Discussion Board
Walter J Freeman to Eugene Halton
I tend to agree with Halton - and Peirce to the extent that one can agree with a chameleon, that mind has priority over matter, in the sense that brains construct meaning by their actions, and the meaning is ontogenetic in the sense that it exists in the relations among intentional beings, not in the individual brains or in their artifacts such as books and cinemas and signs, which are the forms and products of the actions. Yet the brains are shaped by meanings, for development of all human and animal brains is couched in relations from conception to resurrection. Now if Platonic forms exist outside time and evolution, then they are aspects of mind, which must necessarily be reborn with every new generation, and if there were some day to be no more parents and schools, then evolution would continue to engender new forms and new mind.
Harwood Fisher to All
Sept. 14.
In the web-site discussion so far, there is the question of the nature of mind-and self too. How do you define these terms? Are they simply 'brain' or brain phenomena-functions and or structures? Are they semiotic relations or structures? A clue to the problem of definition is that the discussants so far toss about terms, which they excessively nominalize. ' Mind is form'-and the like. How and by whom are the questions asked? To be sure, these questions are asked. But is it one text that is asking another? Or is it one brain asking another? Or could it be one set of neural functions? What does it mean to 'know' what the experience of mind and self are like?
If those are leading questions, then I've achieved my purpose. I'll just say what I propose: If you are defining a subjective experience, you shouldn't dance out of the inner circle within which you can know that experience.
Where does the habit of leaving out the 'knower' come from, and what justifies it?
While leaving out the 'knower' would appear to be a sign of modesty and to provide a way to cope with the problems of subjective distortion; knowledge as embedded in the organism is the only game in town. That is, unless you want to settle for brains in vats and/or some sort of electronic communication that sets bits (or waves) of information into patterns that can be shifted from one vat to the other.
Who is the arbiter of who and what 'self' is? Who is the arbiter of what 'mind' may be? These days, such questions have been embarrassing enough, so as to leave philosophers of science no choice. They have to deal with the notion of knowledge as embedded--even though it raises the messy problem of subjectivity. They do want to keep the scientists' attention, and therefore, they have tried to use the less upsetting term, 'first person perspective.' It's OK. Physicists like it. Those inclined to focus perception like it. I think Peirce would like it.
This problem is one of accounting for 'where you are coming from' when you define 'mind' and 'self.' The way the problem and the accounting currently come to the fore is via a search for a scientific way of accounting for 'consciousness.'
Well, I suppose that I have enough to say about this in the paper I sent on, and that I will have enough to say in the panel discussion in which I hope to participate. However, from the brief notes on the e-discussion so far, I do have the reaction above--and maybe another couple of comments to make. Here goes.
I am arguing that our conscious level of experience of mind is not something that can be defined scientifically by (1) selecting a level that we do not experience and (2) from that description, its terms, and their relationships extrapolating what the phenomenon of mind actually is.
Not only are those two presumptuous ways of deciding ontological inter-texturing, but in effect, the reasoning appears by something quite like a synecdoche. (Doesn't the metonymy in 'I am a brain lobe' seem like synecdoche? At least when Kennedy said 'I am a Berliner,' he wasn't being a reductionist!)
More 'factually,' we-in a scientific mood--select a level of abstraction from which to analyze objects and events that we can show to have either some order or some empirical testability for descriptions of causal regularities. Then we analogize our subjective experiences of self and mind to the things that we can agree take place on such levels as neurological ones. The problem of the inter-relating of the many levels of abstraction and the different sorts of rules of organization at each level doesn't seem to bother the reductionist. At least not enough!
As regards semiotic relations; they too are not rarefied. They too have to be assimilated to phenomenal experience and a natural logic that includes various internal states of development, interactive subsystems of representation, and so on. In short, it's not a matter of a semiotic structure floating around. The embedded nature of knowledge also refers to the natural logic of representations and their relation to the self, the mind, and, not to get overly complex here, intention.
But let me ask the main question intended by this note:
Can we agree on the features and rules of a subjective experience-without directly referring to our experience?
