Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind

Kenneth Sayre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317578567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book, published in 1976, presents an entirely original approach to the subject of the mind-body problem, examining it in terms of the conceptual links between the physical sciences and the sciences of human behaviour. It is based on the cybernetic concepts of information and feedback and on the related concepts of thermodynamic and communication-theoretic entropy.

The foundation of the approach is the theme of continuity between evolution, learning and human consciousness. The author defines life as a process of energy exchange between organism and environment, and evolution as a feedback process maintaining equilibrium between environment and reproductive group. He demonstrates that closely related feedback processes on the levels of the behaving organism and of the organism's nervous system constitute the phenomena of learning and consciousness respectively. He analyses language as an expedient for extending human information-processing and control capacities beyond those provided by one's own nervous system, and shows reason to be a mode of processing information in the form of concepts removed from immediate stimulus control. The last chapter touches on colour vision, pleasure and pain, intentionality, self-awareness and other subjective phenomena. Of special interest to the communication theorist and philosopher, this study is also of interest to psychologists and anyone interested in the connection between the physical and life sciences.

PART ONE

THE MIND-BODY
PROBLEM

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I

INTRODUCTION

1 THE SCIENTIFIC SIDE OF THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

The purpose of inquiry is understanding. In general (more may be involved in particular contexts), to understand a phenomenon is to be able to trace its relationship to the conditions and consequences of its occurrence.

This inquiry is directed toward an understanding of man. Of course there is much about man we understand already, but our understanding of the mental has remained deficient. We understand relatively little about perception and language, and almost nothing about the reasoning process. More basically, we conceive ourselves as possessing both bodily and mental features, but are unable to conceive how the two are related. This difficulty is the core of the mind-body problem.

Being unable to conceive how mind and body are related is not to be unaware that such relationships exist. We learn as part of common sense when to attribute a person’s behavior to his thoughts and intentions, and how his feelings are affected by his bodily states. The difficulty is our inability to trace the connections between the mental and the physical by which these interactions are brought about. Worse yet, we are unable to conceive how these interactions are possible, how events of the two sorts are capable of mutual influence.

It is important to keep these two aspects of the problem separate. On one hand is our puzzlement due to lack of explanatory principles relating physical and mental events, parallel for example to the puzzlement during the early modern period about the relationship between electricity and magnetism. On the other hand is our puzzlement due to lack of a conceptual framework for bringing events of the two sorts into mutual relevance. Just as the concepts of force and motion (typical of the physical) admit no intelligible application to mental processes, so the concepts of thought and intention (typical of the mental) have no literal application to physical events.

Although distinct, these two sides of the problem are clearly related. If we had principles providing causal links between the mental and the physical, we already would have a conceptual framework in which they could be intelligibly related. Solution of the first part of the problem would include a solution to the second as a necessary condition. The reverse, however, is not the case, since we might possess a conceptual framework embracing both types of phenomenon without any account of their causal relationship. The first side of the problem is scientific, the second what philosophers call ontological. Since solution of the first would require solution of the second, the ontological is the more basic side of the problem.

In our preoccupation with the ontology of the mind-body relationship, however, we tend to forget that this is only part of the problem, and that to understand how interaction is possible is not to understand how it actually occurs. The mind-body problem will not be resolved merely by providing a conceptual framework in which these two sides of man can be intelligibly related; it will be necessary to account for their mutual influence as well. An alleged ontological solution by itself is idle if it does not lead to understanding of the actual processes of interaction. In brief, one mark of an adequate answer to the ontological question is its fruitfulness as a prelude to scientific understanding.

By reverse token, our lack of an adequate ontological solution is shown by our persistent inability to account for interaction on a scientific basis. Our clearest indication that the mind-body problem still lacks an adequate ontological solution is the isolation of the physical sciences from the sciences of man. The conceptual gap that blocks our understanding of mind-body interaction is reflected in the cleavage between chemistry and physics and such man-oriented sciences as linguistics and psychology. Lacking a common conceptual framework in which these diverse sciences can be interrelated, of course we do not understand the interaction between mental and physical events.

This is not to suggest that nothing important has been accomplished toward linking various sciences pertaining to human behavior. Much has been learned, for example, about the physiological mechanisms controlling phenomena of perception and speech; and the discovery of various ‘pleasure centers’ in the brain must be reckoned as a breakthrough for empirical psychology. Yet the fact remains that there is little systematic interchange of data or explanatory insights between sciences dealing with the physical organism and those pertaining to mental activity. This is the case even where there is overlap of specialized interests.

