun I’ve derived from it so far, despite a couple of promises that it WAS going to be fun, is this: At the head of the original post is a quotation which seems to serve as a motto, or prelude, to this fugue of incoherence. It is attributed to Berkeley. Where, pray, in the good bishop’s works, is that epigram, apothegm, dictum, to be found?... And the answer is ... Ah, thought so! Now this may be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it needs saying. If Berkeley is to be even mentioned in this context, it would be reassuring to know that the writer had enough acquaintance with B’s works to be able to detect in this quotation an exhibition of: a) a stylistic dissonance with Berkeley’s manner, b) a frivolous lack of any real meaning, and thus he may well display tin-ear syndrome - deduced from a), and imperceptiveness - deduced from b). This hilarious misattribution has been up since Wednesday, today is Monday, and no-one has yet seen fit to tell NW to return this bit of nonsense to The Old Spuriosity Shop, where it can sit on the shelf with the pseudo-Galileo’s “Eppur si muove”, etc, etc. Take it down: it bodes ill. I few weeks ago I mention Bricmont and Sokal: large chunks of what appears above well exemplify their thesis that incompetent philosophising is only too apt to have recourse to the technical vocabulary -misappropriated but sometimes impressive - of quantum mechanics. Why did the Tay Bridge collapse? Many of the rivets were fakes, and tell-tale - and ultimately fatal - gaps in the structure had been hidden by the smoothed-down application of mixtures of hard soap and fine iron filings, and sawdust and lead. Verb. sap. If GW’s “new art” is going to be, as he’d say “predicated on” this sort of thing, then no wonder we have Bowden’s screaming heads and Norman’s Tragic Triads. 40
Posted by Notus Wind on August 09, 2010, 01:43 PM | # Gorboduc,
Is it really necessary that I remind you about the definition of ordinary English words such as mind and machine?
[roaring laughter] It is commonly attributed to the good Bishop without qualification as it befits his sense of humor. Nevertheless, I’ve changed the entry just for you.
Sokal was making fun of people who were willing to apply quantum theory to something so ridiculously dissimilar as post-modernist deconstructionism. I am doing nothing of the kind with my very conservative remarks.
If you read the main entry then you would know that I have yet to present the three arguments that will form the core of this series. If your expectations are still not met once all is completed then you can throw your peanuts at me. 41
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 09, 2010, 03:21 PM | #
Words are consciousness. It’s an operation involving a lexical construct “of an analog space with an analog ‘I’ that observes the space, moves metaphorically within the space, and narrates that movement over time…” Thus the teleological metaphors are no surprise. 42
Posted by Gorboduc on August 09, 2010, 06:33 PM | # 1) Words are also signs, too. Therefore, signs are consciousness. When I was at school, yes, children, back in the days of penny-farthings, magic lanterns, steam-engines, quill pens and spinning-wheels, we were shown a false syllogism as a prophylactic against loose and sloppy modern habits of thought. It ran: Learning is but words, words are but wind, therefore learning is nothing but wind. Somewhere Arnold Lunn quotes a modern as saying, in all seriousness, “Consciousness is just a chunk of space-time continuum.” Actually teleology is a great surprise here. Properly understood, it’s a “God” science. It has been stated here that although we do Godel here, we don’t do God. BUt it looks like some of those benighted faith-geners DO do Godel! His modal logic is viewed by some as a revival of certain mediaeval scholastic procedures. 2) Someone introduced Gurdjieff. I can’t imagine WHY. Now a lot of what G. said is obviously balls. A book about him, the late Jimmy Webb’s “The Harmonious Circle” was mentioned. Now I never met Webb. But I did discuss him, after his death, with one of his mentors, a man well-read in all sorts of occult lore, the late Ellic Howe, widely reputed as a specialist in Masonic esoterica. GW isn’t interested in “esotericism for the masses.” What about esotericism for the few? Otherwise WHY mention Gurdjieff? 43
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 10, 2010, 03:03 AM | #
Edward Lear? Or is that wind as in the passing of… Signs, yes, well, Darwin was presented with an observation of a dumb, deaf, and blind girl, Laura Bridgman who while she dreamed moved her fingers. No words, no language, no long complex trains of thought, no religion, no consciousness. 44
