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Consciousness and Logic

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Embodied, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments


Among the problems with which philosophy and the various sciences must deal, the mind-body problem is still the most intriguing”

Wolfgang Kohler, The Mind-Body Problem, Dimensions of Mind, Ed. Sydney Hook, 1960

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? We know we have brains, but how do we go from a brain, which is matter (like a rock), to consciousness which appears to be pervasive? There are many more problems, for example, do we all experience the world in a similar way? Is consciousness the same as attention? Is it the same as perception? Is it an epiphenomena? Does consciousness have an effect on the brain? How do we know, other than verbal report, that anyone else is conscious?

None of these questions seem to have straightforward answers. Nor are they the only problems of consciousness. Needless to say that there are great many minds pondering these and many other issues attached to consciousness in great detail. Here however, I thought it might be interesting to ponder just a few of these questions.

The first thing worth noting about consciousness is that it is bounded. In order that consciousness is understood at all, it is worth noting it’s limits. And it is limited in many ways. It’s limits are also the cause of very many of the problems associated with it. For example, you are most probably not conscious of the internet speed of the average computer in Uganda. Neither are you conscious of how long it takes do download a jpeg in Wyoming (unless you are downloading one there right now). In the same vein you are not conscious of the color of the walls in your bathroom unless your bathroom unless you happen to be in your bathroom looking at the wall. Most likely you are in front of a computer looking at a scree reading these words – these are the things in your conscious field right now. And by extension you are also not conscious of another mind beyond the description of its contents that mind may give you. One way or another your mind is limited to its contents and by virtue of that limitation it is fair to say that consciousness has a structure, a structure defined by its content.

Now the problem is that the content of consciousness; the items we can most readily identify with it’s structure have been dismissed as a valid source of evidence. The problem is first, that words are red herrings; we all know that people’s ability to describe their own minds vary. Second, that we don’t know that we’re not talking to an articulate zombie (maybe a computer program with exquisite language abilities). Third,  people who have studied phenomenology don’t seem to be able to agree on what the basic constituents of consciousness in fact are. These problems combined have left much to be desired from first person accounts of consciousness.

But that said there are a few glaring problems with these problems. The problem of the red herring is the first worth tackling. The red herring problem is based on the finding that what people report is not always what is found to be going on cognitively. In the words of Jonathan Schooler of the University of Pittsburgh “You can’t always say what you think or think what you say”. And that leads to a rather interesting problem, on the one hand we know that we just can’t report everything that goes on in our minds. There are very many things we experience that we don’t have words for, on the other hand there are very many things that we express that don’t reflect our thought. For example when people are primed with visual stimuli they may say things biased by the prime, even if it wasn’t exactly what they originally thought. Then there is an additional problem, this refers to thought, but a certain amount of our consciousness is not focal, we have a fringe of awareness; a periphery to our experience that, by virtue of focusing on it is no longer the periphery but the focus of the report.

In other words, words don’t seem to secure much certainty. But this may be a bit of a misnomer. First, we are fortunate that we know a enough about the mind to be able to asses which effects are causing inconsistencies with verbal report. Secondly, much of the problem is associated with cognition and thought, not consciousness. If we are studying consciousness we’re not exactly studying cognition, the two converge but are not the same in the same way that attention is not the same as consciousness. we may be conscious of what we think in the same we are conscious of what we attend to, but we are also have consciousness of much of what we don’t think or to that which we attend. The composites of consciousness include and go beyond these things. Not to mention that both thought and attention are cognitive processes, can be manipulated through controlled conditions and measured. It is in that way that we understand them, but it is also in that way that we can understand consciousness. For the most part when we engage in a study we don’t take one persons word for something, even qualitative studies approach peoples reports thematically across several participants in a study. These ‘themes’ are then examined for consistency. In addition, one of the most important bounds for consciousness is the body. We know that our consciousness is limited, not just by the body but by the brain, and in conjunction with verbal reports, the two provide a crux for the kind of consistency sought when we study the mind.

The basis for the problem discussed here has a long history. The problem of other minds (do other people have minds we can know), the problem of zombies (are we speaking to an automaton) and the Chinese Room Argument (just because a computer answers the questions correctly doesn’t mean it understands Chinese) are all very similar to the problems discussed here. They are all based on the logical difference between a report of experience and that experience itself. Science avoids these issues by systematically examining the problems from the third person. But science, especially the science of the mind also relies on the reports of people, as it should.