Well, we could re-define 'self' as a particular portion of the brain and its signal patterns to and from other neurological structures. But, the direct answer to my question, if it refers to the experience of subjective self, is 'No,' not with any confidence--unless we go in the direction of the eliminativists, and refuse to talk about the 'labels' for our experiences. Then we'd be saying that the labels-self, mind, etc--are either (1) circular or merely (2) indexical.
The second point (indexical) is trivial. (At most, it betrays the anxiety to leap to point to the first material level of reference we can find, irrespective of its goodness of fit as an analogy to what we are attempting to define.) The first point, that they are circular, is merely tautologous. After all, shouldn't we all admit that reflexivity and recursiveness are clear characteristics of the functioning of the self as an indexer of itself and its experiences?
Enough for starters.
Harwood Fisher
Victoria Alexander to Lisa Zunshine
Your integration of literature and science is graceful and well balanced. It
reminds me of Elaine Scarry's work. My question might be asking for more philosophy of science,
and you may be avoiding this on purpose. Does a "theory of mind"
imply the belief in the existence of a "mind," i.e., a kind of
emergent self-organized behavior (ways of acting that are internally-created
and internally-directed) that cannot be reduced to (or predicted from) the
electro-chemical activity of the individual neurons in the brain? (Eugene
Halton takes up this issue in his talk.) Is a "theory of mind" a
theory of selfhood? If so, reaching for a glass of water because one is thirsty
is the kind of behavior that doesn't require an intentional self, for one could
program a computer to perform that kind of stimulus-response / action-reaction.
One could not program a computer to perform the more complex action you
describe: "the person who reached for the glass of water might have not
been thirsty at all, but rather might have wanted us to think that she was
thirsty, so that she could later excuse herself and go out of the room,
presumably to get more water, but really to make the phone call that she didn't
want us to know of." I'm not
up on ToM literature as you are, but it seems to me that it cannot avoid
discussing, if briefly, the larger more philosophical question of mind.
Would this make a difference to readers of fiction? I finish a Virginia
Woolf story feeling that I know what it's like to experience another person's
subjectivity. I finish a Hemingway
story feeling like I just watched a film in which the characters reveal no
thoughts. I could partly see their feelings in their actions (mind-reading, as
you call it), but I couldn't discern what their feelings meant. To me
Hemingway's characters have an eerie almost nonhuman quality because they don't
express their motives or thoughts. I think fictional stories sometimes
represent intentional selves but sometimes represent mechanistic (non)selves
instead. I think intentionality
usually requires language. There are exceptions, for example group behaviours
can be complex enough to appear intentional.
If you want to distinguish between different types of behaviors that seem to require a "mind" and those that don't, you may want to collaborate with Michael Schippling on this issue. He will be giving a robotics demonstration. He has developed a group of simple robots that, when allowed to interact, develop self-organized behavior, that is, collectively they seem to have "minds." Mind-like behavior is not something that can be programmed in. This is all off your topic a bit, but a Theory of Mind seems to imply a definition of "mind."
Victoria Alexander to Eugene
Halton
. Gene and I are Peirce fans (I hesitate to call myself a Peirce scholar, tho Gene fits that description). Three thoughts: 1 Peirce's work is often confused with constructivism. Gene makes a clear distinction here: "The mediational or semiotic view of self, society, and science, most deeply articulated in Charles Peirce¹s philosophy, rejects materialism, positivism and all other views which would claim a thing-in-itself outside of mediation, as illogical. Peirce¹s view also entails a rejection of forms of social constructivism which claim that all signification is conventional or contingent."
2. I wonder if you believe that Peirce thought general law is pre-existing like Platonic forms? Or is general law emergent in the systems that express the law? I would assume the latter, but you imply the former in the following quote: "The life of science is the pursuit of spiritual consciousness, in Peirce¹s semeiotic sense, inquiry into the truth of those eternal forms such, as Peirce the mathematician would put it, that mathematics makes us aware of, or of those generals that result from a specific research. " This distinction is important if one is trying to argue that the creation of truly new things is possible -- an important issue for artists.
