A tantalizing part of experience is the noise we don’t experience; both the visual and auditory noise in the environment is immense. The environment is an almost chaos. Light, shapes and sounds; all varied and complex. It is natural to think of shapes as formed, ready made for minds to acquiesce. We see ‘a table’ or ‘chair’ or ‘face’, and that is it. From the chaos we see an ordered world. That is amazing.
Furthermore within the order we can navigate, making sense of the fauna and flora of our environments. There is a degree to which the impressionists had it right however, there is a a sense in which their paintings are closer to the reality of perception than our very own eyes. After all we are closer to light than to objects (physically speaking).
Color perception offers a simple illustration. When we see a series of different colors the colors remain constant despite variability in environmental conditions such as luminance. This is known as color constancy and this is thought to be achieved because the brain reads the ratios of difference between the wavebands of light from one surface to the next. As wavelengths vary between the surfaces we are looking at, the brain ‘reads’ the ratio differences between light from surfaces (which stays the same irrespective of light variations) allowing the colors we see to remain constant. In other words the brain computes color properties from ratios which, when we think about the brain as fleshy stuff is just amazing.
We don’t just perceive and navigate, we order the world too. How many of us, moving into a new home hang up pictures ‘where they belong’? The world is not just a thing we receive, it is something we act on and try to control. Our brains, human brains that is, are immense in their ability to both make inferences from the available data and and then structure the world according to our needs. We are the only species known to use tools to make tools. That too is amazing.
Within evolutionary theory there is a not insignificant idea that the more variable a trait is the less likely it is to have adaptive value. The argument goes that truly adaptive changes quickly loose their variability as the remaining population have acquired them, thus leaving previously adaptive traits fully absorbed by a species; they become a part of the total makeup of the species. Although the assumption has been contested the overarching principle has held as a rule.
The point is that there is a base level at which we all operate on the world with the same bodies. Each an agent coming to the world ready to make something meaningful of it with the same demands. It was Darwin who noticed that across cultures facial reactions to emotions have an invariance. To the extent that we as a species have invariant demands, we too have structured responses. In short, we see and act on a world we see that is, in part at least, not just composed of the world, but of our response to it. In as much as that is the case, the world in which we live is our construction.
For me personally, it is not just that we are conscious that is amazing, it is that we are conscious agents with a bid to our futures. We live in reciprocity with the environment in such a way that the environment serves a function in an almost Hegelian dialectic, but rather than being an historical and transcendental metphysic, the relations are immediate and physical. Rather than being governed by an end point that is teleological in some as yet unperceived way, it is itself evolving between the myriad minds that people the world, somehow finding solutions to life as it emerges. In all its detail, that is magical.
Living day to day we sometimes forget the significance of our brain are with respect to the ideas that make up our worlds. In our brain are a considerable number of neurons with significantly more connections. Odd as it may sound, there is nothing like the world in the brain, nor are there any clear ideas, just some gray and white mushy stuff. How your brain and my brain know a table is a table or an idea is an ideas is therefore puzzling.
Of course as science has progressed the questions have been framed differently. The way in which the questions have been framed has become and index for understanding how we relate to meaning in the world; understanding thought and the relationships ideas have to each other is important if we want to understand how we relate to our cultural environment. Knowing how our brains work will help us to frame ourselves in the conceptual world of memes and archetypes.
A good place to start to think about our dreams. In our dreams our experiences bear little resemblance to the actual world. But when we dream we are as good as conscience. For all intents and purposes we see, move and exist in a world, albeit a dream world. The question is how? A lot of work has gone into trying to explain ‘how matter becomes imagination’ (to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite scientists).
To start to understand we must return to when we are awake; there is distribution of activity going on in our heads. Memories encoded across regions of the brain are activated, not just to explicitly remember something, but to relate what we hear to the bank of information already encoded in our brains. Those semantic networks that become active reciprocally influence the way in which we encode the environment, we thus further perceive the world and our relation to it in relation to the memeories already banked up in our brains.
