Reflections on Mind and the Image of Reality

Brown

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498240925
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

This collection of brief essays and still briefer commentaries is a personal reflection on some topics that have been thematic in the development of my theoretical work. These essays are not meant to extend the theory into yet-uncharted territory, but rather to draw out some of its implications for clinical neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and everyday life. The point of view guiding these reflections can be found in prior works, but the discerning reader will not fail to see a departure from current models of mind and brain based on circuit board diagrams, modular and computational theories that conflict with a processual account in which the mind/brain is more like a living organism. This perspective, which is often at odds with common sense and folk psychology, has particular relevance to our concepts of the self, the inner life, subjective time, adaptive process, and the world represented in perception.

PART I

The Rational Animal

How can we reconcile a world in flux with a self that is relatively constant?

The Study of the Mind

To know yourself is risky. The unconscious is a sleeping dog that bites.

Can we say that within the brain a world of appearance governs the whole of our lives? The distinction of real and phenomenal for an individual perspective is a distinction of a physical brain and a phenomenal world. This enables the organism, with the aid of sensibility, to navigate a surround of other entities, organisms and physical brains; a world that can be apprehended by visual or auditory perception; tactile and olfactory modalities; each of which—conscious or not—mirrors a reality that approximates some or many features of real entities. It is an act of faith or a core belief that the world we perceive is physically real or aligned with the image it portrays. The simplest proof of this is the motor and perceptual lag in consciousness by which we know that the appearance of the world is off-line with mind-independent events.

We imagine a real world beyond our own, but the image that exists in the mind is not a screen to what is physically real. The organism that adapts to a physical world becomes ingredient in that world, part of the Umwelt that will influence the evolutionary path of other organisms. Primitive mind orients the organism in a daily struggle to live. Advanced mind evolves as the Umwelt becomes an expanded functional space, with novel dangers and opportunities. Organism and mentality are part of this space and a surrogate of the absence which they now occupy.

Consider this analogy. We blow up a child’s balloon to a certain shape. Is the shape of the balloon the container or is it the air inside, or the “empty” space it replaces or the configuration in the brain it arouses? Or again, we reach into the world as a hand is inserted into a glove. The fit is perfect though hand and glove are different kinds of things. We see the gloved hand, but we feel the actual hand. We accept a hand, gloved or not, as a mental image, and suppose real flesh and blood within the image to which it corresponds. The hand shapes the glove; the glove constrains and configures the hand. Is this a useful metaphor for mind and brain, or sensibility and appearance? Is the world like an extended skin that surrounds a physical organ? The brain is derived from ectoderm, like the skin. Cortex and skin are multi-layered, with bottom-up development; the skin sheds the outer dead layer; the brain sheds objects that become independent.

Think of the hand as a brain, and the glove as a perceptual model. My image of a scene overlaps that of my neighbor because the scene is in my head, not out there. Similarly, we can ask: is the physical world that which is represented by the brain, or is it more like a 3-D film with nothing behind it? To what does the imaginary world correspond? We move about in this world as if in a dream, a world elaborated by the brain which—as in the relation of hand to glove—points outward to a physical world and inward to the physical hand/brain. The flesh and blood of the hand, the cells and connectivity of the brain: that is where the real correlate of the image is to be found.

We understand that every object has many modes of existence. A chair is a perceptual object that “stands for” a physical entity. The chair is independent of the different perspectives by which it is perceived. It is a member of a category of functionally and spatially related objects as well as a pattern of brain activity. Finally, it exists as the constituent molecules that compose it. The dilemma is that the perceptual model or appearance of the chair so dominates our beliefs so that what we see seems to be what there is. The most parsimonious way to think about an object is to note that what we see is obviously wrong. The problem, which arises with consciousness, has the corollary that my existence is predicated on the consciousness that I exist. This does not mean there is no existence as a sleeping or comatose entity, but that the I, or consciousness, is part of my existence. If to exist means to be conscious of existing, and if the brain cannot be said to be conscious, my existence as a physical entity, if not a conscious one, requires consciousness.

In human mind, adaptation goes beyond the reconciliation of appearance and the physical world. The mind apprehends and acts. The self adapts to changing conditions. This is a higher form of adaptation in which an illusory self adapts to an illusory world apart from brain correlates and without a necessary correspondence to immediate events in the world. The illusion of self and appearance arises in brain, but the world has a double aspect. To say, the self does not exist is plausible; to say the world does not exist seems absurd. This is because we believe there is a correspondence of (the illusion of) the self to some pattern of brain activity, while objects appear independent of mind and brain.

The I is the agent, the me is the object. The me is wider, more persistent (recurrent) than the I, which is its momentary specification.

When we say, I hurt (amuse, upset etc.) myself, the me is an object of actions of the I.

The conscious self can undergo rapid change, angry one moment, placid the next, while change in the me is glacial.

A momentary self, the I, passes to another I, but the me recurs with minor change.

The me doesn’t initiate, it receives. The active and passive exemplars of the self correspond to agency and character.

The me is the object of self-perception; the I is the self that perceives. The conscious self presumes to know the unconscious self, which is not so much observed as extracted from the sum of its beliefs and acts.

Could the unconscious self be an artifact of its categorical nature embracing, as potential, all possible implementations in a momentary I?

The momentary self, the I, is conscious because it specifies the category of the me, which is the sum of all specifications.

In Moscow they said, talk theory for 5 hours; in Boston, 15 minutes for data. Eventually, the conclusion was in the title of the paper, the rest being superfluous.

If you say red and I say blue, there is nothing to debate. If you say a strong red and I say a weak one, the fight is on. The category is critical.

Reflexivity

Without illusion, reality could not be inferred. Without reality, life would be a perpetual dream.

The self is conscious of objects and inner states but to what extent is consciousness of self possible? If not, what does it mean to say the self is conscious of something if there is no consciousness of self? Things that appear real are images, and a feeling of realness can be more vivid in a hallucination or in a dream. In dream, we may ask, is this real, but this is rare in wakefulness. And so, most expressions of thought are not just artifacts of language but often self-referential problems inherent in the nature of mind. There is a reflexive quality in such problems as self and non-self, illusion and reality, subjective and objective.

Consider that mind is elaborated by brain but the brain and its activity are...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part I: The Rational Animal
• Part II: The Emotional Animal
• Part III: The Political Animal
• Part IV: The Imaginative Animal
• Part V: Concluding Thoughts