The mind and mental processes
This discussion is about human mental processes, the mind. Ive made a lot of statements about mental phenomena here on the forum, mostly based on if-I -remember-correctly and seems-to-me evidence. In this post, Im setting out to put a bit of meat on that skeleton.
Quoting Wikipedia
So, mental processes, mental faculties, mental phenomena - emotion, thought, memory, perception, learning, imagination, instinct, attention, pain, motivation, language, action, decision making, maintaining bodily processes. Im sure there are others worth mentioning. One mental process I intentionally left off the list is experience/consciousness. I dont want this to be a discussion about consciousness, by which I mean I specifically want it not to be a discussion about consciousness. There have been dozens, probably hundreds of those discussions on the forum and few went anywhere useful. Beyond that, I dont think we can have a useful discussion of consciousness until we have some kind of understanding of non-conscious mental processes.
I want to talk about the mind by looking at several specific processes - thought, language, instinct, maintenance of bodily homeostasis - through the lenses of psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science. I picked these particular focuses because they interest me and I had interesting sources of information, including the following:
I dont necessarily endorse the specific information and interpretations presented in these sources, but I think they provide examples of useful ways to look at the mind. How to think about thinking. We can discuss the specifics of the summaries I provide. It would be great to look at other mental processes too. I would like to look at specific scientific sources for the ideas we discuss. On the other hand, for me, introspection is indispensable. To the extent possible I would like to avoid arm waving - unsupported overgeneralization. And, as I mentioned, no discussion of consciousness, self-awareness, or whether I experience green the same way other people do.
Thats enough for the OP. Ill start with specific information in my next post.
Quoting Wikipedia
The mind is the set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various mental phenomena, like perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, and emotion.
So, mental processes, mental faculties, mental phenomena - emotion, thought, memory, perception, learning, imagination, instinct, attention, pain, motivation, language, action, decision making, maintaining bodily processes. Im sure there are others worth mentioning. One mental process I intentionally left off the list is experience/consciousness. I dont want this to be a discussion about consciousness, by which I mean I specifically want it not to be a discussion about consciousness. There have been dozens, probably hundreds of those discussions on the forum and few went anywhere useful. Beyond that, I dont think we can have a useful discussion of consciousness until we have some kind of understanding of non-conscious mental processes.
I want to talk about the mind by looking at several specific processes - thought, language, instinct, maintenance of bodily homeostasis - through the lenses of psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science. I picked these particular focuses because they interest me and I had interesting sources of information, including the following:
- The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
- What is an Instinct by William James
- The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
- The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio.
I dont necessarily endorse the specific information and interpretations presented in these sources, but I think they provide examples of useful ways to look at the mind. How to think about thinking. We can discuss the specifics of the summaries I provide. It would be great to look at other mental processes too. I would like to look at specific scientific sources for the ideas we discuss. On the other hand, for me, introspection is indispensable. To the extent possible I would like to avoid arm waving - unsupported overgeneralization. And, as I mentioned, no discussion of consciousness, self-awareness, or whether I experience green the same way other people do.
Thats enough for the OP. Ill start with specific information in my next post.
Comments (113)
Alley Oop, perhaps?
The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker.
Stephen Pinker is a professor of cognitive science and psycholinguistics at MIT. This book provides a very detailed presentation of his understanding of how human language works and how it develops in children, making specific reference to scientific evidence including studies of the effects of brain damage caused by trauma, disease, or birth defects; the results of PET, MRI, and other imaging on living brains; language learning in healthy children starting at infancy; language performance by adults and children; genetic studies of families with a history of language disorders; studies of twins separated at birth; comparative studies of world languages; and others. According to Pinker, the findings presented in the book apply to all human languages studied.
Pinkers conclusions I think are relevant to this discussion include the following:
Language is instinctive. He quotes Darwin as saying that language is an instinctive tendency to acquire an art.
Language does not control thought, its the other way around. The book includes a section debunking the Whorf hypothesis, which claims that different languages promote and restrict the kinds of ideas that people can develop and understand.
Human grammar is an example of a discrete combinatorial system. A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements. He quotes William Von Humboldt saying language makes infinite use of finite media. By this he means that words, phrases, and sentences are made up of elements that can be combined and recombined in an infinite number of ways, always constrained from above by the innate structure of human grammar. Words are built up of elements called morphemes. Although the morphemes themselves are memorized and vary depending on language, they are combined following rigid rules which are not. The same type of unlearned rules apply to how phrases are constructed from words and sentences from phrases.
Although brain functions, including language, are distributed throughout the brain, there are areas in the brain, Pinker calls them organs, which clearly have grammatical functions. Damage to those brain areas can lead to very specific types of grammatical problems. Also, although he recognizes that specific traits are not generally controlled by single genes, studies show that changes in specific genes or lack of those genes can result in language dysfunction that can be passed down from parent to child.
Perhaps most interesting and important, from my point of view, is that people do not think in English, Mandarin, or Swahili. They think in what he calls mentalese. Babies and people who have grown up with no language clearly think. He hypothesizes that mentalese is universal and innate in humans.
The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was a naturalist, biologist, and geologist, born in 1809 and died in 1882. In his discussion of language as instinct, Pinker quotes Darwin as writing:
Human language is an instinctive tendency to acquire an art. It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learned. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write.
What is an Instinct by William James
William James was a psychologist and pragmatist philosopher, born in 1842 and died in 1910. James writes Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance.
In The Language Instinct, Pinker discusses James position:
A language instinct may seem jarring to those who think of language as the zenith of the human intellect and who think of instincts as brute impulses that compel furry or feathered zombies to build a dam or up and fly south. But one of Darwins followers, William James, noted that an instinct possessor need not act as a fatal automaton. He argued that we have all the instincts that animals do, and many more besides; our flexible intelligence comes from the interplay of many instincts competing. Indeed, the instinctive nature of human thought is just what makes it so hard for us to see that it is an instinct.
He then quotes James as writing:
It takes a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of taking the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved! And so probably does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in presence of particular objects. They, too, are a priori syntheses
James also writes:
[i]Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by reason....[But] the facts of the case are really tolerably plain! Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as blind as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to mans memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with a foresight of those results
It is plain then that, no matter how well endowed an animal may originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will be much modified if the instincts combine with experience, if in addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and expectations, on any considerable scale
there is no material antagonism between instinct and reason [/i]
The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio.
Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist as USC best known for his books on the neural basis of consciousness. This book in particular is mostly about consciousness, but in the early part he talks about non-conscious precursors to self-awareness that are appropriate for this discussion. Damasio identifies what he calls a proto-self made up of non-conscious neurological and endocrine bodily functions that connect the brain and peripheral body and which allow maintenance of equilibrium in mechanical, biological, and chemical bodily systems, called homeostasis. As Damasio writes:
[i]I have come to conclude that the organism, as represented inside its own brain, is a likely biological forerunner for what eventually becomes the elusive sense of self. The deep roots for the self, including the elaborate self which encompasses identity and personhood, are to be found in the ensemble of brain devices which continuously and nonconsciously maintain the body state within the narrow range and relative stability required for survival. These devices continually represent, nonconsciously, the state of the living body, along its many dimensions. I call the state of activity within the ensemble of such devices the proto-self, the nonconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness: core self and autobiographical self
[The proto-self is] a collection of brain devices whose main job is the automated management of the organism's life. As we shall discuss, the management of life is achieved by a variety of innately set regulatory actionssecretion of chemical substances such as hormones as well as actual movements in viscera and in limbs. The deployment of these actions depends on the information provided by nearby neural maps which signal, moment by moment, the state of the entire organism. Most importantly, neither the life-regulating devices nor their body maps are the generators of consciousness.[/i]
Damasios description of the proto-self brings to mind the design of mechanical and chemical process engineering systems, which I have some familiarity with, although I am not a chemical, process, or mechanical engineer. The drawing below is a piping and instrumentation diagram from a groundwater treatment system which includes removal of floating petroleum.
This is not a system that I worked on myself and I recognize it is hard to read. On the drawing, pipes are shown as solid lines with arrows; pumps, heaters, compressors, and other devices are shown as icons; vessels and tanks are shown as rectangles, and valves are shown as bowtie shapes. Instruments including heat, pressure, fluid level, pH, flow rate, and other sensors are shown as circles connected to the system by signal lines shown a dashed lines with arrows. Not shown on the drawing is a programmable control box, a computer, which takes input from the instruments and, based on that input turns pumps and other equipment on or off; opens and closes valves, records operating data, and sets off alarms with the purpose maintaining system status within established operating parameters. I think this is a good analogy for the proto-self system Damasio describes.
Boy, this has gotten a lot longer than I intended. Ive tried to cut back, but there are important things I didnt want to leave out. I had intended to include a discussion of the following books:
But I decided not to. Maybe Ill bring them up later in the discussion.