Priming offers a rather good illustration. If we are asked to study a list of words, and we are then given syllables and asked to complete them we are more likely to complete the syllables as the words that were in the list we studied. On a semantic level, if we are ‘primed’ with a word like doctor, we would be more likely to think ‘nurse’ than say ‘telephone’, why, because they are semantically related. Similarly, researchers have found that ‘priming’ people with aggressively related stimuli will get people to interpret others behavior during competitive games as more aggressive and will similarly trigger a more aggressive response than one would otherwise have seen.
One other important things about sleeping is that when we sleep our minds have a chance to encode and rehearse information that was important during the day, that is as well as process things that may have been on our minds. The same semantic networks that are active during the day are active in our sleep minus the real world to order them. Of course this is a rather simple account. But it’s the principle that’s important. The principle is that the world that we experience is related to active constellations of information in our brains, formed by the activity between neurons that structure and encode that information. That activity has an impact on how we act on the world, and of course that has an impact on our experiences, which further influences the world that influences us.
As human beings, as minds a significant part of that activity is ideational. A significant portion of our experience is formed through ideas, concepts and semantic activity. Things mean things (if I am permitted a circularity).
And that is the significance of meaning. The meaning we find in things drives us. We relate to meaning of things. Jung in his book The Science of Mythology drew this point out (albeit psychoanalytically), and if we think of the way in which we use representational mediums, like deserted islands (Deleuze), or the significance of a Brand in the modern world, we come close to understanding the significance of ideas in our lives. But they run deeper.
The concept of a schema is important in understanding the same point. Schema, or patterns that represent some part of the world don’t come in-built like the ability to recognize faces (or like the structures that contain the schemata). The concept of the archetype is of this form as is the concept of the meme. They share enough similarities to be synonyms for each other. That is they are both referents for ideas.
Combining all of the elements in this picture we can begin to form an understanding of our relationship with the world of ideas. Ideas, represented often as objects, have significance by virtue of our relation to them. The relationship between the objects we encounter, the ideas that we form them and the ideas we get learn in society act as referents, providing the environment with a sense of significance. That significance drives our relationship with our environment: pressing forward en-mass the development of ideas contained in that environment shape a shematic of ideational content pressing us with meaning. Thankfully this is a partial picture. One I hope develops the importance of ideas in the world as factors in our relationship with it. One that can help us better conceptualize why some ideas work and some don’t as we creativity develop an image of the world we’re in.
“What if language closely related to poetic diction were indispensable for a science of man…?” Medard Boss, 1954
“The intuitionist mathematician proposes to do mathematics as a free vital activity of thought. For him mathematics is a production of the human mind. He uses language,…only for communicating thoughts…Such a linguistic accompaniment is not a representation of mathematics; still less is it mathematics itself”Arend Heyting, 1964
“To think is the same as the thought that it is”Parmenides, approx 520-450 BC
Thought is thought to be identical with the brain. All mental processes and therefore the contents of consciousness, are brain processes. That is calledidentity theory.
Identity theory doesn’t appear to pose any real problems. In fact if anything it appears to solve a few. UnlikeBerkeley's reduction of all categories to mind, identity theories pose hope for increasing our understanding of the mind through a materialist research program of the brain. Consciousness, the fundamental ’stuff’ that philosophers and scientists have tried to understand appears to be no less and no more than a distributed property of the brain or its activity, possibly an epiphenomenon, a mere consequence. In that sense the only understanding left to understanding the mind is understanding the brain.
The truth is not so convenient. The contents of consciousness don’t just include tables and chairs. Consciousness includes parts of society and culture; however one wishes to understand either society and culture, one must appreciate its existence at least. Furthermore we all respond to what we are conscious of in society. That act of appreciation requires cognizance of what it is that is appreciated. It therefore falls within the mind and a part of either is therefore contained within the contents of consciousness.
If that is true it is then true that parts of society can be explained through brain processes. Therefore, in understanding the mind a part of the phenomenology we ought to be concerned to understand includes the meaning of the world that we derive in relation to it. If we therefore want to understand our place in the world we cannot exclude from our understanding the world that is contained in experience.
