Poetic Dualism

July 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Despite the best attempts by philosophy and science to deny the dualism which is such a part of folk science, a tendency unfairly attributed to Descartes, but actually deeply entrenched in the human psyche, such dualism still dominates much debate. As Paul Bloom suggests, we may be ‘natural born dualists’. Efforts to collapse this duality, whether it be termed as a duality of mind and body, or brain and mind, or matter and spirit, have tended not to provide an integrated model, but simply to deny the existence of one or other of the terms.

Part of the distinction between these terms, and which is used in the suppression of supporters of the one by supporters of the other, is the language which is used to talk about the concepts which form each part of the dualism. There is a perceived difference in the type of discourse which represents the brain, for example, and that which represents the mind. The former is objective, noumenal, scientific, whereas the latter is subjective, phenomenal, poetic.

Recent developments in the study of cognition, however, suggests that this distinction is largely unsupportable.Work carried out by Lakoff, Johnson, etc indicates that the only epistemological distinction to be made is between concepts which are concrete and those which are abstract, not between those concepts which are objective and those which are subjective. Concrete concepts are those which are directly available to the senses, which have tangible and physical attributes. Abstract concepts, which make up most of our thoughts and language, are not available to the senses and can therefore only be represented in cognition through a process of metaphorical mapping.Given that most conceptualisation about both the brain and the mind is necessarily abstract, the mind not being directly available to the senses, then all discourses on the subject of the mind are necessarily structured through metaphor.

Any integration between discourses, if such integration is desirable, must start with a recognition that both objective and subjective discourses around abstract concepts are ultimately poetic.

Posted in Bloom, Paul, Brain, Dualism, Johnson, Mark, Lakoff, George, Metaphor, Mind, Poetics | No Comments »

The Incredible Shrinking Man

July 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

Descartes is known for most clearly articulating a distinction which later became known as the ‘mind/body problem’, that is the radical dualistic distinction between mind and body. Prior to Descartes (and his contemporaries and immediate predecessors), dualist was very much in place (being, apparently a human universal), but this was a dualism of matter and (individual) spirit or soul. In other words, the corporeal body was part of the material world and it was this entire materiality which was contrasted with the soul/mind. Today’s dualism, 400 years after Descartes, tends to be located around a brain/mind distinction, or even a part of the brain; those tissues and circuits holding the ‘correlates of consciousness’, which is held in opposition to phenomenal self of the mind. History, then, has preserved the longstanding dualist term of of mind/soul/spirit, but has radically reduced its corresponding term in the material world. Whereas once the mind/soul was balanced by, and the equal of, the entirety of physical creation, now it finds itself reflected in a few ounces of grey meat.

Posted in Brain, Descartes, Rene, Dualism, Mind | No Comments »

The Brain as a Consciousness Collector

November 24th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One understanding of the panpsychist viewpoint is that all phenomena of the world incorporate the property of consciousness, in the same way that they incorporate space and time. So, for example, a rock, in addition to having its incontrovertible extension into the three dimensions of space: height, width, and breadth, and in addition to its irrefutable persistence over time, also has a quality of consciousness as an aspect of its being. In fact, without this consciousness it could not be said to be engaged in the act of being at all. Alternatively, one might say that the dimensions of space and time, (which may not correspond with human understandings of three-dimensional spacetime,) are also dimensions of consciousness.

A possible product of this way of regarding the world is a redefinition of the brain not as the seat of consciousness as it is currently described, but rather as a kind of ‘collector’ of consciousness. Instead of mind emerging from the behaviour of neuronal networks as an entirely unique phenomenon, disconnected from the contents of that consciousness, as the emergentist viewpoint inevitably indicates, the brain concentrates and organises the consciousness of the universe like a vortex in water.