So, down to work. I have presented some ideas about how the mind works from scientists I consider credible whose ideas make sense to me. Id like to discuss what the proper approach to thinking about the mind is. I consider these good examples. My conclusion - the mind is not magical or even especially mysterious, although there is a lot we dont know. Mostly its just a foundation of business-as-usual biology resulting in the very powerful and complex thinking, feeling, seeing, remembering, speaking faculties of the human beings we all are.
And please - no discussion of consciousness experience or awareness.
I put a lot of effort into these posts. If you don't have anything substantive to add, please go to a different thread.
Quoting T Clark
It is a very substantive and drafted OP. I have been thinking and I guess the following paper can be attached to your arguments about the complexity of thinking. Language is one of the main examples indeed.
Probably you already know it but there is a book called How to do Things with Words by John Langshaw Austin. Well, he also wrote a philosophical paper called Sense and Sensibilia.
According to his thoughts in those papers he wrote:
Austin argues that [Ayer] fails to understand the proper function of such words as "illusion", "delusion", "hallucination", "looks", "appears" and "seems", and uses them instead in a "special way...invented by philosophers." According to Austin, normally these words allow us to express reservations about our commitment to the truth of what we are saying, and that the introduction of sense-data adds nothing to our understanding of or ability to talk about what we see.
Again, Austin argues in Other Minds:
He [Austin] claims, is that if I say that I know X and later find out that X is false, I did not know it. Austin believes that this is not consistent with the way we actually use language. He claims that if I was in a position where I would normally say that I know X, if X should turn out to be false, I would be speechless rather than self-corrective. He gives an argument that this is so by suggesting that believing is to knowing as intending is to promising knowing and promising are the speech-act versions of believing and intending respectively.
I wish these brief quotes can be useful and interesting for you. Glad to see an OP from you again.
Seems to me that would only be true if the term "mental processes" only applies to conscious phenomena and intentional acts and decisions. That's a pretty circular argument. It's not as if Damasio's proto-self is sitting off by itself doing it's thing. It is fully integrated into our nervous system and, as I noted, it acts as the substrate for other mental phenomena, some of which are conscious.
This proto-mind acts. It makes our bodies do things using our brain, nerves, and muscles. How is that different from me flexing my arm, except in that it is non-conscious.
Quoting ArielAssante
I don't know what you mean by this.
Thanks, Javi. I appreciate that.
Quoting javi2541997
I had never heard of Austin or his book. I looked him up on the web and looked at the book on Amazon. Sounds like it has been very influential. I have very little experience with the philosophy of language. I read a little Wittgenstein 50 years ago. That's about it. That's part of the reason I wanted to put this thread together. I wanted to have a foundation of knowledge about how the mind works so I could have something useful to say about language and the mind.
Quoting javi2541997
I'm not sure how to use this in the context of Pinker's work and that of other scientists who study language, how it fits in to what they have learned. That's often an issue with science and philosophy in general. Certainly the philosophy has to be consistent with the science. Maybe it's that what Austin says has to do with meaning rather than structure, function, and performance, which is mostly what Pinker is talking about.
, in The Physics of Consciousness thread*1 is also pursuing a physical explanation for how the mind works, without assuming any non-physical contributions. His theory is based on a technical concept of "Cohesion", which could be imagined as a novel physical force, but that I interpret in terms of "Holism" or "Systems Theory". However, both of those alternative approaches to Reductionism are more rational than empirical, hence more philosophical than scientific.
Anyway, it seems that excluding the non-physical aspect of mental processes runs into a blank wall on the Quantum level. There, "business-as-usual-biology" becomes logically fuzzy, mathematically uncertain, and physically unpredictable, as we approach the foundations of reality. Ironically, there is no there there.
So, the only way I see to find our way through the sub-atomic fog is to make use of a semi-physical tool : Information --- found in nature in three forms : energy, matter, mind. I agree that the mental functions of the brain are "not magical". But they are Meaningful ; which is inherently a "conscious experience or awareness". :nerd:
*1. The Physics of Consciousness
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/724342
Sorry. I was feeling frivolous after reading the sandwich vs hotdog thread. :sad:
Ok.
Quoting ArielAssante
Agreed. I tried to be clear in the OP. The authors seem credible, their ideas seem plausible and supported, but I'm not committed to any of the positions I described. Everything I wrote about is "only theory."
As I've noted many times, Enrique's posts on scientific subjects are pseudo-science - incomprehensible mashups of buzzwords and jargon that don't really mean anything.
I don't see the ideas I've described as reductionist at all. If they seem that way, it's probably because I cut off chunks to highlight the aspects I find particularly interesting.
Quoting Gnomon
Generally, quantum effects are found at the level of atoms, i.e. about 10 picometers or 1/10,000 of a micrometer, while biological processes are found at the level of cells, i.e. about one micrometer. As far as I know, there is no evidence to show or reason to believe that quantum effects affect mental phenomena directly. Just because quantum particles and mental processes are in some sense mysterious to some people, that doesn't mean there is any connection.
This thread is about scientific approaches to mental processes. If you have actual scientific evidence to describe or clarify your ideas about non-physical aspects, reductionist or holistic, please provide it. I don't necessarily criticize your ideas about non-physical processes, but this is probably not the right thread to discuss them.
If you don't bother to think about a model of the chemistry and anatomy of neuroscience until you comprehend it, what YOU'RE doing is pseudoscience. I talk about the properties of ion channels, electric currents in aqueous solution, EM fields and radiation in a way that is based on scientific papers. If you need a diagram that hasn't been drawn yet I can understand, the concepts are very visual. I gather you want to think about mind at a higher level of emergence than biochemistry and cellular anatomy. Sometimes it makes sense to deconstruct scientific models into more manageable fragments of the total picture, and I can try to accomplish that if it becomes relevant to your discussion.
Anyways, enough of defending myself from baseless attacks lol I'll try to make a pertinent contribution: can you describe in more detail what exactly Pinker means by "mentalese"? This seems key to his concept of the thought/language interface.
A way to sharpen your approach would be to look at the issue through the eyes of function rather than merely just process.
You have started at the reductionist end of the spectrum by conceiving of the mind as a collection of faculties. If you can break the mind into a collection of component processes, then of course you will be able to see how they then all "hang together" in a ... Swiss army knife fashion.
And as kids, didn't we all covet a Swiss army knife with the most tools - including the spike for getting stones out of horses hooves - only to find they are useless crap in reality. :grin:
Instead, think about the question in terms of the holism of a function. Why does the body need a nervous system all all? What purpose or goal does it fulfil? What was evolution selecting for that it might build such a metabolically expensive network of tissue?
Can you name this essential function yet? Can you then see how it is implemented in neurobiology?
Your process approach will lead towards the Swiss army knife brand of cogsci - the brain as a set of modules or cognitive organs.
A functional approach leads instead to "whole brain" theories, like the Bayesian Brain, where the neurobiology is described in holistic architecture terms.
By "reductionism", I'm referring to the method of Atomism : dissect the material word far enough down to its foundations, and you will find atoms of Mind. Scientists have been using such methods for centuries, but still have not found the the basic building block of Mind (ideas ; knowledge ; awareness). Yet, they are still looking for the elusive "ghost in the machine". At least, Enrique is looking for a whole system (Cohesion ; Integration), not a sub-Planck-scale bit of matter (Atom). :smile:
Atoms of Mind: The "Ghost in the Machine" Materializes
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-007-1097-9
Is quantum physics behind your brain's ability to think? :
From consciousness to long-term memories, the human brain has some peculiar computing abilities and they could be explained by quantum fuzziness
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830500-300-is-quantum-physics-behind-your-brains-ability-to-think/
This is accurate.
Quoting T Clark
In fact living organisms arise at the point in nature where molecular machinery can be used to harness quantum effects. So life may not be quantum in @Enrique's emergent sense, but it is quantum in that it employs its classical structure to exploit the energetic possibilities of the "quantum realm".
An example is the respiratory chain that powers every cell. Basically it is a ladder of quantum tunnelling formed by a series of sulphur-iron clusters embedded at precisely spaced distances in a protein matrix. A "hot" electron enters the chain at one end and safely milked of its energy in about 15 steps before finally being whisked away by an oxygen atom acceptor.
So a nonlocal quantum effect jumps the electron down the waiting pathway. But the classical physics is what forms the pathway. And the information about the design of the pathway is ultimately contained in the genes.
Thus the biology isn't "made of quantumness". It is instead the opposite thing of (semiotic) information ulitimately using its control over classical molecular structure to exploit the quantum realm for energetic advantage.
The same is true of other ubiquitous biological components. Enzymes rely on quantum level control of chemical reactions. So the brain is "quantum" just because it is made of cells that have to do energetic things.
And brains are also quantum because the same biology is used in in sensory transduction how the receptors that interface between the nervous system and the world can actually physically "handle" the information coming at them in the form of electromagnetic, chemical, or mechanical energy.
So quantum biology is now a thing. But it means the opposite of saying that life and mind arise from the quantum. Instead life and mind arise from being able to use classical machinery to harness useful quantum effects ... with an overarching functional purpose in mind.
