Performing Vitalism

April 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The activity of theatrical performance (acting, dance, live art etc.) is theorised primarily in terms of anthropology (Schechner, 1976, 1990, 1993) and cultural studies. These approaches are valuable and robust, although they do leave a void at the centre of the practice. What is absent is a comprehensive theorisation of the subjective ontology of the performer herself.

Hayes, P. J. (1979). The Naive Physics Manifesto. Expert Systems in the Microelectronic Age. D. Michie. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Schechner, R. (1993). The future of ritual: writings on culture and performance. London; New York, Routledge.

Schechner, R. and W. Appel (1990). By means of performance: intercultural studies of theatre and ritual. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.

Schechner, R. and M. Schuman (1976). Ritual, play, and performance: readings in the social sciences/theatre. New York, Seabury Press.

Posted in Conference Abstract, Energy, Essence, Exercises, Hayes, Pat, Naive Physics, Performance, Schechner, Richard | No Comments »

Folk Physics and Performer Training

April 30th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The first part of this paper will look at a range of training regimes associated with theatrical and public performance forms, paying particular attention to techniques which appear to enhance ‘presence’. Particular attention will be paid to body-based training practices. From this initial research key ideas and terms will be extracted that use metaphors which are drawn from and have accurate meaning in the physical sciences; terms such as energy and focus, and ideas such as ‘being centered’ and ‘extension’.

Keywords: Folk Physics, Naive Physics, Performance, Metaphor, Embodiment.

(Time did not actually permit any practical demonstration of these ideas, but I could see some relationship between these ideas and the content of the ‘Details of Excellence’ workshop I went to.)

Posted in Conference Abstract, Metaphor, Naive Physics, Presence, Story, Training | No Comments »

The Folk Science of Performance Theory

May 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term ‘theory’ as it is used in the arts, and particularly in performance, is markedly different from the use of the term in the hard sciences (1). In art, theory has no predictive value, its claims are not subject to falsification by empirical testing, it makes no hypotheses, and relates to no empirically established, objectively verifiable physical laws. Theory in performance is a kind of ‘organised seeing’ (reflecting its origins in theoria) and constitutes an attempt to order the experience by the imposition of structures of meaning onto performed events. The explanations which emerge from much performance theory therefore constitute a kind of ‘folk science’, an explanatory system which exists in the absence of, or prior to, empirical testing, and which orders common (or uncommon) sense.

1. The scientific definition of the terms theory has been usefully aired and clarified in the recent Intelligent Design debates. c.f. Claudia Wallis. Evolution Wars. Time Magazine, 15 August,2005,page 32.

Posted in Art, Naive Physics, Performance, Seeing, Theory | No Comments »

Folk Science and Enlightenment

May 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie

One of the traditional paths to ‘enlightenment’, the gaining of what might be termed spiritual knowledge, is through extreme scepticism. Even though this path has gained bad press through an association with materialism and anti-religious sentiment, it has a long history including such luminaries as Descartes, Kant, and Alastair Crowley. A feature of the techniques employed by this tradition is the cultivation of a viewpoint in which any faith in conceptual knowledge is ceded in favour of a knowledge grounded in the senses. It will be shown that this sensuous knowledge bears striking resemblance to some of the principles of innate and folk science.

Posted in Enlightenment, Knowledge, Naive Physics, Sense | No Comments »

A Folk Physics of Presence

June 15th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Presence is a feature of performance, particularly theatre performance, which is notoriously difficult to define, and appallingly difficult to teach. As a quality it is instantly recognisable, yet seems to be additional to simple technique or skill. In fact presence is what distinguishes an excellent performance from a display of skill. In some ways presence is analogous to the condition in sport of being ‘in the zone’, in which the athlete has an unproblematic sense of mastery, which shows itself as peak performance on the field. It is an article of faith in many sports that at the peak of the profession skills and technique are a necessary but insufficient factor, what wins or loses is the mindset of the athlete on the day. It is the athlete that is in the zone, that is most ‘present’ that wins.

The challenge facing the teaching of presence is to identify the mindset of those who do have presence and reproduce it in a training regime.