However, if we do try to understand the mind only through the brain we will be in danger of excluding from understanding a large portion of what needs explanation. Formalizing the science of the mind in such a way that it is paradigmatic that the ‘meaning’ (and ‘identity’) we achieve from the world is eliminated from understanding by the act of reduction to the brain leaves out a component part of humanity: the act of formalization ossifies in our minds a paradigm that can only reinforce itself. A paradigm used to explain and understand phenomena has a certain shape (some might say a logical structure) and that shape determines legitimate and illegitimate forms of explanation (including the language that can be used to do the explaining). In identity theory the only legitimate explanations for mentality are brain processes.
The danger is that truth about the world becomes relative to the formalization. Social reality for centuries in our culture, and in every other extant culture too, has been a component part of personal identity. People just are conscious of the milieu in which they exist.
There are people in South America for example that believe their prayers hold the world in balance. They are conscious of the travails of modern life and the concomitant brutality of the modern world. The belief is not implicit. It is explicit and shared, furthermore the discrepancy between their perceptions of the modern world and their values reinforces their beliefs.
One need not believe that global warming will be put off by these peoples prayers in order that one consider the importance that this belief is shared. It is significant that for them the belief is reality, just as much as it is a reality for us that democracy is the best form of government. It is the fact that beliefs can and are explicitly shared that makes them meaningful inter-personally. One just needs to consider cases in which they aren’t shared to understand the point. Shared beliefs are not just objects of consciousness, they areschema from which the world within which we operate is interpreted. For the most part when we don’t share beliefs with someone we are faced with either adjusting our beliefs or trying to adjust the world to fit them.
What I am in effect saying is that much of what frames our minds can be identified with the world outside of our bodies, not just brain processes. To ultimately understand aspects of the mind, society & culture through the brain, we will have to situate the brain in the world. The mental world has to be seen in relation to the social world in which each persons’ mind has a stake on behalf of his or her organism. For that reason beliefs that are shared and the causes of those beliefs are important to the inquiry into the mind, it’s development and the nature of its experience.
We can quite easily conceptualize emotions, perceptions and our attention to the world through the brain without inferring the world. A description of brain processes is enough. That said, there are human concerns that are important to our understanding of consciousness. For that reason a science of human concern is needed in order to compliment the biological and physical sciences that dominate our academic biases. In effect we must understand consciousness as social and cultural too. We must shift consciousness into the world.
This would not be at all relevant if it was not for the division that Descartes made between Res Extensa and Res Cogitans. One, the physical stuff is extended and the other mental stuff has no extension according to Descartes. We still operate under this conceptual shadow today. We understand the world as that which is extended away from the mind, in front of the eyes. The mind, by being shifted to the brain is only hiding the true problem of consciousness under a blanket. By ignoring consciousness as a category that is centrally important to its own physical explanation we are paying lip service to Descartesdualism. The point has been made again and again that our conceptual framework needs to be able to include mind and brain together in order to understand both: In the words of Sayre (1976):
“If one thinks of the mind, with Descartes, as charachterized essentially by thought but as lacking extension, and thinks of the physical as thoughtless but essentially extended, then the two domains are rendered conceptually incommensurable”
This same point has been iterated several times (see Richard Rorty ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature‘, more recently Max Velmans has articulated a view that contrasts with the implicit dualism of contemporary western thought). It is only in the fringes that the water is beginning to leak through the walls of our conceptual framework. But not explicitly. Neuroscience as a discipline has linked cognition to movement and understanding the mind as essentially embodied signifies a paradigm shift that is centrally important.
If we do place the world in the mind and reciprocally, place the mind in the world, the implications for understanding a vast array of phenomena with what we already know will be immense. Phenomena as different as poetry and mathematics will have a home in the same vessel and in some sense be reducible to it. Poetry, an ancient form of human diction seen as an expression of the mind and mathematics seen as a vital language for describing the world are valid as categories of mental phenomena (albeit doing very different things). There are no ontological issues raised by seeing the entire world as conceived by our minds and relative to them.
When Wittgenstein remarked that if a lion could speak we could not understand him he made a serious point about the nature of communication. What we communicate is not only couched in language, it is created by minds to which the communication is relevant. That does not mean by any stretch that what is communicated is false. Measurement of the external world may be universal, and numbers may have different symbols on different planets, but the application of measurement is still transferable across species who use it. What concerns us here is the part that allows the measurement itself to be understood as relative to the species conducting the measurement.