You guys are hopeless lol Matter resides on a spectrum from relatively coherent to decoherent states, of which standard issue superposition, entanglement, chemical bonding and classical dynamics are all instances, listed from most to least coherent. Electric currents are relatively coherent electromagnetic states. Electric currents are modulated in neurons by fluctuations in ion concentration. Signal transmission within neurons is a phenomenon of coherence current operative upon the medium of electrons or more accurately quantum orbital energy density contours, a sort of perturbation in what can be described as an electromagnetic sea. This model explains all we have discovered about neuron anatomy. But you're certainly welcome to disagree based on the facts, and I'll probably be able to convince you of the contrary.
That's so compact as to almost be incomprehensible, so if you want the details, read the OP posts of my The Physics of Consciousness thread. Then we'll have some actual biochemistry and cellular anatomy to talk about instead of the usual epithets.
No. I find them invaluable. :wink:
I made a mistake. I stuck my nose into the quantum effects on thinking trap when I didn't have to. I should have kept my mouth shut. That's not what this thread is about. It's about scientifically supported ways of thinking about mental processes not including consciousness.
I hope it's not too late to stop this wagon rolling down the hill. I have nobody to blame but myself.
So you want experimentally verified mechanisms of nervous system function? Plenty of material online to boost your comprehension. I'll start, the amygdala regulates response to novel stimuli. Yay! lol
Pinker writes:
The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.
Here are his arguments:
:razz:
Well at least you can add the general constraint of ruling out all discussions of mind that makes appeals to the notion of it as some kind of fundamental substance. That would rule out the usual suspects.
You are appealing to a metaphysics of localised process. I am saying go one step further and employ a metaphysics of global function.
But you could rule that out too and only allow the metaphysics you have chosen in advance, I guess.
But this is exactly what the people I have referenced are doing successfully. They are using standard scientific methods to study the "basic building block of Mind." @apokrisis has suggested looking at mind from point of view of function rather than of process. I think that's similar to what you are proposing - a more holistic understanding. I'm still working on my response to him.
Maybe this is too Kantian and feel free piss it off if you find it superfluous. My understanding of Kant in the Critique is that he viewed space as a preconscious organizing feature of the human mind - a critic, (I forget who) compared this to a kind of scaffolding upon which we're able to understand the physical world. I suspect @joshs would say that we don't understand it as such; we construct the semblance of an intelligible world based on shared values. Or something similar.
While you are at it, I would add that the scientifically grounded approach would be being able to say why some "this" is a more specified version of "that" more general kind of thing. So if the mind is the specific example in question, to what more fundamental generality are you expecting to assimilate it to.
So if you are saying the mind is some kind of assembly of component processes, then what is the most general theory of such a "thingness". I would say rather clearly, it is a machine. You are appealing to engineering.
Likewise others are trying to argue that mind is a particularised example of the more general thing that is a substance.
And I am arguing that mind is a particularised example of the more general thing that is an organism. Or indeed, if we keep digging down, of a dissipative structure. And ultimately, a semiotic relation.
So clarity about ontology is critical to seeing you have chosen an approach, and yet other approaches exist.
Cutting to the chase, we both perhaps agree that the mind isn't simply some variety of substance even an exotic quantum substance or informational substance. But then do you think biology and neurobiology are literally machinery? Aren't they really organismic in the knowing, striving, intentional and functional sense?
In simple language, an organism exists as a functioning model of its reality. And it all depends on the mechanism of a semiotic code.
The genes encode the model of the body. The neurons encode the model of the body's world. Then words encode the social model of the individual mind. And finally numbers have come to encode the world of the human-engineered machine.
So it is the same functional trick repeated at ever higher levels of organismic organisation and abstraction.
Organismic selfhood arises to the degree there is a model that is functionally organising the world in play.
So - contra Pinker - language may not create "thought", but it does transform it quite radically. It allows the animal mind to become structured by sociocultural habit. Humans are "self consciously aware" as social programming exists to make us include a model of the self as part of the world we are functionally engaged with. A higher level viewpoint is created where we can see ourselves as social actors. Animals just act, their selfhood being an implicit, rather than explicit, aspect of their world model.
Anyway, the point is that we want to know what is the "right stuff" for constructing minds. It ain't exotic substances. It ain't mechanical engineering. But what holds for all levels of life and mind is semiosis - the encoding of self~world models that sustain the existence of organismic organisation.
My two cents...for what it's worth.
Thank goodness cogsci eventually took its enactive or ecological turn about 20 years back. This is what semioticians were referring to as the construction of an Umwelt - the mental model that is of a self in its world. And yes, gestalt psychology was also saying the same before the computationalists crashed the party and made a noisy mess.
But such modelling is the opposite of neutral. It is supremely self-interested in that the construction of an organismic selfhood is what anchors the whole exercise.
Sounds good to me T-Clark. You've cited the correct people for this conclusion. While this is a nice summation of several different findings, do you have anything of your own to add? Should we change how we approach life? Does this affect morality? Or is it simply a nice result you wanted to share with us all from what appears to be a lot of research on your part?
Quoting T Clark
Some brain scientist (if only I remembered correctly) noted that the primary function/purpose of the brain is "maintaining bodily processes" which needs to be understood broadly. Small clusters of cells in the brain stem are responsible for such essentials as heart beat, respiration, and waking up from sleep. But most of the brain considerable resources are applied in making sure the body gets fed, watered, sheltered, mated, and so on. We have seen what happens to people whose brains don't tend to business. (They tend to do poorly and die early -- unless another brain looks after them.)
Our quotidian lives require the full-bore efforts of our advanced brains. Art? Literature? Darwin's books? Google? Mars rovers? Nobel prizes? Yeah yeah yeah, very impressive. All of us keeping society up and running day after day, decade after decade, is a mammoth operation overseen by ordinary but expert brains that won't get a cash prize and a medal.
My brain loves to use the resources left over after feeding and shelter are taken care of to think about existenz quite apart from everything else. Is recreational thinking a 'need'? Maybe. Certainly it's a '[i]want[/I]'. One of the horrors of the quotidian work-a-day world is reaching the end of the day again and again without having had a moment to just think, let alone have creative thought and dialogue with other brains.
So... award your brain a Nobel prize for seeing you through to an old age where you have time to speculate, write, think.
A Baysian brain is one set up to deal with uncertainty in a way consistent with Baysian statistics. So - the brain's function is as an optimally effective predictor of future events. I guess the question then is "but why?" What is the overriding function of the brain. One source said the minimization of free energy, whatever that means. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about.
As is usual for you and me, I'm coming from a different direction. I like to deal with concrete, pragmatic ideas. In my experience, I can't really figure out how the big picture works until I get a feel for how the parts do. I see the world as bottom up rather than top down. That doesn't mean I don't recognize the disadvantages of looking too closely at the trees.
Quoting apokrisis
As I said, I think I understand the value of your approach, but I always find myself most interested in looking up close. Obviously, the answer is to do both.
Quoting apokrisis
I need to think more about this before I respond further. Your mountain-top view is fine, but is it the one I'm interested in. This is just like that discussion we had about the hierarchical nature of knowledge. Maybe I want to talk about cells and not semiotics.
I just wanted to paint a picture for myself so I could see what it looks like. I don't necessarily think this has any philosophical consequences or broader implications.
Nice!
It seems that we are in full control of only movement vis-à-vis our bodies - walking/grasping/etc (we can move + modulate the speed of our movements).. The rest of our bodily functions are usually in autopilot mode unless you're a yogi with decades of training under your belt!
To cut to the chase, we, the part of the brain we identify as us is, well, motion-oriented. Solvitur ambulando. :snicker: Make your move!
I think Darwins book gives you the obvious answer.
Quoting T Clark
That means reducing uncertainty or error.
Quoting T Clark
Yep. But you can waste years reading the wrong books if your sources are seeking mechanical parts to fit a story of mechanical wholes. Im just giving you a heads up.
Quoting T Clark
Whatever you believe is a wise investment of your energy I guess.
The claim that thought in general does not require verbalization seems undoubtedly accurate to me, and I essentially agree with all you've written in the post. But even though language doesn't necessarily determine what an organism thinks, the verbal stream can be involuntary enough that some thoughts can't be had without it, especially if language was involved in acquiring the informational content of that thought to begin with.
Thoughts might tend to resemble the cognitive form in which their content was assimilated to memory, but that is merely intuition and of course needs to be verified by studies. Anyways, you can comment on that if you want or we can proceed to more research-based insights.
That's it! :up:
Quoting T Clark
Awesome! Prognostication subsumed under pattern-recognition I suppose. A complex web of a multitude of patterns interacting with/informing each other to produce even more complex + interesting daughter patterns, these then doing the same, so on and so forth. I digress. Pardon, monsieur, pardon. Nothing I said is new though! :sad:
Funny you should mention Kant, whom I have never liked and sometimes disparaged. I recently watched an interview on Kant between Brian Magee and Geoffrey Warnock. Magee does great interviews. Warnock said something that surprised and struck me. He said Kant was the first philosopher to recognize the reality we perceive, what he calls appearances or phenomena, comes from the interaction between our limited bodies and minds and a deeper reality made up of noumena, things that exist independent of our perception and are thus unknowable. That's something very similar to what Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching.