Posted by Gorboduc on August 10, 2010, 09:10 AM | # I wouldn’t trust ANYTHING Darwin said, except chance observations about the weather, what he’d had for lunch, etc. (Remember the bear that was adapting to be a whale?...) Anyway, the information conveyed in your link doesn’t relate to Darwin, but rather seems to undermine the claim made in your rather elliptical last post, that Laura had no language and therefore no consciousness. You mean that before she was awakened to our world she wouldn’t have noticed if someone had stuck a pin in her? Wouldn’t have felt hungry? (It seems to me, in passing, that you argument could be used as an illicit pro-abortion argument: “No consciousness, therefore no humanity. Therefore the foetus in the womb may be fearlessly disposed of, as it exhibits no signs of consciousness and is therefore not properly human.” Pinker suggests (and he’s by no means the first) that a language is hard-wired into you while in the womb: its possession does not depend on your perception or relationship with the external world, and does not depend on your possessing the full gamut of post-partum senses. he calls it, I think, Mentalese. Now THAT’S from an atheist materialist! Ah, well, an old “Christer” like myself would say, “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform…” Here are a couple of stanzas from Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality: he thought (and he was by no means the first) that to adapt ourselves to life in the terrestrial sphere we have to FORGET many wondrous things we had already learnt elewhere… Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: But GW and the gang here would reject such a position on the a priori grounds that reason and awareness evolved from matter, and aren’t “givens”. 45
Posted by Guessedworker on August 10, 2010, 09:17 AM | # For Gorb’s benefit, this formulation “happenstance of futurology” is not haphazardly chosen. I was trying to find a form of words to communicate the process of predicting the impact of, and preferences for, randomly-occurring external events, because this is what the brain does (quite probably at the neuronal level, but that is a matter for research). As for esoterism, I have not mentioned it at all, and nor will I. As for Wordsworth, I can certainly read the poem as a lament for the passing of presence in very early childhood to the fallen, mechanistic state of absence and ordinary waking consciousness. I will probably respond to PF via a full article. 46
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 10, 2010, 02:31 PM | # Guessedworker and others may suggest that self-awareness / subjective conscious is emergent from matter but Darwin does not. He believed cognition arose from language, in part because many of the the brain diseases, like schizophrenia, impact language. His speculation has been corroborated by genetic research.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolution-may-favor-schizophrenia-genes
The great ape feels the pin and the pangs of hunger, but these are instinctive things selected for fitness. The ape has intelligence that differs from mankind by degree. The ape however, is not self-aware, even in a pre-conscious sense. In humans language was strongly selected leading to the development of cognition, expression and creativity. 47
Posted by Gorboduc on August 10, 2010, 05:41 PM | # GW: Thanks, mate, but I haven’t benefited much. Don’t understand ANY of this. Perhaps you’ve been impersonated: as you say you never mentioned esoterism. the following little quote which is copied from a posting signed GW and dated Aug 07 2010 at 11.13
must be a tare sown in the MR cornfield by some enemy. My question still stands: MIGHT you be interested in esoterism for the few - say for the remaining .01% of people (your first comment, up above)? DESMOND: NW has put up some interesting videos elsewhere today exhibiting conformist behaviour. At least that’s ONE thing I’m not going to exhibit as far as MR’s prevailing Darwinian orthodoxy goes! The statements about language seem completely unsupported. You ARE taking the matter back as far as Darwin, so it would be good to know just where Darwin discussed schizophrenia. Or even dementia precox, its earlier name. You distance yourself from GW et al. in denying that awareness emerged from matter, affirming its origins in language. So where did language originate? I accuse you of a crypto-teleological intent in your last sentence:
As for its precursor-but-one:
I really can’t see the sequence of events you posit. Please clarify. However, here’s s free gift for you that I just found - just to show I’m fair-minded! The comments are interesting too http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1136 It’s a pro-Darwin essay on his views on music and birdsong as fostering the evolution of language. I know he corresponded with Humboldt, but I haven’t the time at preent to determine if he was interestd in Humboldts’s language theories. Everything’d be fine if I could just attach a definite meaning to the terms “select for” and “adapt”. Both terms seem to involve the development of new characteristics. 48
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 10, 2010, 06:39 PM | # Conformity?! I thought it was contrariness. Darwin on the Beagle:
Not schizophrenia in particular, but “curious cases of brain-disease.“Darwin:
Descent of Man He efforts in the world of psychology are documented in his work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). As for the origin of language, the link you provided lays it out the case quite elegantly.