In this vein of thought identity theory need not be considered false in order that it include consciousness. It’s contents as a unit relevant to its own explanation is not necessarily viciously circular. On one side of the equation may sit terms representing experienced phenomena (x) and on the other the language of materialism/physicalism (z). In my own mind it is what happens in between that allows the equivalence of the two to be understood. That is the important question that ought to be raised.
What is significant to this maneuver however, is that each set of terms are understood as relevant to each other. For the identity to work it is not just the case that the entire world is reduced to the brain, the reciprocal relation between the brain and the world has to hold also. That makes the human mind a category of the world in which it is situated as something to be understood, understood that is, as a part of a larger system that includes the entirety of human experience as a category for explanation.
The physical world is causally closed. The statement is so broad and yet so pointed that understanding the implications in their entirety is impossible. Yet the meaning of the statement needs to be understood, and by everyone. We have all managed to apply in our own beliefs some parts of the tenet but, unfortunately not all. If we were to understand and apply all implications of that one single statement “The physical world is causally closed” our entire attitude to life, the planet and many of the choices we make would be radically different.
The statement that the physical world is causally closed needs some explanation. In essence it means that all of the phenomena we see in the world are caused by other things we find in the world and that the effects of all physical causes will be found in the world. This supposition is taken from the finding that the total of energy and momentum have always been conserved wherever they have been measured.
A more prosaic example comes from Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier who found that in chemical reaction matter may change its state but it’s total mass will remain the same. Rust is a good example, when iron rusts it also gets heavier because iron and oxygen combine.
The word natural has a long history and has come to be used in many contexts. Advocates of herbal remedies cite that their medicines are natural, people talk about homosexuality as unnatural and we talk about ‘the natural course of action’. However, understanding physical closure permits us to say that each of these statements are nonsense if they are taken even remotely literally. ‘Natural’ as term has its origins in Latin and Greek and roughly in Middle English was used to mean ‘in accordance with nature‘. It is in the sense that the word is used in Lucretius’s epic poem ’De Rerum Natura‘ that it is used here. That is as a part of the property that things posses by virtue of existence and not as a moral quantifier or proof of goodness.
Not only is it the case that there are a great number of poisons in the ‘natural’ world, it is also the case that it is literally impossible for homosexuality to be unnatural. More broadly speaking, given physical closure all phenomena that we see are natural.
The natural sciences ought to encompass the investigation of all phenomena. However, they have come to mean (through the correct application of the term) the physical sciences (otherwise known as the Naturwissenschaften as opposed to the Geisteswissenschaften, or social sciences). In essence however, the approach employed by all sciences can be called naturalistic and within the present conception of the universe all of the phenomena contained within it are natural.
If everything said thus far is true then it is meaningful to make statements like ‘photography is natural’ and ‘pollution is natural’ also. Most people, will have a harder time digesting statements like these as opposed to the statement ‘homosexuality is unnatural’.
The difficulty lies in an innate bias. It also highlights our need to guard ourselves from nonsense. The bias comes not just from ambiguity about the word natural but the fact that we have come to assume that pairing the word ‘natural’ with a statement gives that statement moral significance. That is in effect the nonsense which I refer to.
The point is that everything that does occur, occurs in the world, if it occurs in the world then it is natural. The flip-side of the coin is that just because something is natural (or can be found in nature) it doesn’t make it either right or give it any special moral significance. It was a natural event that wiped out the dinosaur. That fact doesn’t make the potential extinction of the human race any more palatable, I happen to be quite attached to the interests of humanity.
There are a number of implications of the discussion so far that ought to be considered. In connexion with this post however, my interest is in the world that we live in.
It is no platitude to say that wherever we are we obey the laws of physics. Gravity is a pervasive feature in all of our lives despite the fact that most of us take little time to notice the effect it has on us. But existing in the natural world is not just about obeying laws such as the law of gravity. The natural world is as much about living in a complex system such as our environment. What is more the point about natural phenomena is that we are embedded within those systems and are component part of them.