The nature of the interaction between our reality and the unknowable one, noumena or the Tao, is something I've struggled with. The fact that Kant was fully aware of the implications of the consequences of that relationship was what surprised me most. Warnock specifically identified time and space as human overlays on reality that Kant identified. In a sense, this discussion is my attempt to work back to an understanding of that interaction from the other direction, i.e. looking at the mechanisms of how humans divide the indivisible world.
I think that means you and I are somewhere on the same page, or at least the same chapter. As I mentioned in the OP, another book I'm reading may have more to say about that. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanual Sander has a lot to say about how the human mind classifies phenomena and creates categories using analogy. If I have time maybe I'll try to fit some of that in here too.
I think that feeling you have is a common one and it's probably a big reason it's so hard to get people to agree on this issue. For what it's worth, I don't think the information I included presented any kind of unified model of how the mind works. As I noted, I picked out particular aspects of the mind that interest me and for which I had information I consider credible.
Thank you.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I think this is what Damasio meant when he was talking about the proto-self.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I guess this part is more about what Apokrisis was writing about - the greater purpose of our minds.
Oh, I see! You are interested in Neurobiology instead of Psychology -- neural nets & nodes instead of meanings & feelings. Apparently, you have a novel philosophical angle on that topic -- using plumbing metaphors -- that has not already been covered by Neuroscientists, who normally use flow charts & wiring diagrams. Unfortunately, by referring to "Mind" instead of "Brain", you opened the door to metaphysical philosophical concepts, instead of physical engineering diagrams.
I apologize, if my link to Enrique's posts has deflected your thread off-course. But I thought his expressed intention was similar to yours : The Physics of Consciousness. Maybe he sees a broader scope for Physics than you do. Even so, he also felt, at first, that my inclusion of Quantum and Information theory was off-topic. I suppose that's because he was thinking of "mental phenomena" in terms of classical Physical Phenomena : visually observable things and events.
However, as the OP expressed it, Mind is a continuous "process" (movie), not a single thing or event (snapshot). And ongoing processes cannot be observed via the physical senses. We only know Change by means of the the eye-of-the-mind, Reason, which cognizes (sees) invisible relationships between things & events. Yet, Cognition is not itself a material object, or a string of events, but something more ethereal : awareness, or as Damasio put it : "the feeling of what happens".
Consequently, trying to explain "mental processes" in terms of physical events seems to be a category error. But Shannon inadvertently gave us a clue to the Mind, when he applied the traditional word for the intangible contents of Mind, Information, to the coded data of computers. But those codes (strings of 1s & 0s) are merely symbols for meanings, such as "something" or "nothing". And meanings & feelings are hard to represent in still-shot graphic diagrams. Which is why philosophers and theoretical scientists resort to fanciful Analogies & Metaphors. :cool:
Neural engineering is an emerging interdisciplinary field of research that uses engineering techniques to investigate the function and manipulate the behavior of the central or peripheral nervous systems.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/neural-engineering
NEUROMORPHIC ANALOG IMPLEMENTATION OF NEURAL ENGINEERING
I just realized I hadn't responded to this.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, I am an engineer, which may have something to do with the differences between your and my ways of looking at this. I certainly don't see the mind as a machine in general, but it doesn't bother me to think about mental processes as actual processes, which end up seeming a bit mechanistic.
Quoting apokrisis
You and I are in agreement on this. I think I've put my attention at a level that is of particular interest to me, but I think it's also relevant to how things fit together at other levels. In the end, most of my information about mind comes from my interactions with other people on a social level where I see it in action as a unified whole.
Quoting apokrisis
Do I think biology and neurobiology are literally machinery? I'm not sure anything is literally anything, but I have no problem applying a mechanical model to biology when it makes sense. But then even machinery isn't really machinery. It is subject to constraints from above from it's operator, other factory processes, and ultimately the economy as a whole.
Quoting apokrisis
I remain a skeptic about biosemiosis. Not so much about the processes included or the level of observation, but rather about the implication of meaning to biological processes. For me, meaning is something humans overlay onto reality, not something built into reality itself.
It would be silly for me to claim that language doesn't have anything to do with thought. I don't know if you read what Apokrisis wrote in an earlier post.
Quoting apokrisis
It was completely my fault, not Enrique's or yours.
Quoting Gnomon
I was clear. This is a discussion about mind from a scientific point of view, so there is no door open to "metaphysical philosophical concepts" unless they have specific, direct scientific consequences.
Yes. I think of Mind as the "function" of the brain : what it does instead of what it is. In that case, the "basic building block" of mind will be an action instead of an object. That's why standard (reductive) scientific methods have given way to the novel (holistic) methods of Systems Theory, which is more like ancient theoretical & speculative Philosophy than classical empirical & factual Science.
Essentially, I view Mind as more closely related to causal Energy than to malleable Matter. Maybe the atom of Mind is an Erg (unit of work). But, I have coined my own philosophical terms, to describe Mind's relationship to Information, and the power to Enform (to cause change). However, I will follow your thread to see where it leads. :smile:
Systems Theory is the interdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive [holistic] groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or human-made. ___Wikipedia
Ironically, the "scientific point of view" has changed since the 20th century, in order to grapple with the non-classical & counter-intuitive aspects of Quantum & Information theory. For example, "quantum mechanics" is a misnomer, because that sub-atomic realm is neither quantized nor mechanical. Instead, it seems to be fuzzy & acausal. Hence, more amenable to philosophical methods. :smile:
No.
If you have specific, credible, referenced, scientific information that describes or explains mental processes, please post it. That's what this thread is about.
Neanderthals possessed considerable technology in stone, wood, and bone; knowledge of the natural world necessary for finding and killing food; preparing clothing; and possibly an aesthetic sense. Injuries to bones that crippled individuals healed and the individual lived--with help--for years afterward, If they didn't have a spoken language like ours, how did they transmit information? Could we transmit information without a spoken language? Could we innovate (anything) without language?
Neanderthals didn't innovate; during their long existence they maintained what they had. If they lacked language, perhaps they could not innovate, adapt. Their population was always small--they didn't have the means to rear more of their own kind (apparently).
If it's a chicken (innovation) and egg (language) situation, I think the chicken comes first. With language, the innovation can be distributed and expanded. Without, innovation stops with the innovator.
This is very interesting. Thanks.
I found this essay by Steven R. Palmquist on a comparison between aspects of Kant and Tao.
https://philarchive.org/archive/PALADM-4
Quoting Bitter Crank
A couple years ago I gave human cognition's evolution a lot of thought and published a paper on the topic in an anthropology journal, so I have some decent insight into this area. Most of these points can be challenged, but the general outline seems plausible to me.
I don't think language initially arose to fulfill explicit social purposes, as a technology of culture, for various reasons. This is not how mutations happen, to provide a holistic benefit, a function. Reliance on language makes it harder to deceive and less efficient to engage in basic perception: hunting, rudimentary toolmaking etc. either are mostly silent or must be silent. But language is key to the development of a self: personality, aesthetic experiencing of the world, connection with the spiritual dimension of existence, self-expression, essentially life's meaning are all enhanced by language.
I suspect some kind of auditory stream of consciousness as a primitive "mentalese" was present in the vertebrate mind prior to extinction of the dinosaurs, but reasoning was not developed enough in most lineages to make this more than a novelty that may have slightly improved memory and provided some scaffolding for self-aware thought. This was enough to keep the trait near universal despite minimal selection pressure from the environment. Auditory stream of consciousness was a luxury that allowed organisms to better identify as a self, more richly perceiving and possessing the thought process as a will.
At first, the only selection pressure for humanlike language was libido - internal to the organism - and some relatively compulsive self-expressions of libido. This is manifest by how most vertebrates in the wild vocalize to discharge or express states of arousal rather than to analyze in detail. Thinking in sounds has universal benefit for evolutionary development of the mind, though to a very limited degree, but vocalizing those sounds immediately tends to vestigialize and gravitate towards baseline functionality in most lineages whenever a mutation conferring more advanced ability occurs, with some rare, modest exceptions which usually coincide with idleness and opportunity for recreational thinking.
From various causes, hominid reasoning ability, complexity of intention, and opportunity for recreational creativity advanced to the point where these species began deliberately resolving auditory stream of consciousness into a logiclike form. This is when thought and social behavior began to select for aesthetic superiority, so that by the time hominins such as the Neanderthals had evolved, joking, basic narrative, and perhaps singing had developed as a recreational luxury. Whenever a mutation produced superior ability, strong social selection pressure caused linguistic memes to spread through hominin communities, resulting in a steady ascent of facility with vocal expression.