Many actor training systems attempt this through physical and mental exercise routines which are intended to have certain specific effects on the actor. Some of these effects are simply physical, the actor becomes more supple, more in control of their posture and gestures etc. In addition, however, some of these training techniques seem to be intended to subtly alter the mindset of the performer, particularly the subjectively experienced relationship of the actor to the wider world in which they feel themselves to be lodged.

The body of knowledge, or ’science’, which articulates this subjective relationship between actor and world is not quite the same as the science of the objectively real world studied by the rational sciences. The physical laws that the actor must internalise (to the point where they become embodied common sense, much as gravity becomes embodied common sense to us all), are more akin to a kind of ‘naive’ or ‘folk physics’.

Posted in Acting, Exercises, Naive Physics, Performance, Presence, Training | No Comments »

Perennial Philosophy as Embodied Folk Science

July 4th, 2006 Fred McVittie

‘Perennial Philosophy’ uses the strategies of comparative religion and comparative anthropology to identify common themes running through diverse cultural traditions. Although originally coined by Leibniz, the term has become more widely associated with Aldous Huxley, whose book by that title attempted to distil the wisdom of the world’s religions into an essential set of perennial truths. The perennial philosophy movement includes such figures as Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Martin Lings, Fritjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, Marco Pallis, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Jacob Needleman. The extensive research on comparative mythology/psychology/philosophy carried out by Ken Wilbur, and referred to by him as ‘integral psychology’ is a modern reworking of this idea and ideal.

I would argue, however, that rather than illuminating some transcendent truth or pattern outside of human cognition, an ‘ultimate reality’ if you will, Perennial Philosophy and its cognates (Traditionalism etc.) might better be thought of as ‘embodied folk science’, that is, the body of knowledge we, as humans, create to explain the ‘big picture’ of human existence using the meagre tools of human sense and cognition. The degree of correspondence in the world’s great religious and philosophical tradition is not an indicator of a hidden truth, but a reflection of what truths are constructed when the tools for answering the big questions are common sense and common embodiment.

Posted in Huxley, Aldous, Naive Physics, Perennialism, Universals, Wilbur, Ken | No Comments »

Evolution, embodiment, mythology, philosophy

July 5th, 2006 Fred McVittie

These things we share:

• shared evolutionary experience, which have given us all the same hands, eyes, and brains
• shared ontogenic developmental experience, which has introduced us all to the same basic features of the world at the same rate
• shared knowledge or propensities that we all seem to be born with
• shared knowledge and practices we all seem to generate culturally, usually expressed as ‘human universals’
• shared knowledge we all create about our experiences in the world, usually expressed as ‘folk science’
• shared mythic structures, narratives, and archetypes
• shared religious and philosophical frameworks, usually expressed as ‘ perennial philosophy’

It is quite likely that there is a relationship across these commonalities, that, for example, our ‘perennial philosophy’ is ultimately related to our shared evolutionary experience.

Posted in Embodiment, Evolution, Myth, Naive Physics, Perennialism | No Comments »

Zen and Metascience

July 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Typically, the subjective experience of the world, and the folk/naive science is constructs, is considered to be a pre-scientific, possibly even primitive way of knowing. Historically as well as individually folk science gives way to the superior knowledge of rational science, subjectivity cedes precedence to objectivity as the more advanced and valid epitemological method. We see evidence for this in the historicisation of 15th century alchemy and hermeticism, which is usually construed not as a practice in its own right but as simply a precursor to the ‘real science’ of chemistry. Similarly, in child development we tend to assume that the knowledge possessed by small children prior to formal education is an inferior and temporary substitute for real knowledge. For instance, children’s tendency to experience themselves as located at the centre of the world, what Piaget referred to as ‘ontological egocentricity (1926: 110, 241), is supposedly supplanted by a more ‘correct’ view of themselves in a world which has no centre. Both these examples relate a narrative of subjectice knowledge being superceded by objective ways of knowing.

Some practices, however, have been developed which do not tell this story. Zen (buddhism) particularly regards its own mystical practices, and those of other philosophies and religions, not as precursors to rational science, or even as spiritual counterparts (’non-overlapping magisteria’ to use Stephen Jay-Gould’s term). These practices, and the knowledge they produce, is assumed to have value both before and after science, or ‘antescience and ‘metascience’ as philosopher D.T. Suzuki puts it. This position arises from a realisation that objectivity necessarily excludes the observer or subject from the data and is therefore inevitably incomplete. It is interesting to note that a number of prominent scientists, particularly scientists studying consciousness (also, so far, largely resisted to conventional scientific methods) are practicing Zen Buddhists; Susan Greenfield, (the late) Francisco Varela etc.

