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 »

Can a Brain be Creative, and would we know

April 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Last night’s paper (presented at midnight in a disused church for some reason!)


In ‘Can a robot be creative, and would we know’, Margeret Boden (in Ford, 1996) identifies two types of creativity, each associated with different domains. That which she calls ‘H-creativity’ (for Historical) is associated with actions and artifacts which have never been produced before anywhere (or at lease not anywhere in the culture). These artifacts are usually applauded as genuinely original; unique solutions to old problems, new scientific theories, patentable inventions, copyrightable artworks etc. What Boden refers to as ‘P-creativity’ (for Personal) is only creative in the limited domain of personal experience. Although the person carrying out the creative act may be doing it for the first time, the actions and artifacts produced already exist in the wider domain of culture. It follows from this that whilst all instances of H-creativity are also P-creative, the reverse is not true.

In this paper I propose a third level at which this process occurs, call it ‘C-creativity’, in which the ‘C’ stands for ‘Consciousness’, and which corresponds to the creative formation of new unities of phenomenal experience. Here the domain is that of working memory to which new sensory experiences are introduced with each passing moment.

Ongoing phenomenal consciousness, in this model, therefore parallels the ‘body of knowledge’ which makes up a domain within H-Creativity, and to the ‘body of personal experience’ which forms the domain within P-Creativity. Just as in these larger scales of creativity, C-creativity is a dynamic process and the body of consciousness it produces is constantly evolving, not in the sense often used by new age gurus etc. but in the routine flow of everyday awareness. To paraphrase Boden’s original question, not only would we know whether a brain can be creative, but knowing itself is a deeply creative act.

Possible neurological correlates of this process will be discussed and suggestions made concerning the implications of an evolving consciousness.

Ford, K. M., C. N. Glymour, et al. (1995). Android epistemology. Menlo Park Cambridge, Mass., AAAI Press; MIT Press.

Posted in Boden, Margaret, Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Creativity, Phenomenology, Story | No Comments »

Liquid States of Mind

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

William James (1892) famously uses the term ‘Stream of Consciousness’ to describe the unbroken succession of images which seems to characterize the flowing, river-like experience of wakeful awareness. He also writes of the ‘oceanic’ feelings associated with religious experience (1902), an entailment picked up by Freud (1973) and Clement (1994) and which also figures in first-person accounts of certain varieties of peak experience; a feeling of unbounded unity with the wider cosmos and an apparent dissolution of the boundary between self and world .

These two images, the stream and the ocean, can be seen as complementary features in an ontology, or rather a ‘hydrography’ of consciousness; at one extreme the subject is defined by the path of their individual stream; delineated, bounded, and temporal. At the other extreme the subject dissolves into a larger substrate, an all-encompassing, atemporal ocean. These two terms for particular radically different states of consciousness are entailments of an extended metaphor in which the operation of the mind is compared to the behavior of a liquid.

The metaphor does not just allow for these two entailments, but structures a range of discourses related to consciousness from the fields of psychology, technology and phenomenology. These include Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow (1990; 1997) immersion (Grau 2004), thought ripples (Greenfield 2001), and absorption (Gurwitsch 1979).

This deployment of a liquid metaphor in talking of consciousness has a long history and extensive current (sic.) use. Water, particularly, features significantly in many of the world’s religions and in mythological texts as a medium for describing cognitive states or processes which would otherwise be inconceivable, the most familiar of these probably being the Greek legends surrounding Lethe and Mnemosyne, the rivers of forgetting and remembering. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and others, this metaphor can be shown not to be arbitrary and contingent, but as providing a consistent, coherent structure whereby the abstract notion of consciousness is made conceivable and articulate.

Clement, C. (1994). Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Freud, S. (1989). Formulations Regarding The Two Principles in Mental Functioning. The Freud Reader. P. Gay. New York, Norton: 301-306.

Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: from illusion to immersion. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Greenfield, S. A. and T. F. T. Collins (2005). A Neuroscientific Approach to Consciousness. Amsterdam, Elsevier B.V.

Gurwitsch, A. (1979). Human Encounters in the Social World. Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press.