Far moreso than with dinosaur remains, most of the evidence for hominin lifestyle was geologically shallow and effaced by dense human populations, but we do know that a huge decline in biodiversity paralleled hominin assent, probably due to nonsustainable hunting and overpopulation. Early Homo sapiens were just one lineage among many hominins, most likely with comparable linguistic abilities to begin with. What I strongly suspect, but which of course hasn't been conclusively proven, is that a string of rather dramatic mutations took place in prehistoric humans that induced synesthesia between auditory, visual and especially logical stream of consciousness, what @Gnomon refers to when he talks of nonphysical ideas. This greatly increased our capacity to conceive the world technologically and think symbolically, one of multiple factors allowing human culture to master almost every ecological niche on Earth, regardless of which species were already present, and embark upon civilization. This analytical kind of thinking, first selected mostly as a superfluity by personal relationships, was then coopted for engineering, writing, economy, institutions, etc.
I doubt it's language or any specific set of selective conditions so much as underlying synesthesias that make human thought different while uncommonly effective for civilizing, and a broad spectrum exists in the degree and type of synesthesia due to ongoing development in relatively flexible societies, though with a fairly universal basic template.
Pinker says something similar about Neanderthals. Apparently their larynx and related organs were not as well developed for speech as modern homo sapiens, but it wouldn't have stopped them from being able to speak at all. Pinker points out that speech evolved sometime after the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees about 5 million years ago. Since all other intermediary species are extinct, including our common ancestor with Neandertals, there is no way to know for sure which of them might have had language.
A couple of years ago I made a similar search for a connection between Taoism and Kant. I found a, not very good, paper called "Kant's Thing in itself, or the Tao of Konigsberg." So we're not the first ones to make the connection.
@T Clark, although I do not have any papers on the topic, I would like to bring up a point that I think is often overlooked (I might be wrong here, again I have not done much research on the topic) when talking about the relationship between mind and brain. I am quoting apokrisis because I think I can use his wonderful example as a tool to explain what I wanna say.
Following the structure of the quoted sentence, we could say that the rates at which neurons perform their functions and their change (of the rates) in time encode the model of the self. I know it is a pretty bold statement, but my main objective here is to steer your thought/thinking towards the rates of change of physiological processes concerning brain cells (neurons and supportive cells). If the number and organization of brain cells within the brain encode the model of the body's world, changes in their organization, number, and physiology might encode something else, and we gotta keep in mind that these changes are maintained within certain ranges (homeostasis) so that there is some constancy, as seen in the mind. We could say that the change in the model of the body's world encoded by neurons encodes the mind or affects it to some degree. So, in addition to the spatial distribution, number of cells, and the change in these two factors, there are also physiological processes taking place in these cells which are also changing in time (they are not constant), and this change is kept within certain ranges. Is there a relationship between rates of change of physiological processes and the mind/self?
Quoting apokrisis
This is Apokrisis' whole quote. I think I have some idea what he's talking about, but I didn't dig in to it in my response to him.
Quoting Daniel
I have to admit I'm not sure what you're trying to say here or how it ties in with what Apokrisis wrote.
Hallelujah!
The possibility remains that I'm mistaking ignorance for complexity. There are many occasions when what one thought was complicated turns out to be quite simple.
Greater rates of oscillation in the brain's electric field generally correlate with higher arousal: delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma waves, from least to most rapid.
Slight increase in thermal energy (temperature) of brain tissue correlates with most kinds of awareness, involving changes to both wavelength of light radiation within the EM field and vibrational properties of molecules. I've hypothesized that molecular vibrations are induced by and bound into emergent, multiscaled structures by infrared light fluctuations resulting from electrical currents produced by ion concentration differentials within the aqueous solution of neurons, and these arrays are at least a major component of the percept itself. So if you hear a symphony in your mind, it might be in part molecular vibrations modulated within an infrared field. This could be the case for most sensory experiences, differing based on which molecules and cells are involved. Interestingly, habituation reduces temperature, suggesting that relatively unconscious neglect of a stimulus or conversely less focused awareness of a percept are associated with alterations to the infrared spectrum. In visual cortex, temperature so far appears to reduce when focused awareness on a stimulus is happening, so perhaps the infrared field is modulated to a different, less vibration-inducing wavelength such as visible light in this case. Rate of light oscillation as generated by neuron firing, interacting with molecules, could be tied to sensation, perception, imagination, the substance of emotion and thought. This remains to be conclusively proven of course.
So that is one certain and one speculative instance where rate variations appear to correlate with mind.
As I wrote in the OP:
Quoting T Clark
The OPs of my The Physics of Consciousness thread which I might as well link to again are part of the rough draft for a scientific paper I'm publishing in September. It's a specific scientific source, and you get a sneak preview! That thread contains all the material about infrared radiation and molecular vibration.
As far as I could see, you do not provide any specific scientific references for the information you provided in the posts you linked. I am highly skeptical of your hypotheses and I don't see how they apply to the subject of this discussion. Also, as I expressed strongly in the OP, this is not a discussion about consciousness.
Please don't continue discussion of your theories here.
I omitted the 25 source reference list as it was kind of much for a message board.
Quoting T Clark
I don't think I'm beyond the scope of this thread, participants raised a specific issue and I addressed it directly.
Quoting T Clark
I'm just talkin about what you guys talk about. We all gotta theorize, or what are we gonna talk about? I'm as interested in reading what you have to say as contributing myself, but it's all very vague at this point, we need facts and I provided some.
See the last few posts. I have asked @Enrique several times to stop posting his unsupported theories that are inconsistent with the subject of this thread as expressed in the OP and he refuses to stop.
I would appreciate your help.
Alright, if you want to blow off experts who are trying to clarify and bs instead that's not gonna be my problem. Proceed with your stuff.
Thank you.
Since I'm not a practicing scientist, I don't presume to provide "specific, credible, referenced, scientific information". So, as an amateur philosopher, on a philosophy forum, I have to limit my posts to philosophical theorizing & speculation.
However, in my blog posts, I do include copious references to the informed opinions of professional scientists. And Information Theory is on the cutting edge of Mind research. I thought that might be relevant to a thread on the underlying causes of mental processes. But I now see that the OP assumes a narrow definition of what constitutes Science. So, I'll tune out. :smile:
According to Pinker,
Quoting T Clark
I dont think Pinkers approach is strictly compatible with Damasio. The latter understands mental phenomena from an embodied standpoint in which affectivity is inseparably intertwined with cognition. Pinker holds to a model of cognition rooted in Enlightenment rationalism. I recommend psycholinguist George Lakoffs work in language development, and his book with Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.
Heres Lakoff on Pinker:
For a quarter of a century, Steven Pinker and I have been on opposite sides of a major intellectual and scientific divide concerning the nature of language and the mind. Until this review, the divide was confined to the academic world. But, recently, the issue of the nature of mind and language has come into politics in a big way. We can no longer conduct twenty-first-century politics with a seventeenth-century understanding of the mind. The political issues in this country and the world are just too important.
Pinker, a respected professor at Harvard, has been the most articulate spokesman for the old theory. In language, it is Noam Chomskys claim that language consists in (as Pinker puts it) an autonomous module of syntactic rules. What this means is that language is just a matter of abstract symbols, having nothing to do with what the symbols mean, how they are used to communicate, how the brain processes thought and language, or any aspect of human experience cultural or personal. I have been on the other side, providing evidence over many years that all of those considerations enter into language, and recent evidence from the cognitive and neural sciences indicates that language involves bringing all these capacities together. The old view is losing ground as we learn more.
In thinking, the old view comes originally from Rene Descartess seventeenth-century rationalism. A view of thought as symbolic logic was formalized by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege around the turn of the twentieth century, and a rationalist interpretation was revived by Chomsky in the 1950s. In that view, thought is a matter of (as Pinker puts it) old-fashioned universal disembodied reason. Here, reason is seen as the manipulation of meaningless symbols, as in symbolic logic. The new view holds that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames, image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends. The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms. Jerome Feldmans recent MIT Press book, From Molecule to Metaphor, discusses such mechanisms. Contrary to Descartes, reason uses these mechanisms, not formal logic. Reason is mostly unconscious, and as Antonio Damasio has written in Descartes Error, rationality requires emotion.
Let me try again in even simpler terms using the concepts of computational processes.
The brain models a self~world relation. That is why consciousness feels like something - the something that is finding yourself as a self in its world.
This is all based on some embodied neural process. The brain has to be structured in ways that achieve this job. There is some kind of computational architecture. A data processing approach seems fully justified as the nervous system is built of neurons that simply "fire". And somehow this encodes all that we think, feel, see, smell, do.
Neuroscience started out with a model of the nervous system as a collection of reflex circuits - a Hebbian network of acquired habit. In neurobiology class, we all had to repeat Helmholtz's pioneering proof of how electrical stimulation of a dead frogs spinal nerve would make its leg twitch (and how electric shocks to a live rats feet could train it in Skinnerian conditioning fashion).
So psychology began as an exploration of this kind of meat machine. The mind was a set of neural habits that connected an organism to its world as a process of laying down a complexity of reaction pathways.
But then along comes Turing's theory of universal computation that reduces all human cognitive structure to a simple parable of symbol processing the mechanics of a tape and gate information processing device. In contrast to a story of learnt neural habits that are biologically embodied, the idea of universal computation is deeply mathematical and as physically disembodied and Platonic as you can get.