Posted in Brain, Consciousness, Mind, Monism, Panpsychism | No Comments »

The Dying of the Light: Hello Darkness

December 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Development in human medicine may one day delay the onset of senile dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and the routine deterioration of memory and reasoning that accompanies old age. (Recent studies have linked these effects with loss of integrity in the white matter of the brain (1).) We may eventually see a time in which aging of the brain is halted and as one gets older there is no loss of mental function, one stays as sharp and alert as a 20 year old, right up to the point when one dies from some somatic breakdown or other. Is this really a good thing? I am not at all sure I want to go out like that, at the absolute height of my cognitive powers, fully wide-awake and fully aware that, if only my body would keep going, then my brain would continue to carry me forward. I suspect that such ‘improvement’ would only add to the fear of death and the impossibility of imagining it. There would be no gradual decline, no fading away, no seeping of consciousness into the fabric of the world, no emptying of the self until the body is a hollow shell. Instead the ghost would be perfectly trapped within the machine, watching the decay of its vessel with increasing frustration and anxiety. There would be no ‘dying of the light’ to rage against, only the solid black wall of terminal embodiment to which we would hurtle, wide-eyed and with our path toward it brightly lit with anachronistic mind.

Let me dissolve into the gathering dusk piece by piece. Take this part of mind, then this, then this. Let me gently forget my friends and family, my home, the books I’ve read and the television I’ve watched, my wife, my past, my name. Return these things from wherever they came, out there beyond the extent of skin and bone. Take my freedom, my independence, my dignity, my continence, my responsiveness, my mobility, my rights as a human being, my sense of self, and stick them where the light of my sun no longer shines. Here is the dark, and here is the whisperer in darkness.

Andrews-Hanna J.R., Snyder A.Z, Vincent J.L., Lustig C, Head D, Fox M.D., Raichle M.E., and R.L. Buckner. “Evidence for large-scale network disruption in advanced aging.” In Preparation. Reported in Scientific American, December 5th, 2007.

Posted in Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Darkness, Death, Embodiment, Life, Light | No Comments »

Complex Brain (and why is there more than one?)

December 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

It has been noted that the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe, and is certainly more complex than either the parts from which it is composed (atoms, molecules, neurons, networks) and the greater whole of which it is a part (society, material world, galaxy, universe in totality). The complexity of the brain, which complexity surely gives rise to the strange phenomenon of mind, is not isolated from those greater and lesser entities. Rather there is a necessary dependency of brain on the processes which operate at a smaller scale that it contains and those large-scale cosmic processes in which it is contained. It also seems quite likely, if not inevitable, that the complexity of the brain greatly outstrips that of the mind supervenient on that brain. My brain seems to embody processes which my mind can scarcely conceive of, and then only through metaphor and symbol; quantum theory, complexity, etc.

One of the odd things about the mind is that there appears to be more than one of them.

Posted in Brain, Knowledge, Mind | No Comments »

Mind Brain Physics

February 16th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The account provided by neuroscience for how the brain performs the many functions it does are complex to an incredible degree. What’s more, many of the processes and mechanisms that are cited in these explanations are not only difficult to understand but are effectively impossible to understand in a literal embodied way. For example, it is distinctly possible that quantum mechanical processes are involved, if Penrose and Hammeroff are to be believed, in which case this part of the cognitive process is beyond our intuitive grasp.

The likelihood of the brain’s functioning being non-comprehensible in this literal way is not routinely regarded as a problem for science, as we have strategies for gaining knowledge about even the most non-intuitive systems. Confirmation of this can be found in the success of quantum physics more generally, which provides enormous explanatory power despite its reliance on mathematics for the conveyance of these explanations, rather than the flesh and blood language of intuitive common sense. Investigation of the brain therefore uses all of the tools of modern science, and is not restricted by the limitations of our embodied understanding.

Explanations of the mind, however, seem unable to transcend this limitation. All models of the mind seem locked into a requirement that explanations for mental function (as opposed to brain function) be intuitively evident and available to routine comprehension. This is perhaps inevitable since, given that the (conscious) mind is a product of evolutionary forces aimed at maximising the survival potential of medium-sized social mammals moving at medium speed (to paraphrase Dawkins), the ability of that mind to represent the world, including itself, would only need to address those concerns. Since our ability to intuitively apprehend anything is constrained by this precondition, any model of mind we feel intuitively satisfied with would be similarly constrained. We should expect that models of mind be easily visualisable, and probably follow laws of physics which correspond to Naive or Folk Physics or some version of the Newtonian. What’s more, it is likely that the mind itself, again for good evolutionary reasons, functions in a way which corresponds to this embodied paradigm. If the mind is an organ (or set of organs) produced by evolution which represents and allows for an effective engagement with a largely Newtonian world, then that mind, as part of the world, would need to be similarly Newtonian in structure.

Posted in Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Embodiment, Evolution, Mind, Naive Physics, Neuroscience | No Comments »