Logically the philosophical problems have the same shape, and they can be tackled in about the same way, scientifically. We are free to doubt just about anything. We can justify doubt that a world other than the world we immediately perceive exists. But we would also be radically inconsistent if we did. After all the only clue we have that we make an error in something we perceive is perception itself. It is the more consistent perceptions that we have that inform us about the inconsistencies between other perceptions. Science is little more than a systematic version of this principle. By exploring both the structure of our descriptions and the consistencies between our perceptions (and within our theories) we develop systematic accounts of the world which are then formalized. That is the start of an account of consciousness. But best of all it demonstrates how important consciousness is to its own explanation.As Ned Block of New York University points out:

the starting point for work on consciousness is introspection and we would be foolish to ignore it

But it is ignored. That justifies the claim by Block. Daniel Dennet in his theory of  heterophenomenology is clear that we can’t rely on consciousness, and many have urged for a reduction to the brain in our exploration of consciousness. In somewhat less dogmatic words John Taylor has said;

It is necessary to have a solid information processing framework for the brain before we embark on such an ambitious project even at the qualitative level

In my opinion it’s not that these people are necessarily wrong, it’s that they miss the point of consciousness. Nagel in one of the most significant essays of the 20th century (What is it like to be Bat)has clearly pointed out that a reductionist program has to be based on what it seeks to reduce and that a reductionism that does not capture the subjective character of experience is compatible with its absence. In my opinion this is right, it’s not that we should stat with the brain, it’s that what we understand about the brain in relation to consciousness has to be limited by what we discover in experience. The two in other words are not just joined at the hip, they are essentially dependent if we are going to have a genuinely good characterization of consciousness at all.

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A Relationship With The World

in A Place For Thought, Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Humanism, Images, Logic, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

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.

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An anatomy of the idea

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Art, Belief, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Logic, Psychology, Science, Sleep, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

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.

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De Lunatico Inquirendo

in Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Fear, Frailty, Humanism, Love, Me, Myself and I, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Stories, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

“Any attempt to define what psychopathology is presupposes that we know what normality is. In view of this, any consideration of psychopathology requires an examination of the notions of mental health…..Throughout history, people’s understanding of psychopathology has constantly shifted; different cultures and historical periods have labeled ‘mad’ those whom other times and societies have regarded sane”

Alessandra Lemma in An Introduction to Psychopathology

It has to considered to what extent any one of us has what might be described as sanity and is ‘normal’. I am sure that more than one of us would describe ourselves as normal, other would quite happily demonstrate all the ways in which they are atypical. As a psychology student I remember quite clearly identifying myself with every kind of neurosis we were presented with in the lecture hall. Either way I’m not sure that ‘normality’ is a requisite of either sanity or health. The view to normality presupposes some kind of definition of what a person ought to be in a society to be like everybody else. It is certainly clear to me that this is a nonsense.

One thing is clear, in order that others, with no insight into ourselves regard us as ‘normal’ we are required to do what they do, behave as they behave and feel like they feel. I am confident that this is in no way dissimilar to the opening of almost every dystopian fiction written or realized.

Normality is no doubt useful. Social science uses what is called ‘the normal distribution’ as a means of testing for significance in research. The normal distribution is not a logical or mathematical ‘truth’, it is an empirical observation. It just so happens that when phenomena a measured they tend to fit, on a graph, what looks like a bell shaped curve. That curve also tends to have certain properties that make it identifiable as the normal distribution and, as a consequence it has become a useful constancy to test against for abnormality in a population.

In addition we rely heavily on our ability to predict what the world will be like. Constancy in our environment is an important part of our ability to navigate the environment and surprise can cause a certain anxiety. When the mold is broken, or someone doesn’t quite fit the mold, it is less the actual threat and more the perceived uncertainty that makes us weary. Society has to function, in order that it does we have to rely on the fact that it will do whatever we expect it to do at any given time. In that respect normality and stability are important for us.

However, there is a clear sense in which an absolute need for constancy is pathological. If one take people with neurotic dispositions for example, they may for all purposes live a normal life, however, the threat of ambiguity and uncertainty can be too much. Often times people with anxious personality types abhor what they do not know and are quite willing to impose on their environment their own versions of what is normal (and hence good). There is a clear sense in which dogmatism is an example of this.

The desire to fit the mold, to inhibit the passions in order that we are ‘normal’ is neurotic. It is a function of neurotic minds that the world is black and white according tot heir ideas. Once boundaries for understandable behavior are set they are in effect set in stone. But to what extent does this reflect real life?

