Mind – The need for a new model (part 4)
Project: Polytopia

All the ways about here belong to me! The Red Queen in ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll

Detours

Back, here, at square one… In the course of thousands of years of human thought, almost everything that could have been said about the mind, had already been said and in more than one way. With the guidance of the red queen (she wished me to mention her other famous quote...) which hides in its utter simplicity a quite profound reflection on the power of narratives, I found that it will be impossible to even start to sketch a framework for a new model without making some far reaching detours which might seem, at first, sidetracking the subject. We need to find some ways that do not belong...

Let us start with the question about the kind of relations that can be described between mind and embodiment. How does the mind arise? Or, a different way to ask this question: what are the processes and interactions by which mind takes form as sensations ideas, emotions, memories etc, or, mind is being made into form as sense impressions, experiences, insights etc. A somewhat simplified version of this same question (is it is the same question?) might be the well known mind-body problem: how do phenomenal states i.e. experiential states and mental states in general arise from the neural activity of our organic brains? Making the brain and the nervous system the context of asking the question, is indeed a great simplification compared to a wider, more abstract, and less presuming context. Yet, it is an unwarranted one considering that it is the thinking organ itself which is under investigation here.

It seems fair to assume that minds are necessarily embodied. This, however, does not automatically come to mean that minds are physically embodied. Embodiment and physicality are not synonymous. Physical embodiment is only one option and not necessarily the most aesthetic one as I will try to show further ahead. The issue of embodiment is in fact very abstract and it strongly resonates with another deep question regarding the nature of reality. Hence our first detour, which we will soon see is only the first in a sequence.


Fred Tomaselli, Untitled, 2002

Why do we need to address the nature of reality? When we try to better understand embodiment, we have relate to a certain ontological background. We use words and linguistic gestures to form descriptions that represent certain states of affairs. But as I wrote in a previous post, the manner by which we relate to mind cannot possibly be separated from the manner of minding the nature of reality at large. We must attend to what is the case (after L. Wittgenstein), we must somehow ground our conceptions (ground=embodiment). Moreover, without subscribing to at least a provisional belief about the nature of reality we cannot even start to figure (figure=embodiment) what embodies what: is the mind embodied in a wider reality which is basically independent of it? Or is it the other way around: it is the mind that embodies reality. This is difficult and even confusing because mind and embodiment do not seem anymore as distinct as one usually might think about them.

To make things just a bit simpler but not really, let us briefly explore such provisional beliefs. Here are two options: the first option is a belief that forms have an independent existence, and the content present in our minds (or as our minds) is basically impressions, or representations, or shadows of those forms. In this option a mind is a kind of a screen or a mirror (or even a clay-like malleable stuff) on which forms are being rendered.

It is interesting to note that both idealism and materialism that seem to be so widely removed from each other in the virtual atlas of human thought, are merely particular flavors of this option. The difference between materialism and idealism is in the particular kind of substance intrinsic to reality. While materialism is the belief that the substance intrinsic to reality is physical, i.e. matter, energy, space and time, etc, idealism is the belief that the substance intrinsic to reality is rooted in the realm of (platonic) abstract concepts. In a particular and very popular version of this same belief, it is the mind of a god, or its presence, or its emanation which is the substance intrinsic to reality that by divine intent is shaped into all forms. In all the different versions of this belief, however, there exists a kind of primal substance intrinsic to reality that embodies (yes, same concept again) all forms.

The second option is that forms do not have an independent existence (in Mahayana Buddhist tradition this option is referred as conditioned arisal or conditioned origination). One might already have asked even earlier: independent of what? Plainly speaking, it is independent (or not) from the subject of experience, the observer, me, or the mind that experiences, perceives, relates, represents, describes etc [another detour invites itself here: is it justified at all to describe ‘mind’ and ‘me’ as distinct, and if so how do we describe a mind(s) which is ‘other’? We will get to it ahead]. This option boils down to the belief that the intrinsic nature of reality arises as relations and necessarily depends on the mind. In other words which I find clearer: reality (all forms) arises in the course of minding, or reflecting, the dynamic relation of a universal mind with itself. Or, in other words that might make this idea more accessible: there is no observer independent reality. No forms exist independently and there is no substance intrinsic to them. Forms are (merely?) relations, empty, dreamlike. They arise as the undulations of an undifferentiated nothingness, not unlike the Taoist concept of the Tao. Out of Tao forms and order arise, pulled out, so to speak, as minding, the on going process that brings forth an insubstantial instance of a dream-reality, our dynamic remembered present, the universe we know to be real.