In effect we are a part of a much wider system and that system houses us. However, much like gravity we seem to be too well acquainted with our environment. So well acquainted in fact that it doesn’t seem to make significant difference to us if we destroy it in piecemeal fashion. Of course we don’t experience a great deal of pollution. Nor do we experience the effects of pollution immediately. Environmentalism is concerned with a concept and by virtue of being a concept it is far removed from us.
But that doesn’t change that fact that the destruction of the system that we live in could be the destruction event of our species. By extension this also suggests the possibility that another species one day in the far future will refer to us in making the same arguments. As human beings we have used our imaginations to great use. From migrating bands of hominid to static cities populated by millions of people living not on subsistence but beyond necessity our species has achieved a lot in a short space. However, it is a part of that achievement that we can see that our actions now have, within the closed physical system that is the world we live, far reaching consequences.
The point is this: Given that we live in the natural environment, (and I see no option but giving ourselves to that fact) a certain clarity of thought is required about our lives within that context. So far we have allowed ourselves an incredible amount of fuzzy thinking on the subject. However, if we are to save the planet we have to divorce ourselves from all of the immediate luxuries of existence (such as gravity) and understand that as necessary as gravity is, so are the effects of our actions on the future of our species.
We are unfortunately predisposed to being told what we want to hear from politicians (lest we don’t vote for them). However, in order that a concerted effort is made by all, that effort will have to be concerted and universal. That means saying a number of unpopular things and effort on all our parts. It means that developing countries will have to develop within the context of change that is uncertain and in developed countries that incentive will have to be on the part of survival. It is after all survival that we are after and survival can only take part within a physical system that we know can sustain us. That system is closed and that leaves a great deal of responsibility on our shoulders.
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time…..I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist…….nor do I conceive what I is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity”
David Hume: A Treatise On Human Nature
“1. The world is all thst is the case”
“1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Assuming physics to be broadly speaking true, can we know it to be true, and, if the answer is in the affirmative, does this involve knowledge of other truths besides those of physics?”
Bertrand Russell – Physics and Experience
To think about consciousness is difficult, moment to moment it is the one thing of which we are not aware, that is despite its unique relationship with all with which are aware. Of course from time to time we will comment on how we feel or what we see but in none of those statements are we even implicitly referring to our own consciousness. But without it, we wouldn’t have the awareness that would make any of those statements remotely intelligible.
The words here as they are read by you, the sense of your hand guiding you, the sense of the back of your neck. These are not things, they exist as constellations of activity in your brain. They are qualia, aspects of consciousness. The sense of having a word on the tip of your brain, that’s also consciousness. But, and it would be unnatural to do anything but this; we conflate each of those experiences with the things they are experiences of; they are in fact just mental activity.
Of course your hand and your neck exist, as do these words. However, the point remains; between you and your experience is a world taken for granted. That world is an interpretation, and reality, once you’ve been removed from it is something quite different to what we interpret. Cut open a human brain and there is nothing that looks like a word or a book or even a desk lamp, there is a fleshy organ and in that organ millions of connections infer not just the lamp, the book and the words, they infer you reading it as well.
Given that this is the case, and this is the case, what certainty do we have that we are even really real? That is a question that has been asked and examined and attempts have been made to answer with varying degrees of satisfaction. Ultimately however, each answer has led to a regress of absurdity, leading to more and more questions at every turn. One of my favourite answers used to be the idea that it is by virtue of the coherence of evidence that we can be sure that the world exists, and my favourite retort; we could also be be coherently wrong about all of those facts as well.
To make matters worse; physics tells us that the world that we see is in fact an inference and a relatively bad one at that. The table, the book and even the ink on the page that make up the words are made up of billions of electrons buzzing about, and between them a lot of empty space.
The issue it seems to me that makes us nervous is that we like to feel certain about things. Novelty is always nice when it doesn’t threaten you, but when you can’t be sure that you’re really reading these words on this screen because you may in fact not exist, or these words may only exist by virtue of your thinking them, then the uncertainty is a little more daunting.
