Through a Glass Concretely

September 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Abstract, Cognition, Mirror, Velmans, Max |

It seem likely that the consciousness we have of the world ‘out there’ is not achieved through process of simulation, in which we somehow reproduce an image of the world inside our heads and refer to this image, but rather that the world itself, as presented to the senses, is its own image (Velmans etc). This is not to say however, that we do not produce abstract models of the world, models which are inevitably partial, contingent and purposive. The purposive nature of mental modelling comes from the logic that the ability to produce such models can only have been provided by evolution, and evolutionary parsimony would limit such modelling to the concrete needs of physical survival. Our inability to directly model an image of those elements of the world which are not concrete, which in the complex world of human culture is probably the majority of experience, means that the world is reflected in our mind but the reflection is imperfect. The mirror of consciousness is constructed with ancient tools; embodied cognition and the limited senses that produce it, and these tools cannot model ‘justice’, ‘love’, or any other abstraction literally. The representation we build of the mind through the use of these tools is of a world as seen ‘through a glass darkly’.