Jean Piaget. La représentation du monde chez l’enfant. Paris: Alcan, 1926.

Posted in Alchemy, Buddhism, Naive Physics, Subjective | No Comments »

Universal Physics and Rational Physics

July 22nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term Universal Physics here refers to the set of extra-scientific (1) beliefs and theories about the physical world which have claim to universality, particularly those beliefs which concern matter, energy, and their interactions. These beliefs differs in significant ways from Rational Physics. In Universal Physics;

• There is no clear distinction between those aspects of the world which are external to the self, and those which are internal; i.e. there is a significant overlap with what Rational Physics would refer to as psychology.
• Entities and phenomena are proposed which are not acknowledged in Rational Physics, and which would otherwise be referred to as ‘magic’, ’superstition’, or ‘religion’.
• All descriptions are in natural language, no mathematical formulation is used

1. The theories and beliefs of Universal Physics are often held to be temporary and ‘pre-scientific’, to be replaced by the more ‘objective’ knowledge created by rational scientific processes. The term ‘extra-scientific’ is used here in preference to ‘pre-scientific’ to indicate that such beliefs may not be replaced in this way, but are usually held alongside scientifically formulated theories of Rational Physics.

Posted in Fiction, Naive Physics, Physics, Science, Universals | No Comments »

Examples of Universal Physics

July 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The concept of a ‘Universal People’ put forward by Brown is based on the notion that all human beings share a common core of behaviours, perceptions, and concepts. This notion is derived from a large number of cross-cultural and anthropological studies and is widely assumed to result from a common evolutionary history and a shared embodiment, this embodiment also incorporating the organs of sense and cognition. Part of this shared universal cognition concerns commonly held interpretations of the behaviour of matter and energy; what in rational scientific terms would be called ‘physics’. Given this commonality, we should expect to see a set of correspondences across cultures, and possibly across times, between the models that different peoples use for this ‘universal physics’, and indeed this is what we find when we compare:

• The pre-Newtonian paradigm in Western hermetic science
• The paradigm informing Chinese Traditional Medicine
• The paradigm implied by ‘Naive Physics’

Posted in Brown, D. E., Embodiment, Evolution, Naive Physics, Physics, Universals | No Comments »

Impetus and Energy

August 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Naive Physics cannot handle abstract (non-embodied) concepts (in that sense Naive Physics is an organised system of embodied metaphors). Therefore a concept such as ‘energy’ cannot figure with Naive Physics as it does within rational physics, as a purely mathematical or other abstraction. Instead it is conceived of as a SUBSTANCE; a limited resource which provided motive power and which, in common with physical substances, can be transformed, transferred, accumulated, depleted, much as a fuel is conceived in engineering. The Impetus Theory of energy and motion, which is part of the Naive Physics perplex, (and was a part of mainstream ‘rational’ physics from Aristotle onwards) makes explicit use of this ENERGY=FUEL metaphor. This historical correspondence between naive and rational physics was only broken in the 17th century by Newton in his formulation of the laws of motion. In Newton’s schema, motion is conceived not as an unusual state of matter requiring a fuel or impetus to maintain, but as a natural relative state or property. The only ‘energetic’ principle that is required within the Newton paradigm is during acceleration and deceleration, and this cannot be conceived as the transfer of a limited fuel resource into the body of the moving object.

Posted in Energy, Naive Physics, Newton, Isaac, Physics, Substance | No Comments »

Naïve science and coherent metaphors

August 15th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The principles of a naïve science, otherwise referred to as folk science (folk physics, folk psychology etc) are held coherently by an overlapping set of metaphors. That is, that whilst such ‘sciences’ may not correspond to rational science, and may not be structurally complete, that they nevertheless do find coherence, and a sense of completeness, through the use of metaphor, particularly in the entailments to such metaphors (following Lakoff and Johnson 1987). Metaphorical entities are postulated, such as the ´luminiferous ether´, which bring together in an easily embodied understandable way, elements of the observed reality which otherwise (actually) are only coherent through their connections to a disembodied rational science.