But the computational metaphor took off. It took over cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, especially once computer scientists got involved and it all became the great artificial intelligence scam of the 1970s/1980s. The mind understood as a symbol processing machine.
The computational paradigm boils down to a simple argument. Data input gets crunched into data output. Somehow information enters the nervous system, gets processed via a collection of specialised cognitive modules, and then all that results hands starting to wave furiously at this point - in a consciously experienced display.
So good old fashioned cogsci builds in Cartesian dualism. Computationalism of the Turing machine kind can certainly transform mechanical inputs into mechanical outputs. But only in a disembodied syntactic sense. Semantics being excluded from the start are never recovered. If the organism functions as a computer, it can only be as a mindless and purposeless zombie.
But even while the symbol processing metaphor dominated the popular conception of how to think about neurobiology, the earlier embodied understanding of cognition puttered along in the background. Neural networkers, for example, continued to focus on machine architectures which might capture the essence of what brains actually do in relating a self to a world - the basic organismic or semiotic loop.
In data processing terms, you can recognise the flip. Instead of data in/data crunched/data outputted, the organismic version of a computational cycle is based on making a prediction that anticipates a state of input so that that input can be in fact cancelled away. The computational task is homeostatic to avoid having to notice or learn anything new. The ideal is to be able to deal with the world at the level of already learnt and honed unthinking reflex. To simply assimilate the ever changing world into an untroubled flow of self.
Of course, life always surprises us in big and small ways. And we are able to pick that up quickly because we were making predictions about its most likely state. So we have a machinery of attentional mop-up that kicks in when the machinery of unthinking habit finds itself caught short.
But embodied cognition is the inverse of disembodied cognition. Instead of data input being turned into data output, it is data output being generated with enough precision to cancel away all the expected arriving data input.
For one paradigm, it is all about the construction of a state of mental display with all the Cartesian dualism that results from that. For the other paradigm, it is all about avoiding needing to be "consciously" aware of the world by being so well adapted to your world that you already knew what was going to happen in advance.
Erasing information, forgetting events, not reacting in new ways. These are all the hallmarks of a well-adapted nervous system.
Of course, this biological realism runs completely counter to the standard cultural conception of mind and consciousness. And this is because humans are socially constructed creatures trying to run a completely different script.
It is basic to our sociology that we represent ourselves as brightly self-aware actors within a larger social drama. We have to be feeling all these feelings, thinking all these thoughts, to play the role of a "self-actualising, self-regulating, self-introspecting" human being.
We can't just go with the flow, as our biology is set up to do. We have to nurture the further habit of noticing everything about "ourselves" so that we can play the part of being an actor in a human drama. We have to be self-conscious of everything that might naturally just slip past and so actually create the disembodied Cartesian display that allows us to be selves watching selves doing the stuff that "comes naturally", then jumping in with guilt or guile to edit the script in some more socially approved manner.
So there is the neurobiology of mind which just paints a picture of a meat machine acquiring pragmatic habits and doing its level homeostatic best not to have to change, just go with its established flow.
And this unexciting conception of the human condition is matched with a social constructionist tradition in psychology that offers an equally prosaic diagnosis where everything that is so special about homo sapiens is just a new level of social semiosis the extension of the habitual mind so that it becomes a new super-organismic level of unthinking, pragmatic, flow.
But no one writes best-sellers to popularise this kind of science. It is not the image of humanity that people want to hear about. Indeed, it would undermine the very machinery of popular culture itself the Romantic and Enlightened conception of humans as Cartesian creatures. Half angel, half beast. A social drama of the self that you can't take your eyes off for a second.
So if you have set your task to be the one of understanding the science of the mind, then you can see how much cultural deprogramming you probably have to go through to even recognise what might constitute a good book to discuss.
But my rough summary is that circa-1900s, a lot of people were getting it right about cognition as embodied semiosis. Then from the 1950s, the science got tangled up in computer metaphors and ideology about cognition as disembodied mechanism. And from about 2000, there was a swing back to embodied cognition again. The enactive turn.
So you could chop out anything written or debated between the 1950s to 2000s and miss nothing crucial. :razz:
I don't think there was any conflict, or even much overlap, between the ideas of Pinker and Damasio that I wrote about. Pinker didn't really talk about reason at all in "The Language Instinct," just language. I didn't see anything I would characterize as "Enlightenment rationalism." I haven't read his other books. I focused close in on one subject in Damasio, the proto-self, because I specifically wanted to avoid talking about consciousness. So I didn't address his thoughts about reason. Even if there were conflict, I was never trying to provide a comprehensive, consistent view of mind. I tried to make that clear in the OP.
I appreciate you providing Lakoff's comments, although not much of what he has written seems to have much to do with language. As I noted, there is little discussion about reason in "The Language Instinct," and what there was wasn't included in the part I wrote about.
Well, I've read your post three times and still don't know what to make of it. It's not all that unusual when I'm dealing with you. The main problem is that I don't know how to incorporate what you've written into what I've said previously or vise versa. I probably need to do some more reading before I'll be able to do that.
Quoting apokrisis
That doesn't sound like anything I read in Pinker's book.
When was it written? :smile:
I got into the socially constructed aspects of the human mind just a few years before evolutionary psychology came rolling in over the top of everyone with its genocentric presumptions about the higher faculties.
So there are parts of the Chomskyian school I am sympathetic to - such as its structuralist bent. And then other parts it misses the boat in classic evolved mental facilities fashion. Go back to the 1920s and Vygotsky and Luria laid out the socially constructed nature of these.
That is why I keep insisting on semiotics as the unifying view. Nothing can make sense until you realise that genes, neurons, words and numbers are all just increasing abstracted versions of the one general self-world modelling relation.
Life and mind have a single explanation. And it even explains social, political and moral structure.
There is a big prize at the end of this trail. And it aint something so trite as explaining the explanatory gap in everyones consciousness theories.
My objection to your approach is that it presumes that a lot of patient detail will assemble some secure understanding about how the brain works.
But the problem is so much bigger. It is about understanding the deep structure of the very thing of an organism. You cant even see what counts as the right detail without having the right big picture.
You are probably right. Which is kind of why I have never bothered to worry about details. The chances of determining or identifying the correct big picture seem remote to me and likely will make no real difference to my day-to-day life. Interesting to hear snippets from true believer's however.
Right. gotcha. :up:
Interesting take on my response. Do you take me as condescending? Not my intention.
Quoting Tom Storm
Great. But talking of true believer snippets sure sounds that way.
So I'm agreeing with your broader point that we cant even see what counts as the right detail without having the right big picture and I'm expressing skepticism in my ability to identify what matters in this vast and highly technical subject. For this reason, I have never tried to study or incorporate any advanced theory of mentation or cognitive processes and am satisfied to behold glimmers from others more assertive than I am.
To start, I want to make it clear you are doing exactly what I asked for in the OP. As I wrote:
Quoting T Clark
That's what you're doing and I appreciate it.
"The Language Instinct" was written in 1994, but was republished in 2008. I guess I assume it wouldn't be reprinted if Pinker didn't still stand behind it.
I've learned a lot from you over the years. For example, more and more often I find myself thinking about constraints from above as being as important as synthesis from below in all sorts of situations where there is a hierarchy of effects. I never would have been able to grasp that, even as much as I do, if I hadn't worked first to try to understand the bottom up way of seeing things.
Ditto with what we're talking about here. As I noted, I have a hard time buying the semiosis argument. It sounds and feels too much like the whole mathematical universe schtick - mistaking a metaphysical metaphor for science. Maybe I'll come around eventually.
Obviously you know more about this than I do. I don't think you're wrong, but I don't understand about 80% of what you're talking about. I won't be able to figure it out by just listening to you and ignoring what other people say. You pissing on Pinker and others like him doesn't make your arguments more convincing.
I gave Pinker a fairly favourable review of his Words and Rules when I reviewed it for the Guardian. But I wasnt impressed much by the Language Instinct. And I found How the Mind Works too trite to read.
So my view was that he was fine so long as he stuck close to his research. But he was just a bandwagon jumper when it came to the culture wars of the time.
I think I might have reviewed Damasio too for the Guardian. I did for someone.
There are a ton of books I could recommend. Some are even quite fun like Tor Nørretranders 1991 book The User Illusion.
Quoting apokrisis
But this can:
Quoting apokrisis
Thanks. I'll take a look.
Quoting T Clark
Descartes argues that humans are rational animals, and the faculty that guarantees our rationality is an innate , God-given capacity to organize thought in rational terms.
In the past few centuries, notions of innatism have evolved away from a religious grounding in favor of empirical explanations. While the concept of instinct is so general as to mean almost anything, the specific way in which Pinker uses it in relation to language is something he inherited from Chomsky. Chomsky posited an innate , and therefore universal , computational module that he called transformational grammar. In other words , there is a rational logic of grammar , and this rationality is the product of an innate structure syntactically organizing words into sentences . In this way, Pinker and Chomsky are heirs of Enlightenment Rationalism. Chomsky has said as much himself.