Andrew Carnie, Things Happen (part of), 2005

These options (understandably there is much more to them than said here), are in fact highly accomplished and sophisticated thought systems, or more precisely, species of thought systems which, figuratively speaking, embody major branches in the evolutionary tree of human thought.
In as much as they are different, there is one thing fundamentally common to both species: it is an underlying concept of truth. The primacy of the concept of truth deserves of course a detour in itself. We might get to it further along our investigation. Meanwhile, I would propose to provisionally relate to truth as a kind of an overarching selective principle. Unlike the relatively simple and ad-hoc way it is used in qualifying facts and logical reasoning, truth, when applied to fundamental beliefs in one’s worldview, carries an emotional value and therefore is intimately involved in the shaping of motives and initiation of action. Again, without digging too deep into the issue, truth is a belief’s instrument to effectively assert its own distinctiveness. While we usually imagine truth as embodied by this or that belief, like a flag on the top of a castle (castle topples, flag is taken… Protect! Protect!), truth is actually a kind of funny stuff found between beliefs and drives them apart to become distinct from each other. It is a repulsive kind of force (like dark energy), localizing and excluding. This kind of truth is nothing but a carefully refined brand of good old Neolithic territorialism brought to the heights of abstract thought.


The face of Truth as captured recently by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP)
a spacecraft which measures differences in the temperature of the Big Bang's remnant radiant heat - the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - across the full sky.

Regaining our temporary theme after this swift detour towards the truth, let us turn back to our original detour. I hope that in the course of reading the last few paragraphs you gained at least a preliminary sense of what embodiment is (incarnation, realization, manifestation, expression, representation, actualization, symbol, model, quintessence, exemplification, example, exemplar, ideal, instance...). Embodiment is necessary for meaning. Without embodiment of any kind (very hard to imagine such state of affairs), nothing would make sense to us. The very expression ‘makes sense’ is about embodiment, about bringing something into a tangible form, understanding and experiencing something which is intangible in terms of other things which are tangible. The mind is continuously busy in embodying its intangible aspects into tangible ones. This is an ongoing dynamic and evolving process of our metaphor machine. It is a fundamental activity of our minds – a continuous process of embodying. Again, the relation mind-embodiment seem to gain even a deeper intimacy as if minding and embodiment are less and less distinct. As we look closer, it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.

In their landmark work “Metaphors we live by”. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson introduce a novel and expanded approach to the concept metaphor:

The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined.

The metaphorical machine that progressively makes the contents of our mental states tangible is anchored in a yet deeper level of processes which are not accessible to us. When we feel excited, or angry, or interested, when we see a flower, or bump into a (transparent) wall, when we suddenly remember a vivid dream that we had, or think a thought that just came up (up from where?), the underlying cognitive processes that produce all these are transparent (unseen) to us. This transparency is perhaps one of the most paradoxical aspects of minding. It makes a world appear to us as ultimately unmediated, while, simultaneously, our mental space seems to be enclosed within itself and entirely disassociated from any world whatsoever. It is as if we sit at a restaurant table and these experiences are served to us as elaborately prepared dishes. How the food is cooked and how the dishes are prepared is entirely out of sight. Being creatures of theories and explanations that we are, we vaguely (and somewhat reflexively) guess that these dishes come from somewhere, that there is a kitchen (entirely hidden from us), where the food is being prepared. But in this case, the kitchen is so hidden that it becomes a true mystery and we start to suspect whether it exists at all. Or, alternatively, we start to believe that there is only a kitchen and us, eating, is just an elaborate illusion.


Jericho Santander, Own World, Illustration made for Depthcore.com

For modern neuroscience the kitchen is the brain but the embarrassing riddle is still with us: The ingredients the kitchen works with and the dishes we are served are made of entirely different kinds of stuff. In the brain we have biochemical reactions and electrochemical signaling. In our minds we have voices, colors, words, shapes, emotions, choices, desires etc. We know that these are somehow connected, at least correlated, for every dish which is served, the kitchen is producing something quite distinct and for every preparation of the kitchen there is a dish being served. Yet, the kitchen and the eating hall, our minds and our brains, seem to inhabit entirely different realms. We seem to be creatures of multiple worlds… How could this be? This riddle does not seem to be a riddle of neuroscience. It does not seem to be a scientific riddle at all. It is a riddle that touches the very foundations of how our minds operate and how minds arise in the first place. It is a riddle sitting at the very core of our model; a place where all our stories originate from, yet itself still untold. It is so mysterious that we fail even to ask the proper questions about it or come up with really useful (digestible) metaphors.

When we realize that our metaphor machine fails us, we know that we have reached a reality limit and we are in need for a new narrative. Even this wouldn’t be good enough because what we really need is a new kind of narrative, a new kind of knowing, of telling our stories. We must return and re-examine the origin of forms and the very nature of reality. In search of a new model I will write next about abstract self organizing forms, meta-evolution and emergent universes and of course about minds being multiply embodied and yet at one.

To be continued…

Sat, Jul 25, 2009  Permanent link

Sent to project: Polytopia

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