Posted in Lakoff, George, Metaphor, Naive Physics, Science | No Comments »

The boundaries of naivite

August 17th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The folk disciplines carve the world up at different joints than do the scientific disciplines. Rational physics, for example, has a relatively clear border between itself and the discipline of psychology. (In fact there is something of a demilitarized zone between these two, where only such interdisciplinary ephemera as ‘quantum psychology’ are found). Naive or Folk physics draws its (distinctly fussier) boundary differently, including within its remit the presence of consciousness and psychic effects. (Smith and Casati 1994)

Posted in Consciousness, Naive Physics, Physics, Science, Smith, B. & Casati, R. | No Comments »

The Physics of the Unconscious

August 27th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Unconscious cognitive processes, including those which produce physical actions, attitudes, and emotional responses, often react or refer to the physical properties of objects, events, or spaces. So, for example, the actions used to catch a ball are unconscious and automatic, and refer to the object and the space through which the ball travels. This unconscious processing of information, and its subsequent translation into effective action, requires the person engaged in that action to possess an internal model or paradigm of the behaviour of objects in spaces. We would not be able to catch a ball if we did not have, in some form, paradigmatic knowledge of the flight of objects and the effects of gravity, wind resistance etc on that flight. There is evidence to suggest that this paradigmatic knowledge is innate and that it closely resembles ‘naive physics’.

McIntyre, J., Zago, M., Berthoz, A. and Lacquaniti, F. 2001. Does the brain model Newton’s laws? Nature Neuroscience, July 2001.

Posted in McIntyre, J., Zago, M., Berthoz, A. and Lacquaniti, F, Naive Physics, Physics, Unconscious | No Comments »

Honouring Naivity

September 5th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The tenets of the various ‘naive’ or ‘folk’ sciences; naive physics, naive biology etc, are considered to have, at best, a parasitic relationship to the developed rational sciences. They are the infant to the adult, the primitive to the civilised, the rule of thumb to the rule of law. In this asymmetric relationship the naive sciences are subjects of condescension, they are the unruly designs of nature rather than the manicured gardens of rationality, and like all things of nature, (as Lauren Bacall put it in ‘The African Queen’ ) are there to be risen above . This asymmetry between the rational and the naive is undoubtedly partly caused (and partly justified) by the resounding success of rational science is explaining the world and proving its worth through its application to practical problem solving. ‘Better Living through Science’ is not just a catchphrase.

But what of the worth of the naive sciences? Can a knowledge of Naive Physics, for example, be shown to be add value to existence which could no be added by a singular rational approach to knowledge?

Posted in Knowledge, Naive Physics, Science | 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 »

Folk Physics and Agency

October 28th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It is a principle of Folk Physics that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. This principle was widely accepted as true until the time of Galileo, and is still felt as intuitively correct by many people today until they actually carry out relevant experiments. Evidently this principle is incorrect and is easily disproved simply by dropping two object of dissimilar weight and observing what happens, and this finding seems to illustrate the ‘naivite’ of Folk Physics and its inherent weakness. Folk (Naive) Physics seems, with this example, to be prone to substantial factual errors and therefore inferior to other, more rational physics systems such as the Newtonian model (which predicts the result of the falling objects experiment accurately). However, whilst the prediction made by Folk Physics is, in this case, incorrect, this is not due to an error in the physics but rather to a misapplication of the Folk Physics model to a system which lies outside its area of explanation. Folk Physics is, to a large extent, the physics not of inanimate objects, but of intentional agents, and describes the functioning of a world in which matter is animated and motion is purposive. The force of gravity, within Folk Physics, is felt not as the passive attraction of inert masses, but as the active striving of material agents. Like two dogs pulling at their leads with different degrees of force, the two objects of different weights, when attributed with agency and purpose (entelechy), will inevitably move at different speeds when released. Within the limits of its own purview Folk Physics is an accurate description of the world and makes accurate predictions. It is only when it is misapplied (as it commonly is) that its limitations are revealed.