3. I do think that human minds result from the complex semiotic interactions between what is usually called "inanimate" matter. Though I think that matter can interact semiotically, I balk at the idea of equating this with primitive animism. In primitive animism, matter in nature is fully mind-like, which is not the same thing (to me) as saying that mind emerges from semiotic interactions of matter. Peirce seems aware of my kind of trepidation when he writes, "...I am not much afraid of specializing too much and of assuming that the universe has characters which belong only to nervous protoplasm in a complicated organism. For we must remember that the organism has not made the mind, but is only adapted to it. It has become adapted to it by an evolutionary process so that it is not far from correct to say that it is the mind that has made the organism." Peirce was more comfortable than I am flirting with mystical ideas.
Eugene Halton to Victoria Alexander
Regarding your point 2 on whether Peirce "thought general law is pre-existing like Platonic forms" I would say yes, but with an interesting evolutionary twist, one that allows creation to be an ongoing process and not simply the original big bang dead-echoing itself. As Peirce put it in the context of evolution: "The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed." (Charles Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.194).
Peirce claims that the laws of evolution themselves had to evolve into being at some point, so why could they not undergo modification and development, that is, EVOLUTION. And, we might say, especially with the appearance of humans? The assumption that evolution and Platonic forms are irreconcilable, so entrenched in modern thought, is one that Peirce rejects.
Peirce¹s pragmatism views meaning as the conceivable consequences of conduct, whether actualized or not, and revealed through a self-correcting process of inquiry. Remember too that Peirce views reality as a conditional, a would-be, and not simply an existent. That is why he says somewhere that 3 would be real even if there were but 2 things in the universe. If there can be real possibility, how would a would-be, not yet expressed in a system, square with the view you expressed, ³Or is general law emergent in the systems that express the law?² This seems to me an interesting question to consider, not only given that Peirce was a practicing mathematician, but also in the context you mention of the creative artist.
Regarding your #3 point, yes, your Peirce quotation says that the organism is an adaptation to mind, and that mind begets organism, bodies it into being. By mind Peirce means general law, habit, or, to use his technical lingo, Thirdness. That is why he says elsewhere that matter is mind, ³hidebound with habit.² Yes, this is weird to the modern mind, "mystical." But I will counter by claiming that this is because the modern mind is contracted to a culture of materialism and its mystical scientistic view that only matter matters, and that signs, the lifeblood of science, are ultimately unreal: the ghost in the machine. Materialism would make signs supernatural, additives to the laws of the universe, mere naming devices, rather than the essence of those laws. That is why Peirce claims that materialism ultimately makes science impossible.
But matter as mind, "hidebound with habit," is not at all weird to hunter-gatherers.
So it seems to me one implication of your question is whether it is fair of me to compare mathematical logician Peirce with the animate world view of hunter gatherers. Many Peirceans probably balk at this, and I know a number who prefer to stick with his meat-and-potatoes philosophy of science and ignore Peirce¹s seemingly exotic statements in this direction. But I find these exciting, of a piece with the very basics of his philosophy of science. And with the anthropology of our degenerate monkey ³glassy essence.²
His language may be radically different from hunter-gatherers, but Peirce seems to me to hold explicitly that mind matters, that is, that matter is mind: ³The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws² (Charles Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol.6, Para. 25). Remember, this comes from a practicing physicist, who made original discoveries in mathematics, geodetic studies, astronomy, and other sciences, and who invented mathematical logic.
Peirce does not hold that mind emerges from matter, but rather the reverse, and more, that ³there is a reasonableness energizing in the universe.² In the section of my essay on degenerate monkey I claim that humans evolved in reverential attunement to the instinctive intelligence of surrounding life. It is perhaps easier to see this in the lessons to be learned from animals and plants. But rocks? The landscape bears life-influenced lessons, weathering. Learning its lessons can spell survival, so why not treat it as a moral presence? The landscape, in this sense, as an object of that sign, ³hunting and gathering life,² is ingredient in the life of the sign, lives in it.
So Victoria, I toss the hot Peircean potato back to you. Are you claiming mind emerges from triadic, semiotic relations of matter? If so, that is already mind in Peirce¹s view, as I understand it. Or are you claiming that those interactions of matter are dyadic, only becoming mind when some phase shift occurs and the interactions become triadic? If so, then you must explain ³the first sign,² which Peirce argues is a logical impossibility.