To be certain of everything you believe is in reality a probabilistic nightmare. Desire for certainty is a necessary disease of the mind, it is the anxiety of uncertainty that lies behind neurotic disposition, and that is the point. How many nightmares have been caused in the world because one group of people have killed to defend one false proposition against another? How much of history is marred by sacrifices made in the name of ideas that today we’re certain are parochial, ridiculous even. Science itself is in part built around the idea that it’s central authority lies in its own ability to falsify itself. And how many ideas that we take to be the fabric of reality today will our future generations inquire with an equal humour? But that said the fabric of what we take to be the essence of the world, the values and assumptions we make in the simplest of our observations seem unavoidable.
That single impasse, the impasse of pragmatism has shifted debate from the quest for truth to the nature of attitude. Progress, it seems, is less to do with what we know than our attitude towards what we think we know.
And yet we certainly will, and we certainly do take our own existence for granted. But we fail to take for granted the same sense of existence in others, or even the world in which we live. The distance between us and the minds of others, those minds who share the uncertainty of reality with us are at a greater distance from us than the least tenable of our beliefs.
That is an irony, and it’s a bad one too; the further away someone is from us the easier it is to forget the one thing they certainly do share with us, that is humanity, consciousness and a mind. It is all of the minds in this world taken together that give is the most coherent picture of the world we can have, it therefore seems viciously illogical that we are also so capable of standing at such a distance from people who for all the superficial differences are in essence the same as us. Most importantly, people who share a world with us and have as much right to a picture of existence as us.
Within the depths of those minds are the anxieties of existence that drive each of us. For some however that existence is in fact desperate, and in a society that can give anything to anyone most people struggle with the very fact of existence. That is madness for a rational society.
But as much as we would like to believe it is the case, society is not rational. Of course the law, the government and the values that we share preserve some kind of rationality. The concept of human rights, international diplomacy and democracy are in effect standards of rationality that have developed and evolved over time, they have been made possible through history; even though many of these ideas were born of inequity at one time or another. But there is a deeper and more significant point, one that leads to an absurdity that is unavoidable, just like art, language and any other form of expression, each of these institutions are born of human minds and shape human reality and in as much as that is the case, and again, that is the case, they are only capable of as much reason as we are in using them.
“THE HOPE OF SATISFACTION TO OUR MORE HUMAN DESIRES – THE HOPE OF DEMONSTRATING THAT THE WORLD HAS THIS OR THAT DESIRABLE ETHICAL CHARACTERISTIC – IS NOT ONE WHICH, SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, A SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY CAN DO ANYTHING WHATEVER TO SATISFY”
&
“THE GOOD WHICH IT CONCERNS US TO REMEMBER IS THE GOOD WHICH IT LIES IN OUR POWER TO CREATE – THE GOOD IN OUR LIVES AND IN OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE WORLD. INSISTENCE ON THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL REALISATION OF THE GOOD IS A FORM OF SELF ASSERTION, WHICH, WHILE IT CANNOT SECURE THE EXTERNAL GOOD WHICH IT DESIRES, CAN SERIOUSLY IMPAIR INWARD GOOD WHICH LIES IN OUR POWER, AND DESTROY THAT REVERENCE TOWARDS FACT WHICH CONSTITUTES BOTH WHAT IS VALUABLE IN HUMILITY AND WHAT IS FRUITFUL IN THE SCIENTIFIC TEMPER.”
Among the most difficult issues faced by humans in science and in philosophy is consciousness. The problem with consciousness is that is has many sides to it. On the one hand there is the very difficult problem understanding what it is. Is is a stuff like say an electron is something i.e. matter, or is it it’s own stuff? That is the problem of substance. Then there’s another problem, that is: how is it that we are conscious?
Wittgenstein remarked “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”. It’s worth noting that the insight was not Wittgenstein’s alone. Xenophanes (approx 400 BC) stated “if oxen, horses…. had hands or could paint…
my own exploring of my identity through sound and vision. I put these short videos together in 2009 as an experiment, trying aesthetically express my sensibilities. Each of the three depicts a different aspect of me. As usual I am always grateful for peoples views and ideas.
A tantalizing part of experience is the noise we don’t experience; both the visual and auditory noise in the environment is immense. The environment is an almost chaos. Light, shapes and sounds; all varied and complex.
Knowing how the world and our own consciousness of it will help us to frame ourselves in relation to the concepts that inhabit our world. The physical world is important if we want to understand that other word we inhabit, the world of ideas.