I would like to take some time making the issue as unclear as possible. Not for any other reason than to show what lack of clarity the issues has for me en-route to maybe discovering some way of thinking about it.

What is clear is that normality and sanity are in effect synonymous on the one hand but, they in another sense they can quite clearly been seen to stand in opposition to each other. In as much ’sanity’ is concerned there is a synonymy with normal function. However, at the same time there is an equal discrepancy as far as the desire to be normal is manifest. In this latter sense, it is almost as if the very desire for normalcy is in and of itself a kind of insanity, a state of mind that constricts the very freedom of spirit and the individuality of expression that makes the human psyche what it is, a socially creative agent.

It is that sense that true insanity seems the most manifest. I found the following definition of a Lunatic online:

LUNATIC, persons. One who has had an understanding, but who, by disease, grief, or other accident, has lost the use of his reason. A lunatic is properly one who has had lucid intervals, sometimes enjoying his senses, and sometimes not.

I wonder however, to how many people who are not ‘lunatics’ this definition would apply. Personally I am prone to periods of dejection, dysthemia and depression. I have experienced pains in life and am sure that I will continue to experience pain and suffering during my life. However, I have also experienced wonderful highs and in no way do I feel abnormal in this. I don’t think there is anything atypical about the grief that I’ve had. What is more, I am quite sure that my senses have not always served me well. I continue to learn that I am prone to serious flaws in my reasoning but, at the same time would be loath to consider myself a lunatic.

It is worth noting that society as a whole has its own values regarding sanity and insanity. I don’t doubt that there is a regimentation to our own society that imposes restrictions on the limits to which free expression is possible. What those limits are and how they are defined is in my mind a serious question.

A typical response might be that if an individual finds it hard to cope in a society, if an individual is in fact suffering then they may qualify for treatment. This raises to parallel questions. The first is, to what extent is the individual responding to the way in which the society finds them, secondly, to what extent is a certain amount of suffering a prerequisite of life. The point I am making is not only the the world in which we live seems to make almost unreasonable demands on people and their capacity for happiness that I for one have never seen, but at the same time, to what extent are we really living in a kind of dystpopia of which we are in fact unaware?

Our virtues are not defined by our humanity in as much as they defined by our success. And by that success we are quite ready to bleed our humanity. what about our own society as whole? What about the whole of humanity? Is it sane? In early societies there is no doubt that life was hard. There is less doubt that peoples lives were shorter, more was expected of them and the consequences of not submitting to the group were, without any doubt severe. There is no question that the freedom we have to express ourselves in the modern world is a wonderful aspect of our lives today. Within cities that are worlds unto themselves live and breath forests of people, all interwoven, disconnected and striving for survival within the forest. Some people enjoy great freedom, however many also suffer great inequity. Most definitions of sanity have the terms ’soundness of mind’, again, a normative definition. I wonder though, is it so wonderfully normal?

There is little doubt that a society needs to function. In order that it functions it is clear that certain values for typical behavior are set. Anarchy, both of mind, people and a nation at large is in no way different to a state of perfect entropy. A state in which the informational, structural and functional value of the system in question is beyond use. However, at the same time there does seem a human danger that exists in the opposite direction. That danger is that we consolidate our horizons so narrowly that the essence of humanity and human creativity are inhibited to the extent that society ossifies.

There is ample evidence both in historical literature and in modern academic literature to suggest that we take for granted what we believe to be clear cut mental conditions. However there is also something about the very concept of sanity that is an anathema to freedom of mind and of spirit. And without suggesting a better alternative, I would at least like to pose a warning. That as a society of people mutually engaged in the single purpose of working towards a better future, we consider our relationship with the insane and welcome the prospect of difference, if not for the very reason that the minds that appear so different may be the reality that we need in our default to normalcy.

I worked in a psychiatric hospital after I left university. There was little doubt that the patients I worked with would not have been able to manage on their own in the world. However, one thing that struck the strongest cord with me. One that still sounds loud today is that in between the incoherence of that time, between the spoken lines I felt a clear reflection of truth. When the patients were upset they weren’t able to articulate they complaints in a way that made sense in relation to the physical world. But what they meant to say were truths that we as wardens in the hospital were certainly not prepared to accept.

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Homo Poeta & The Idenity Of Thought

in Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Embodied, Humanism, Logic, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 2 comments

“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 called identity theory.

Identity theory doesn’t appear to pose any real problems. In fact if anything it appears to solve a few. Unlike Berkeley'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 Descartes dualism. 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.

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