In Peirce¹s view relation is real. Science itself is a life, the life of inquiry, which animates its avatars, scientists comprising the community of inquiry. Consider that test tubes and telescopes can do this, can act as animate signs which body scientists into being! Similarly tracks can body trackers into being, capable of practicing an art and science of inferencing far more sophisticated than any contemporary forensic science has been capable of.
The great masters of traditional navigation in the Pacific found their way across vast distances feeling the waves in a medley of senses: smelling, touching, tasting currents, seeing and hearing. When the night is cloudy, one must feel the waves, feeling all the bumpings of the waves, empathically becoming the waves, for in those bumpings and the total sensorium are the tracks of various winds, and in the winds are directional links parallel to those provided by the stars, and ultimately signs, for us watery primates, of the living earth we seek.
Institutions mind human selves into being. The institutions of hunter-gatherer life, deeply rooted in empathic relation, bodied anatomically modern humans into being. And we retain those Pleistocene bodies today. We are inhabited, you might say, by beings of bodily wisdom.
Intelligence, in this sense, is far more than a happy spiraling progress of human mind and reason. It involves orders of intelligence deeper and more mature than human reason, of instinctive, emotional, dreaming, and spontaneous forms of reasonableness tempered into the human primate and mammalian body and sprung from the biosphere in which we evolved.
The living earth, from which agricultural, civilizational, modern rational mind has severed itself, remains paradise, and remains embedded in our hunter-gatherer shaped bodies, despite the 10,000 year veneer of civilization. The living earth is that primary source of intelligence from which infantilized human reason needs to refashion itself if humanity and organic life are to prosper. Or so I argue in my essay.
Yeats put it this way, Platonically perhaps, but add to his rhapsody that Peircean evolutionary twist: "The shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration. . . [are] a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets. . . .and because beings, none the less symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands pointing the way into some divine labyrinth."
V Alexander's response to E. Halton's response:
VNA: Great response on Platonic forms. Great Peirce quote. I'm writing an article now that could use that one.
EH: "Materialism would make signs supernatural, additives to the laws of the universe, mere naming devices, rather than the essence of those laws."
VNA: Also a good point.
EH: " So Victoria, I toss the hot Peircean potato back to you. Are you claiming mind emerges from triadic, semiotic relations of matter? If so, that is already mind in Peirce¹s view, as I understand it."
VNA: I'm concern to argue that an emergent phenomenon such as mind, is not implicit in "matter" before it comes into being. (Matter is in quotes because it too is emergent-- from the quantum mechanical world.) Emergents must be radically novel if they are truly emergent. Yes, I would argue that mind emerges from triadic, semiotic relations of matter. And yes, I agree that semiotics relations are already mind. But firstness by itself is not mind, nor is mind implicit in it. Here I probably differ from Peirce.
I'm working on this now, so I'll upload a draft of the article in a day or two. Any further comments will be appreciated. Hopeful Monsters - draft
To Ellen Sponsky from Victoria Alexander.
Ellen makes a nice point in her paper on Derrida and Darwin, which is also a main point in her abstract. The flexibility of interpretation affords one a true "reproductive advantage," that is, plasticity. Optimization is far from optimal in the biological world. According to Darwinian evolutionary theory, properly understood, the "goal" of natural selection is not optimization. Being "good enough," as Ellen puts it, is better. This may feel like paradox, but its just the sensation of being woken from deep sleep. Can you think of a beak shape that is perfect for a particular situation? Can you think of anything that is perfect for anything? In organisms there is always heat loss; there is always waste; there is always a need to consume energy. Dissipative structures are stable because they change. Only things that change can stay the same. To this effect, and in support of her thesis that Derrida and Darwin are compatible, Ellen writes,
"The result of several decades of poststructuralist argument has been to allow the emergence of an important insight: the functioning of human language depends on both its iterability and its instability."
This is an insight of poststructuralism (or deconstruction), but not quite the tone. The dynamics of dynamical stability have always been stressed in postmodern theory generally, not the stability. If there is a trend in theory whose curve can be felt at this colloquy, I think it may be this subtle change in tone that is reflected in your paper, in Walter Freeman's work too.