My quote from Lakoff was intended to show that embodied approaches to language tend to reject Pinkers claim that innate grammar structures exist. They say there is no language instinct , but rather innate capacities for complex cognition , out of which language emerged in different ways in different cultures.
As far as the relation between Damasio and Lakoff is concerned, you are right that Damasio does not deal with the origin of language. But given his credentials as a an embodied neurocognitivist, it is highly unlikely that innate computational grammar structures are consistent with his general approach , which is anti-rationalistic.
But as I pointed out, the modelling relation approach to neural information processing says the brains aim is to turn the lights out. It targets a level of reality prediction where its forward model can cancel the arriving sensory input.
Efficiency is about being able to operate on unthinking and unremembered automatic pilot. You can drive familiar busy routes with complete blankness about the world around as all the actions are just done and forgotten in a skilled habitual way.
So like the fridge door, the light only comes on when a gap grows between the self and the world in this holistic self-world modelling relation.
The input-output computer model has the opposite problem of treating the creation of light as the central mystery. All that data processing to produce a representation, and yet still a problem of who is witnessing the display.
The modelling relation approach says both light and dark are what are being created. It is about the production of a sharp contrast out of a state of vagueness - the Jamesian blooming, buzzing, confusion of the unstructured infant brain.
So the question of why there is light is answered by the reciprocal question of how there can be dark. And the answer in terms of how the brain handles habitual and attentional level processing is just everyday neuroscience.
The input-output model of data processing cant produce light because it cant produce dark either. It is not producing any contrast at all to speak of.
Quick question: I find it hard to understand what the nuances of difference are between 'innate capacities for complex cognition' and an 'innate , and therefore universal , computational module'. Sounds like different language for a similar phenomenon. Can you clarify this in a few sentences? I understand that Chomsky's view provides a rationalist logic but how is Lakoff's view antithetical to this?
Sounds like an argument over whether a donut is a cake or a biscuit. :lol:
The linguistic wars talk past the issue in being hand-wavingly simplistic. From the semiotic point of view, what really mattered in language evolution was the development of a vocal tract which imposed a new kind of serial motor constraint on the standard hierarchical or recursive architecture of frontal lobe motor planning.
Tool use had already started the process because knapping a flint demands a grammar of chipping away at a rock in serial fashion to achieve a pictured goal. Dexterity is about breaking down sophisticated intent into a long sequence of precision actions.
Is making a hand axe a tool instinct or complex cognition? Or is it really an intersection of nature and nurture where other things - like an opposable thumb, a lateralisation of hand dominance, a bulking up of prefrontal motor planning cortex - all combine so as to impose a strong serial demand on the brains general purpose recursive neural circuitry?
Language likewise would have most likely evolved due to the lucky accident of changes to the vocal tract imposing a new kind of constraint on social vocalisation. In my view, Darwins singing ape hypothesis was right after all.
Homo was evolving as an intensely social tool-using creature. Vocalisation would have been still under emotional limbic control - the hoots and grunts chimpanzees use to great communicative effect. And even today, human swear words and emotional noises are more the product of anterior cingulate habit than prefrontal intent. Emitted rather than articulated.
But something must have driven H erectus towards a sophisticated capacity for articulate vocalisation - sing-song noises - requiring the connected adaptations of a radical restructuring of the vocal tract and a matching tweaking of the brains vocal control network.
The big accident was then that a serial constraint on hierarchical motor planning could be turned into a new level of semiotic encoding.
Genes are likewise a serial constraint on hierarchical order. A 1D DNA sequence can represent a 3D protein. A physical molecule can be encoded as a string of bits. This was the lucky semiotic accident that allowed life to evolve.
Language became the genes for the socially constructed human mind because once vocalisation was strait-jacketed into sing-song sequences - proto-words organised by proto-rules - it became a short step to a facility for articulation becoming properly semiotic. An abstract symbol system that could construct shareable states of understanding.
So while Chomskys disciples work themselves into a lather over specific instinct vs general cognitive complexity, as usual the interesting story is in the production of dialectical contrast.
It was how vocalisation came to be dichotomised into a serial constraint on hierarchical action that is the evolutionary question. And then how this new level of encoding blossomed into the further dialectic that is the human self in its human world.
Language transformed the mentality of Homo sapiens in social constructionist fashion. Again, this was widely understood in about 1900, yet almost entirely forgotten by the 1970s or so. The computer as a metaphor for brain function had completely taken over the public debate.
You became either a Pinker having to claim a language faculty was part of the universal hardware, or a Lakoff claiming it was just another app you might not choose to download.
I wonder, am trying to make out, if this answer uses the same lighting metaphor as the question. Because I'm fascinated by the metaphor.
I think the question is, why can't a (super impressive, say mammal-imitating) neural network type machine be a zombie, just like a similarly impressive but old-style symbolic computer/android?
Putting this as a question of whether the world is lit up for the machine in question seems a powerful intuition pump for consciousness. I've found myself spontaneously invoking it when considering discussions of zombies, and of the alleged difference between primary and secondary properties.
Possibly @apokrisis is following that reading, and saying that, paradoxically, consciousness happens as the organism strives to avoid it.
I'm not sure if that would convince the questioner, who might object that it merely describes a kind of attention-management that is easily enough ascribed to a zombie.
But as I say, I'm not sure if that is the intended answer.
As someone who insinuates that the intuition is wrong, even if easily pumped, I of course ought to offer an alternative. Ok, maybe something like, a machine that's one us (one of our self-regarding ilk, properly called conscious) constantly reaches for pictures and sounds that would efficaciously compare and classify the illumination events and sound events that it encounters. It understands the language of pictures, in which black pictures refer to unlit events and colourful ones to lit events. Whereas a zombie, however it deals with what it sees, is like the Chinese room in failing to appreciate the reference of symbols (here pictorial) to actual things.
Howard Pattee my favourite hierarchy theorist and biosemiotician (along with Stan Salthe wrote this on how even the question of living vs nonliving can be applied to machines. It all starts from a proper causal definition of an organism one that clearly distinguishes it from a computer or other mechanical process.
Quoting bongo fury
Where does the idea of a zombie even come from except as "other" to what popular culture conceives the conscious human to be.
Everything starts to go wrong philosophically once you start turning the complementarity to be found in dialectics the logical unity that underwrites the logical division of a dichotomy into the false dilemmas of reductionism.
Reductionism demands one or other be true. Dialectics/semiotics are holistic in that they say existence is about the production of dichotomous contrast. Symmetry-breaking.
So brain function is best understood in terms of future prediction that seeks to minimise an organism's need for change - as how does an organism exist as what it is unless it can homeostatically regulate the tendency of its environment to get busy randomising it.
You are "you" to the extent you can maintain an identity in contrast to the entropifying actions of your world - which for humans, is both a physical environment, and a social or informational environment.
We can be the eye of the storm because we are the still centre of a raging world that revolves around us. That contrast is what we feel as being a self in a world.
The neural trick to achieving this is a modelling relation which cancels away the changes the world might impose on us - all its unplanned accidents - and thus imposes on the world our "self" that is the world exactly as we intend it to be.
The baseline has to first be set to zero by cancelling everything that is currently happening to the level of "already processed" habit. And from there, attentional processes can mop up the unexpected - turning those into tomorrow's habits and expectations.
This is the basis of Friston's Bayesian brain. Neuroscience has got to the point that semiosis can be written out in differential equations. So Pattee's call for a proper epistemology of life and mind are being answered.
For other reasons, I doubt this will lead to conscious computers. But it at least grounds the next step for neural networks.
An innate language module of the Chomskian sort specifies a particular way of organizing grammar prior to and completely independent of social interaction. Lakoffs innate capacities for cognition do not dictate any particular syntactic or semantic patterns of language. Those are completely determined by interaction.
I believe Chomsky went from a much more complex grammar rule-based brain to simply "Merge".
That doesn't seem true to me from what he wrote in "The Language Instinct." He quoted William James' "What is an Instinct." James defines instinct as stereotyped behavior which is triggered by specific environmental stimuli, is genetically transmitted, and generally is active only during a limited period of time, after which behavior is influenced by experience. I had never thought much about it before and I found that really helpful. He also quoted Darwin as writing "Human language is an instinctive tendency to acquire an art."
Quoting Joshs
I saw very little in "The Language Instinct" that dealt with language as a rational process. I don't see that the fact the grammar is structured is the same as saying it is rational. There was little discussion about the mechanism that generated similar grammars in all human languages. One thing that struck me as unconvincing about Pinker's argument is that he claimed that the underpinning of language is an unconscious language he called "mentalese." I don't see why there needs to be another system of symbols beneath the languages themselves. Certainly my opinion is based on very little except introspection, which is suspect in this situation.
Quoting Joshs
Pinker gives specific explanations and references specific studies to support his positions that made sense to me. I don't know the arguments on the other side in order to be able to judge.
I had a similar response, especially because the sources I referenced focused on mental processes with a limited range, not a full explication of human cognition.