For instance, sociology shares with the theory of evolution an interest in group influence upon individual members. Yet, apart from isolated exploration by social scientists of the evolutionary model,¹ neither field has been much influenced by the other’s theoretical work. A more basic rift exists between linguistics and communication theory. Despite the fact that linguistics today seems bent on an autonomous course, it remains a sheer anomaly that the particular study of human communication remains isolated from the study of communication in general.²

Even more remarkable is the conceptual distance between the social sciences and thermodynamics, the science of energy transformations. All activities of the human organism itself, mental and physical, as well as all interactions between members of human groups, involve highly structured forms of energy exchange. Indeed, man is unique in the variety of living conditions under which he can extract energy from his environment, a fact (we shall see) intimately bound up with his mental capacities. At face value, thermodynamics might be expected to be as basic to psychology and sociology as chemistry is to neurophysiology. From the ideal viewpoint of an integrated science of man, the isolation of the social sciences from thermodynamics indicates a fundamental conceptual deficiency.

The mind-body problem thus is no mere occasion for speculative exercise, unrelated to empirical approaches to the understanding of man. If I have read the signs correctly, the conceptual deficiency behind our inability to relate the mental and the physical is implicated also in the theoretical cleavage between the natural sciences and the sciences of man. An adequate solution to the mind-body problem should lead to an integrated science of human nature. At very least it should bring these various approaches into mutual relevance.

2 PROTOSCIENCE

Science disengaged from philosophy only recently in human inquiry, and their relationship since has remained ambiguous. Today they appear to be independent disciplines, each locked within the jurisdiction of its own university compartment. But this appearance is surely misleading, for neither could remain vital without the other’s influence. The mind-body problem provides an appropriate context for examining a few aspects of their interrelationship.

Philosophic inquiry is general in several senses, each serving to distinguish philosophy from the empirical sciences. For one, philosophy is not identified with a particular methodology. Although many philosophers (I among them) think of philosophy as conceptual analysis, in application their methods vary from ‘logical reconstruction’ (Russell) and ‘descriptive metaphysics’ (Strawson) to what Austin has called ‘linguistic phenomenology’. Moreover, there are many other techniques (textual exegesis, demonstration, provisional doubt) practiced by successful philosophers which we should not deem irrelevant to philosophic inquiry. To be engaged in science, on the other hand, is to be committed to a particular methodology, although methods of course differ from field to field.

Further, philosophy is not restricted to particular areas of human concern. Whereas physics, for example, has no bearing on social behavior, nor sociology on interactions among inanimate systems, both are recognized as subjects of philosophic inquiry, along with problems ranging from cosmology to art and religion. This restriction in subject matter on the part of science is related to its specialization of methodology, both traceable to the manner of its origin in the philosophic enterprise.

In presocratic thought philosophy was indistinguishable from biology (Empedocles), psychology (Anaxagoras) and mathematical physics (the Pythagoreans), being based on common observation and speculative reason. As particular approaches began to prove fruitful in particular problem areas, however, inquiry in these areas came to be dominated by concepts and observational techniques which could not be extended appropriately to other fields. Thus biology emerged as a distinctive discipline on the basis of methods which (despite Aristotle) proved ineffective for physics, while physics gained autonomy through conceptual resources which (despite Locke) proved inadequate for the study of mind. More recently psychology itself achieved status as a specialized discipline with methods inapplicable, for example, within sociology and linguistics. In each case limitation to a particular subject matter is a consequence of methodological specialization.

Perhaps the most important point of comparison between philosophy and science for our purposes, however, has to do with a third sense in which philosophy is the more general inquiry. Since science is generated through specialization, it splits off from philosophy in relatively isolated segments. Problems particularly amenable to one approach usually are excluded by other methodologies. The result is a circumscription of the several sciences by boundaries of responsibility and of permissible neglect. The accomplished physicist is not expected to be informed in sociology, nor the psychologist in the mechanisms of genetic inheritance. In sum, it follows from the very nature of scientific inquiry that scientists are segregated into diverse competencies, none of which is capable of synthesizing a comprehensive conception of man. The task of integration is left to philosophy, where it lay originally with the presocratics. But whereas the presocratics lacked the benefit of specialized science, we have accumulated massive bodies of relevant scientific data. One of philosophy’s main responsibilities today is to weld these masses of scientific data into a coherent account of human nature.