How pray tell do you swim without getting wet. Language has been imbued with the teleological for thousands of years. The theory of evolution arose a century and a half ago. Surely, you will allow Darwinians the grace of time to reshape the language and its customs. Regarding the ape, you suggested that Laura was self-aware before language because of the feelings of pain and hunger. The ape feels pain and hunger. Is the great ape self-aware? 49
Posted by Guessedworker on August 10, 2010, 06:42 PM | # Desmond, The argument I have been making is matter > mechanicity. It is specifically about the quality of awareness. It is not about its evolutionary origins. 50
Posted by danielj on August 10, 2010, 07:03 PM | # My car works. Because of the hard, ordered, teleologically infused planning of Henry Ford Got no time to contribute anything of value since I’m working lots of hours. I’m happy to lurk for now. Keep up the good work boys. 51
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 10, 2010, 07:11 PM | # Guessedworker, Understood. A question though, if I may, is the quality of awareness or absence (mechanicity) equal in ape and man? The work in schizophrenia implies it may not be.
Matter > mechanicity may be a functional hypothesis for primates but not humans. 52
Posted by Gorboduc on August 10, 2010, 07:56 PM | # Sorry, I put the Laura matter very badly indeed. All sorts of organisms register and avoid pain of course. What I should have said was, how was it recognised that she was dreaming?*) Her lack of “ordinary” consciousness prevented her from using our words, that’s all. We simply don’t know what passed in her mind before she was awakened. I knew Darwin was interested in Humboldts’s travel writings. Danielj has demonstrated that conscious design is needed for a car to function. Well of course that’s OK for the design of the engine: I’d extend the necessity for design to the chemical and physical properties of metals, petroleum, oxygen, trees, in fact the whole shebang including laws on thermodynamics and Boyle’s Law. Oh , and the driver. Odd how teleology keeps entering a non-purposive universe as a valid component. *) Perhaps the ability to dream was only detected after her awakening. But I’m afraid the Darwin pasage isn’t scientific: ( Descent of Man, pp.109-111 of the current Penguin edition) the phrases “would have”, “might have” and “may not?” occur all too often, so what he’s presenting is a wish-fulfilling dramatic imagining rather than a factual account. 53
Posted by Guessedworker on August 11, 2010, 11:26 AM | # Gorb,
I’m not sure what you mean by “esoterism”. But my meaning is quite precise and excludes religion, and its discussion is outside the remit of this blog. Yes, it is likely that a discussion about ontological nationalism will lead to a discussion about Heidegger and being, and that will lead to a discussion about authenticity and inauthenticity, and that to the power of mechanicity and the nature of consciousness, and so on. But we are the customary side of the line in all this, and it is critical that we stay there. Desmond,
I don’t believe direct comparisons can be made between any animal only equipped with developed motor and emotional faculties, whether a primate or not, and Homo sapiens. The seat of consciousness in the latter is focussed principally in the mentational faculty, while in primates and other mammels it is focussed in one or other of the two faculties they possess. How can one make any statement such as “animals are not self-aware” unless one precedes it with an understanding of what self-awareness seated largely in the motor or emotional faculties would look like. What is really being said here is: Man’s mentational faculty, in which his sense of self-awareness is substantially seated, is completely unique in Nature, and his self-awareness with it. Uniqueness of kind, however, does not imply uniqueness of possession. 54
Posted by Desmond jones on August 11, 2010, 06:43 PM | # Guessedworker, The mechanistic crowd, in an effort to combat Cartesian dualism, have always presented animal self-awareness as decidedly human. If it is not then that poses a problem for the matter > universal mechanism crowd. Animals with a unique self-awareness are then in tune with some other natural law(s).