Quoting Joshs
As I wrote in a previous post, Pinker has specific, referenced responses to those criticisms. I don't know the counter-arguments so I have a hard time judging.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur, so feel free not to respond.
I have a friend who has no minds eye. She does not see visual mental images. She didn't even realize this herself until she was in her 60s. Next time I talk to her, I ask about what that experience is like.
I dont want to look like a blab but this story is so interesting. Please, if you finally ask her what that experience is like I want to know her answer too.
It amazed me when I read she didnt realize herself until she was in her sixties!
Yes. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/416251
Does she see mental images of the things in front of her?
Quoting T Clark
This is simply the way that rational has been used when it comes to framing the debate between innatism and behaviorism.
The most important and probably controversial issue in child language studies is concerned with the knowledge a child acquires. Is this acquired knowledge innate or empirical? The answer to this question might be quite different from one perspective to another in language acquisition. Two philosophical traditions with respect to knowledge in general are empiricism (Lock & Hume) and rationalism (Plato & Descartes). Empiricists believe that knowledge is solely the product of experience and rationalists on the other hand argue that knowledge is part innate and part experience. All approaches to
language acquisition adhere to one of these positions more or less and consequently there have been various versions of empiricism and rationalism. The corresponding theoretical positions with respect to language acquisition are two extreme positions: Behaviorism and Nativism.
(Revisiting First Language Acquisition Through Empirical and Rational Perspectives)
Yes, she sees fine, but her memory and imagination do not include visual images.
Yes then, Pinker is a "rationalist" in the sense you are describing. He believes "knowledge is part innate and part experience." You don't believe that? You don't believe that there are innate mechanisms that make acquisition of language possible? Doesn't the fact that there is only a limited time in childhood during which people can learn language, indicate there is probably an innate mechanism for learning it?
What is the source of the quote you provided?
I guess if you've never had it, you never know you don't. I'll ask her.
Its in parenthesis at the bottom of the quote.
Revisiting First Language Acquisition through Empirical and Rational Perspectives.
Abdorreza Tahriri
Published 1 July 2012
Linguistics
Quoting T Clark
Its true that language learning in childhood is more rapid than in adults, and there is a window of opportunity after which certain abilities can no longer be achieved, but the same is true of many perceptual achievements. I think theres an important difference between claiming that humans are born with general cognitive capacities that allow for conceptual symbolization, and claiming that they are born with structures that precisely dictate the kinds of grammatical
patterns we use , in an absolutely universal manner. I side with those who explain the cross-cultural commonalities of grammatical structuration ( subject-predicate , etc) as the result of commonalities in embodied interaction with our world, not some innate computational mechanism
Quoting T Clark
I also like to use Wikipedia as a reference. But as it happens with dictionaries too, sometimes they give us circularity. Here, mind -> mental -> mind. Because what you get from any dictionary and from Wiki itself when you look for the term "mental" is "of or relating to the mind"!
I wonder how these things escape so easily the minds of people who are posting them!
Anyway, they are also a sign and the result of an inability to understand and define a subject. In this case: mind.
Quoting T Clark
Main sentence/verb is missing ...
Quoting T Clark
Neither experience nor consciousness are mental processes. They are not "phenomena", as the definition, you, yourself, have brought says (Re: "The mind is the set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.")
"Experience" has to do with immediate contact with and observation of something. And "consciousness" has to do with a state and an ability to perceive and be responsive to something. Neither of them is a phenomenon. Indeed, the mind is involved in both of them as an intermediate (nouns. It's a communication system between the person and the environment as well as with his own thoughts, feelings, bodily functions, etc.
Mind and consciousness are two of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted (misexplained) concepts and subjects in philosophy. Maybe the main responsible are Science, and by extension scientists, who insist that they are both bodily "functions", of a purely physical nature. And, although Philosophy, and by extension philosophers, should not be affected and misled by such an unfounded position, an unproved fact, a fallacy, a fiction, a lie, etc. yet it does. This is the power that Science has over us. We take for granted things it says which are out of its jurisdiction. Like mind and consciousness.
Isnt the notion of semiotic encoding an atemporal
concept? Does a code transcribe its pattern identically? And if not , must not the code itself persist self-identically in order for it to function as code?
If we begin with a pattern, an ensemble of elements organized with a particular relationship one to another, and observe this pattern transform itself as a new whole from one moment to the next such that each new configuration is similar but not identical to the previous pattern ( and each element has also changed its sense and role with respect to the ensemble), can this be considered a semiotic process?
I dont follow your questions.
Sure, a serial code has to be communicated one discrete step at a time. But that is the structural limitation that also allows unlimited combination - chains of symbols as long as you like to stand for some state of meaning.
So in being physically reduced to a string of informational bits, a state of informational constraint can be constructed that is itself atemporal in its effects. Genes can crank out the same protein at any time of choosing - Pattees point about rate independent information, if that was your issue. Likewise, a Shakespeare passage can be delivered at any time or place, and the time it takes to read shouldnt bear on the actual interpretation.
But what question are you asking?
Quoting Joshs
What example do you have in mind here? Chinese whispers?
What is "rubbish"?
1) The circularity in the definition (Re: "The mind is the set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena") ? Do you really can't see it? But even if you disagree, shouldn't you tell me why?
2) That the main sentence/verb is missing --Re: "So, mental processes, mental faculties, mental phenomena - emotion, thought, memory, perception, learning, imagination, instinct, attention, pain, motivation, language, action, decision making, maintaining bodily processes."-- and therefore the whole statement or point is invalid or makes no sense? Again, If you disagree, shouldn't you tell me what/where is that sentence and what is actually your statement or point ?
3) That neither experience nor consciousness are mental processes? Again, if you disagree, after all the explanations I gave you, shouldn't you tell me why?
Do you really think that choosing to respond to all of the above with just using the word "rubbish", and without providing a single why, makes you a wiser person than me?
As you suggested, I am reading "The User Illusion." I'll let you know what I think. In the interim, I've just finished reading "A Standard Model of the Mind: Toward a Common Computational Framework Across Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Robotics," included in AI Magazine from 2017. Are you familiar with it? Here's a link:
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2744
The article covers cognition in a way that seems consistent with the way you have been describing it. It is clear, well-written, and interesting. I had never thought about thinking in that way before. I don't want to get into any kind of in-depth discussion now since I don't understand it well enough, but I think I understand the overall approach reasonably well. I have some preliminary thoughts:
I think calling it a "standard model" with a specific reference to the standard model in physics is a mistake. Not because it is necessarily inaccurate, but because it is presumptuous. It seems to somehow claim that cognitive science is established at the same level as particle physics. I think that will undermine the credibility of the approach to people outside the field. I recognize that is not a substantive criticism.
The model presented in the article is in no way set up as an alternative to or in contradiction with any other way of looking at mind. It was just a straightforward presentation. That increased it's credibility for me.
The kind of approach described in the article seems to me to be at a different hierarchical level of organization that that described by Pinker. It focuses on processing rather than human behavior. That's not a criticism. I had never considered the structure of how exactly brain activity becomes the mind. It was eye-opening. Because the approach was at a different level than that described in Pinker, I don't see any obvious contradiction, although the article did say:
...the programs and data are ultimately intended to be acquired automatically from experience that is, learned rather than programmed, aside from possibly a limited set of innate programs. Cognitive architectures thus induce languages, just as do computer architectures, but they are languages geared toward yielding learnable intelligent behavior, in the form of knowledge and skills.
And:
In simple terms, the hypothesis is that intelligent behavior arises from a combination of an implementation of a cognitive architecture plus knowledge and skills. Processing at the higher levels then amounts to sequences of these interactions over time. Even complex cognitive capabilities such as natural language processing... and planning are hypothesized to be constructed in such a fashion, rather than existing as distinct modules at higher levels.
Beyond that, the article had very little to say about language.
Anyway, really interesting. As I said, I don't think it will be fruitful to go into a lot more detail. I have more reading to do. I would like to know if this article does match the approach you have been presenting.
Alas. I'll keep trying. Thanks.
Doesn't it depend on what you mean by "mental Image"? I can visualize quite complex structures and maps, but it is not like staring at an actual static picture or map or an actual object. How is it for you?
I definitely have a "mind's eye," i.e. I can see visual images unrelated to any current external stimuli. I have visual memories, imagination, insights, concepts... A few times I've had a wonderful experience. Suddenly I'll get a flash of a visual image, e.g. one time I was feeling deeply at peace when from nowhere I got an image of a horse pulling a plow. In five minutes I wrote a poem describing the horse's experience that perfectly expressed how I was feeling. As they say, the poem wrote itself. It's one of my favorite things I've ever written. I have no idea where the horse came from. I don't hang around with horses. I had no recent experience with horses. I'm not a farmer. Magic.
But no, like you, I don't see detailed images. I generally can't pick out details.
Also, ask her to describe a route, say out of the house to the nearest post box?
And what happens if she were to draw (the post box, say) from memory?
I don't talk to her often. Next time I do I'll ask.