At least three stages are involved in this integrative process. First is the stage of clarification, where the conceptual structures of a given science are analyzed for consistency and logical order (for example, with respect to primitive terms, explanatory principles and rules of inference). This task generally belongs to philosophy of science, although there is no reason why the scientist (like Einstein) should not be his own philosopher. The second stage is that of interpretation, where the basic terms and principles of mutually relevant sciences are worked into a form showing structural similarities. An illustration from psychology is the recent conception of learning as a form of the evolutionary process (see chapter VIII below). Although such interpretation does not consolidate the disciplines in question, it indicates facets that can be drawn together and enables an interchange of explanatory insight. In the third stage conceptual ties are extended between analogous facets of the several disciplines in the form of shared categories and explanatory principles. One example of synthesis on this level is the development of the concepts of charge and electric current by which the previously separate studies of electrical and magnetic phenomena became integrated into the science of electromagnetism.³

These latter two stages of interpretation and synthesis extend the conceptual resources of the disciplines in question, and might appropriately be labeled ‘protoscience’. Although protoscience is directed toward an increase in scientific understanding, its integrative aspects make it a paradigm of philosophic inquiry.

In arguing above that the mind-body problem would be resolved only by bringing the natural sciences into harmony with the sciences of man, I was arguing that the problem has proto-scientific as well as ontological dimensions. For its resolution, not only must we (a) provide a general conceptual framework accommodating both mental and physical phenomena (the ontological problem), but also we must (b) interpret the categories of the several relevant sciences to fit within this general framework, and (c) formulate generic explanatory principles to merge the results of these diverse studies into a fruitful and coherent account of the human organism.

The central thesis of this book is that all three of these requirements can be met with the resources of cybernetics, the study of communication and control.⁴ In order to appreciate more fully the significance of this point of departure, let us review some more familiar approaches to the mind-body problem.

3 TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

If one thinks of mind, with Descartes, as characterized essentially by thought but as lacking extension, and thinks of the physical as thoughtless but essentially extended, then the two domains are rendered conceptually incommensurable with no common ground for explaining their mutual influence. Any resolution of the mind-body problem must provide a set of categories appropriate to both fields of activity, in terms of which they can be conceptually related.

Attempts to provide such categories generally have followed one of two quite different stratagems. One stratagem has been to accept the descriptive and explanatory concepts that have been found adequate to one field of activity, and in terms of these to ‘reduce’ (define or eliminate) the basic concepts of the other field. The other has been to devise a third set of categories in terms of which the concepts of both fields can be explicated, and through which accordingly they can be interrelated.

Two typical instances of the first approach are Berkeley’s mentalism and the materialism of the contemporary scientific realists. Both these positions are reductionistic, but one accepts as basic what the other rejects.

Assuming as unproblematic the concepts of idea, applying to all objects of mental awareness, and of volition, applying to the mental activity by which ideas are initiated, Berkeley attempted to dispense with the concept of matter and to define the basic categories of physics in terms solely of relationships among ideas. In this respect, Berkeley attempted a reduction of physical to mental categories, with more technical success than I believe is commonly realized.

Yet Berkeley’s reduction was fated to remain unconvincing. One reason undoubtedly was the highly theological cast of the ontology with which he replaced the ontology of physical things. More significant in the long run, however, is that no well established theory of mental activity exists in which either physical or mental events can be satisfactorily explained. A person concerned to increase his understanding of the human organism is not going to find much help in the suggestion that physical events, of which we already possess a considerable degree of systematic understanding, on a more basic level really are mental happenings, of which we possess very little understanding at all. From the systematic point of view, Berkeley recommends a move from strength to weakness.

Perhaps the most basic reason for failure of Berkeley’s view-point, however, is that it has led to no new insights into physical nature, or into the relationship between physical and mental phenomena. It was an insight of sorts, to be sure, to realize that there is nothing conceptually necessary in our ordinary way of thinking about t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One The Mind-Body Problem
• Part Two Fundamentals
• Part Three Organism and Environment
• Part Four Mentality
• Bibliography
• Index