If we are taking that route then a very large assumption is being made, because the opposite, devoid of understanding, may also be true. Uniqueness of kind, may also imply, uniqueness of possession. 55
Posted by Guessedworker on August 11, 2010, 07:40 PM | # Desmond, I am positing the view not that Man or animals or anything else in Nature is mechanical per se, but that, probably by dint of his own evolutionary complexity, Homo sapiens’ mental functioning is susceptible to a declension into mechanicity (which at least momentarily he can, as an individual with the appropriate knowledge and effort, mitigate). To be honest, I am not sure how that meshes with the principal treatises on Man and Nature. This is metaphysics and its connection to the Western philosophical canon is through Heidegger, and even then Grimoire holds that this is invalid. On uniqueness, you have to understand that I do not view the mind as an amorphous blob, thus licencing comparisons between animal blobs and human blobs on the basis that they differ only in scale. The mind consists of faculties with different evolutionary ages, different functions, different methods, different languages, different speeds of operations, and so forth. It may be interesting to compare faculties of animals and humans, where they are commonly possessed. But the total endowments are not directly comparable. 56
Posted by Desmond Jones on August 11, 2010, 08:48 PM | # Guessedworker, Mechanism, apparently, metaphysically, implies determinism in all human events. Is that your meaning? It doesn’t quite make sense that there is a deterioration into mechanism, if that’s what you mean. And determinism suggests causality and thus would be difficult to mitigate. Even if the no direct blob comparison rule is invoked, the issue of language (language or no language) provides considerable means for comparison, if only at the genetic level. 57
Posted by Guessedworker on August 12, 2010, 08:14 PM | # Desmond,
The word I prefer to use, mechanicity, is a characterisation not a definition, if that helps. The mechanicity consists in the running-on of the three mind systems (motor, emotional, mentational) without reference to any central, decision-taking consciousness or even to eachother. The only points of reference are (i) habituation, which is extremely strong, and (ii) the continuing flow of data from without the systems. As Libet confirms, there is nothing else there. So not mechanism as such, but a system evolved for consciousness and will in which something has gone quite catastrophically wrong, and the reverse is taking place. We are both fallen into absence and mechanicity and yet we retain the capacity, since consciousness is intentional (literally - not in the phenomenological sense), to raise ourselves by our own hand and return for a moment at least to that presence and self-awareness which is arguably our rightful estate. I am sorry this probably sounds like I’m being deliberately arcane. I am trying to throw open the doors, but unless those investigating these ideas possess some of the information already, they will inevitably return to personally-held points of reference and the meanings will be lost. Just a fact of life. Next entry: On leadership Previous entry: Six little words |
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I wasn’t trying to keep you honest, I was just noting an odd choice of words.
Posted by Guessedworker on August 04, 2010, 09:02 PM | #
This will be fun.
I don’t think you have done full justice to the argument for materialism > mechanicity. In fact, I think you have been sloppy in the way you have set out the thesis.
Let’s do it, then.
For the purpose of the continuity of the organism, which means the transmission of genetic information through time, the mammalian brain has, at different times, evolved distinct systems operating on different media, burning different fuels, using different languages and working at different speeds. In Homo sapiens one can easily distinguish a system regulating in exquisite detail the internal function of the organism. Perhaps we can call this the Autonomic system. For the purpose of this description I will include the reproductive system in this, though it may profitably be viewed in isolation.
For the purposes of this discussion, however, the really interesting systems are the three which have evolved to predict and model the state of “the thing that is” out there, beyond the organism’s physical boundaries, on which predictions its survival and reproductive chances depend:
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/what_it_is_to_be_human_part_2/
These three systems are the motor system, the emotional system and the mentational system, the latter of which is the primary seat of the internal sensing process we call consciousness, which is also an evolved facility and which can be characterised qualitatively (according to intentionality and attentionality). That is to say, our general state can be characterised as ordinary waking consciousness.
Ordinary waking consciousness is a mechanistic state. This is what is important. It is not important to say that the brain is mechanistic. The brain is an architectural system of systems. Of course it is mechanistic. The point is that ordinary waking consciousness is minimal consciousness. It does not pull together and drive the working of the three systems, which simply run on, doing their work of generating predictions and models of external reality AND, probably in conjunction with autonomic system, doing one other very interesting thing.
This is also an evolved facility, and it is that of ascribing the personal ... self-hood ... to the finely wrought and subtle web of perceptions, associations, memories, habits and personality characteristics that is woven over consciousness and which we see as the all-important “me”. It is an illusion fit, literally speaking, for the non-self-conscious life we ordinarily live, and by which we can perfectly well fulfill our evolutionary function.
Now, if you want to produce a proof that Man can drive his own car and not be perpetually chauffeured by it, that’s fine. But you must start here, with the realisation that 99.99% of humanity lives this mechanistic life, and of the remainder we phantoms of the imagination can barely speak. But never mix the two. Never take lessons from and conclusions about consciousness into the world of the Man-machine. The difference between the two, which begins with attention, is too great to permit of that.