3-D Mind

April 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The experience of being human seems to be intimately connected to the physics of the space in which that being feels itself to be embedded. There is an uncanny match between the formulation of space articulated in the axioms of naive physics, roughly approximating Cartesian/Newtonian physics, and the feeling of being.This feeling of being might be described as a sense that one’s body is a single object with a clear boundary, existing at a single location in an extended 3-dimensional space, a feeling which is also extended to the mind, and the feeling that one is a singular entity, reasonably whole and separated in space from other entities, exactly here, precisely now. Studies on the early development of knowledge in babies and children (Baillergeon, 1994; Spelke, 1998) seem to indicate that the cognitive and perceptual apparatus driving these feelings is hard-wired. We know, however, that this perception of space and being is inaccurate. We learn from particle physics that these solid bodies are mostly empty space, our materiality consisting only of widely separated energetic particles blinking randomly in and out of existence. We learn that space itself is not as it appears, but is n-dimensional, curved, and worm-infested. We know that matter and energy are interchangeable. We know that consciousness and intention does not precede action but rather follows it, like a slick politician riding the wave of public opinion (Libet 2004), and we are told that subjectivity itself is an ideological effect, our most phenomenologically real feeling of self constructed by the projections and pressures of culture (Althusser 1998).

The degree of correspondence between Newtonian/Cartesian space and the intuitive understanding of being-in-space as captured in the informal axioms of naive physics requires explanation. I am suggesting that this correspondence is an inevitable feature of the embodied nature of naive experience and the largely embodied nature of scientific enquiry up until the time of Newton and Descartes. When the unaided human sensory system is the primary tool for examining the world, the model of the world is likely to reflect the experienced model of being.

Althusser, L. (1998) “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses.” Eds. J. Rivkin & M. Ryan. Literary theory: An anthology. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. pp. 294-304.

Baillargeon, R. (1994). “How Do Infants Learn About the Physical World.” Current Direction is Psychological Science 3(5).

Libet, B. (2004). Mind time: the temporal factor in consciousness. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Spelke, E. S. (1998). “Nativism, empiricism, and the origins of knowledge.” Infant Behavior and Development 21(2): 181.

And now I am taking my 3-D body to the bar….

Posted in Althusser, Baillergeon, Conference Abstract, Libet, Benjamin, Phenomenology, Space, Spelke, Elizabeth, Up | No Comments »

Non-conscious Emotional Steering

October 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Some unconscious processes can be learnt, and some appear to be innate. Innate unconscious processes include the various tenets of Folk Physics and the intuitive knowledge possessed by babies and infants identified by Spelke, Baillargeon et al. Among those non-conscious processes which are not innate but are acquired through interaction with the world, some can be learnt through ordered rational processes of self-instruction, learning to ride a bike for example, and some are learnt ‘covertly’ through experiences of being in the world which we may not consciously examine but which nevertheless construct our worldview. All of these unconscious processes, learnt and innate, covert and overt, have an affect upon our actions, and on our emotional engagement with those actions. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that such processes (and the beliefs which are formed through them) determine our emotional engagement with action, and this emotional engagement ’steers’ the action into directions which correspond with the dictates of non-conscious processes and beliefs. Going against the steer of the unconscious is experienced as doing something which doesn’t ‘feel right’.

Posted in Baillergeon, Emotion, Intuition, Naive Physics, Spelke, Elizabeth, Unconscious | No Comments »

Adaptive Attention

December 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Studies by Spelke and Baillargeon have established that babies and very young children look longer at events and objects which are unusual than at those which are behaving ‘normally’. This finding is used extensively to investigate what expectations about the world are hard-wired into the human brain and which are the results of acculturation. It has been found, for example, that babies look longer at events which seem to contradict the permanence of material object (in contrast to earlier experiments by Piaget), implying that the basic heuristic ‘objects persist’ is present at birth. Other findings suggest that such elements of knowledge as (Newtonian) gravity, inertia, momentum, agency, and energy conservation also appear to be built into the repertoire of innate human understanding. (This particular cluster of ‘facts’ seems further to underpin the Innate, Naive, or Folk Physics described by Smith, Hayes, etc).

The success of this experimental method depends upon the fact that babies pay greater attention to events that seem to contradict such ‘facts’. This behaviour, in which the unusual and the unexpected is awarded greater attentional resources that the usual and the expected itself requires some explanation. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology it is perhaps inevitable that, given the existence of any kind of innate or default model of the world, then an animal which was able to quickly detect variations from this model would have greater survival potential. After all, it tends to be the unusual events of the world that kill you, or conversely, provide rare opportunities for enhanced survival possibilities.

This tendency to be attracted toward and to pay preferential attention to unusual stimuli not only plays out within the field of visual attention (although given the massive processing power awarded by the brain to the visual system it is undoubtedly dominant). Unusual sounds, or combinations of sounds, attract the attention of babies also, as do irregular and unpredictable patterns of touch, e.g. tickling. It may be that the ‘invisible’ or ‘default’ actions, sights and sounds, those rhythms and patterns which do not demand attention reflect some aspects of the natural environment which our ancestors recognised non-consciously as unthreatening; the low murmur of a calm sea, the regular creak of breeze-blown trees, the predictable movement of clouds across the sky. Events which varied from these patterns would indicate the presence of unpredictability and possible threat; the faster rhythms and discontinuities of storm-blown trees, the crashing of a high sea, the dysrhythmia that signals agency and human or animal intentionality.

It would seem logical that, in addition to attracting and holding the attention of the senses literally, through the extended capture of eye-gaze direction for example, unusual stimuli would attract and hold the attention of mind; a kind of metaphorical gaze in which cognition is ‘focussed’ or ‘concentrated’ upon some non-standard aspect of the environment. Difference, and what Bateson (1979) refers to as ‘news of difference’, should be one of the most long-standing occupants of mind and consciousness.

Posted in Attention, Baillergeon, Bateson, Gregory, Consciousness, Evolution, Naive Physics, Physics, Spelke, Elizabeth | No Comments »