Posted in Agency, Intentionality, Naive Physics, Newton, Isaac, Physics | No Comments »

The Earth is Flat

August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie

As Primack and Adams not in ‘View from the Centre of the Universe’, the model by which scientific revolutions proceed by large scale ‘paradigm shifts’ is flawed. Kuhn’s model, postulated that occasionally there are major changes in the way that science understands (all or part of) the world. At these times, and the most commonly-cited example is the Copernican revolution from an Earth-centred solar system (or universe) to one centered on the Sun, the old order of theories, models, diagrams, and mechanisms, is dismissed in favour of the new. In Kuhn, it is a necessary consequence of this revolutionary overturning that what went before it becomes wrong and that apostles of the new, (after moving through a brief period of being heretics) become keepers of the new flame and upholders of the new truth. Old is wrong, new is right.

According to Primack and Adams, a more accurate understanding of what happens during these times is not a replacement of one truth by another, but rather the re-interpretation of the data of the world such that it applies to a wider set of circumstances and covers a larger set of phenomena. So, by this understanding, the Ptolomaic model of the Earth-centered universe is not ‘wrong’, it is instead a special limited case of the Copernican model. It is worth noting in passing that the Copernican model tends to promote an understanding of the universe which is as partial in its own way as the Ptolemaic which preceded it. A casual interpretation of the Sun-centered model seems to indicate a stationary star orbited by moving planets, but of course, in relativity, nothing is stationary in absolute terms and by most accounts the Sun itself is hurtling at several thousand miles an hour in the direction of Andromeda, with the planets around it like the loose reins of a horse. Copernicus put his thumb on the Sun and momentarily arrested its wild flight and, in doing so, revealed a pattern in the relationship of the movement of the planets, but the Copernican map is not of the real solar system, any more than a 2-dimensional map of the Earth is an accurate rendition of the real globe. It is more a graph or schematic showing the pattern of relations he discovered.

In many cases it is preferable to work with the assumption that the Earth is stationary and central rather orbital and peripheral. When we make appointments or set or watches we do not consider this as stating the location of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, or the number of degrees through which it has rotated. We refer to sunrise not Earthfall and we watch the Sun go down over the ocean, not the Earth turning its face away into the darkening night. For most purposes the Ptolemaic model of the universe in which Earth is the centre of attention is sufficient. This is not to say that when we use such Earth-centered concepts we are using a kind of lazy shorthand, or are being inaccurate. When the application of the Ptolemaic paradigm is limited to specific uses such as these it is as accurate, and more efficient, that the Copernican.

On the even more local scale of vernacular or ‘folk’ experience, we can even extend this notion of overlapping or simultaneous paradigms to include the apparently self-evident wrong-headedness of flat Earth theory. The Earth in its entirety is not usefully considered flat, and any depiction of the Earth which too closely resembles a 2-dimensional map is demonstrably inaccurate. However, in day to day life we routinely work with the assumption that it it indeed flat, and are rarely proved wrong. When we measure a room prior to fitting a carpet, or stake out the foundations of a building, we do not take the spherical nature of the Earth into account. It would be perfectly possible to include the curvature of the Earth in our calculations but since this difference would be insignificant (smaller by far than the variations in the landscape itself) it would be foolish to do so. It is at this level that ‘folk knowledge’, or Naive Physics, and the paradigms which make it up, become available as accurate, relevant theory.

Posted in Knowledge, Naive Physics, Paradigm, Primack, J. & Adams, N., Science, Space | No Comments »

Evolution, Embodiment, Perennialism

September 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie

1. All humanity has a common evolutionary history, facing largely the same challenges and finding the same opportunities.
2. Our common evolutionary history is expressed in the genome.
3. Our evolutionary history, and the genomic record of this ancestry, is echoed in our common embodiment.
4. Our common embodiment includes all of the mechanisms of sensation and of mind
5. The commonality of our physical and cognitive embodiment is echoed in the wide range of identical features found in all human cultures, the ‘human universals’.
6. The commonality of cultural, embodied, genomic, and evolutionary experience is echoed in the common philosophies and mysticisms of Folk Science and Perennialism.

For example, the universal cognitive process which allows us to conceive of categories, based on the common embodied conceptual metaphor of the container, leads inexorably to the idea of a universal category. The universal category, the conceptual vessel in which everything is contained, is one possible formulation of a monotheistic deity, as is found in Plato and the neo-Platonist philosophers of the early Christian church.

Posted in Category, Embodiment, Evolution, Naive Physics, Perennialism, Science, Universals | 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 »

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 »