James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Posted in Clement, Catherine, Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow, Freud, Sigmund, Greenfield, Susan, Gurswitch, Aron, James, William, Liquid, Metaphor, Phenomenology, Psychology, Religion | No Comments »

The Human Science Project

May 30th, 2006 Fred McVittie

This presentation marks the launch of an interdisciplinary research project involving institution in the UK, Canada, the USA, and Norway. This research, dubbed The Human Science Project, brings together knowledge production strategies from;

  • studies of the innate knowledge possessed by babies and infants
  • the various branches of ‘naive’ and ‘folk science’ knowledge acquired by humans prior to empirical research
  • subjective and first person accounts
  • phenomenology

These knowledge forms have been developed in many cultures prior to the invention of rational scientific procedures (falsification, double blind trials etc), including in the west up to the time of Newton and Descartes, and the Enlightenment more generally. They also continue to exist in a developed form outside of rational science and empirically grounded knowledge within metaphysical, occult, and religious beliefs and practices.

It can be argued that this ‘Human Science’, failing as it does the test of empiricism and rationalism, is unimportant and childish or backward, and the knowledge it claims is therefore bogus. However, it will be argued that these human centred knowledge systems are not so easily wished away. They have their roots in evolutionary history and that history is engraved in the fabric of our psyche. So whilst we may claim the light of reason as the only illumination for our knowing, the million year old light cast by the dawning of human being also shines on our understanding of the world.

Posted in Knowledge, Phenomenology, Science, Subjective, Universals | No Comments »

Soul Revival

June 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Evidence for the revival (or continued belief) in the concept of the human essence can be found in changes in the way the condition of gender dysphoria is treated. This is a condition in which an individual’s biological sex is experienced as being different to their psychologically gendered ’self’. Up to 30 years ago this was considered a psychological disorder which it was felt appropriate to treat with psychotherapeutic means in order to bring the wayward brain in line with an ontologically definite, and gender defining, body. Today this approach is regarded as biological determinism, and it is more likely that gender realignment surgery will be employed to bring the body in harmony with a phenomenologically felt gender. This suggests, or at least plays into, the idea that gender is an essential attribute even though there is no test or scientific model which supports this idea.

Posted in Essence, Phenomenology, Soul | No Comments »

Between the Will and the World

August 16th, 2006 Fred McVittie

We have the subjective experience of being in control of our decisions and, to a certain extent, our destiny.This is manifest in the the concept of ´free will´and the responsibility which accompanies it. However, whilst the theories of science which describe the physical world are undoubtedly ‘real’, they describe a reality beyond the range of human sense and thus beyond embodied cognition. The will operates only within a framework specified by the limitations of the sensorium. In effect, this sensorium, the physically apprehensible, phenomenal world, is an imprecise interface between the will and the world. Our hands are on this phenomenal interface, not on the actual controls of the world.

Posted in Free will, Hand, Phenomenology, Subjective | No Comments »

Zero Person Singular

October 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

First and third person accounts are the dominant positions of phenomenological and physical enquiry; phenomenology uses the 1st person ‘I’, objective science uses the 3rd person ‘he’, ’she’, or ‘it’. Science usually uses the passive mode, such as when we say that ‘this measurement was made’, or ‘this experiment was carried out’, the 3rd person making the measurement or carrying out the experiment is implied rather than overtly stated or named.

An ongoing problem in areas of study which draw on the techniques of both phenomenological and physical enquiry, consciousness research for example, is resolving these 1st and 3rd person accounts into one single coherent account, taken from a single viewpoint. To rational science the 1st person is invalid, to phenomenology the 3rd person is irrelevant.

A possible means for establishing a hiatus in this problem is by developing a mode of discourse which is neither 1st nor 3rd person, and one possible candidate for such a discourse would be an enhanced version of the way of speaking known as e-prime, which draws on Korzybski’s General Semantics. In standard e-prime the verb ‘to be’ is suppressed, such that any statement which claims an objective physical fact by saying that some object is some property (such as ‘that elephant is grey), is disallowed, and must be re-articulated to include the viewing position (so that the sentence above becomes ‘that elephant appears grey to me’, or more pedantically ‘the side of the elephant facing me appears grey to me’). Clearly, standard e-prime favours a 1st person account, countering the implied 3rd person objectivity of the is statement. An enhanced version of e-prime would also eliminate this 1st person in favour of a zero person singular account, in which no reference is made, overtly or covertly, to any viewer whatever.

Posted in Elephant, Korzybski, Alfred, Language, Objectivity, Phenomenology, Science | No Comments »