Philosophy of Mind

[SecurityManKillJoy]

Hi, I'm a new member. Right now I have been trying to develop ideas about the mind. What are your conceptions of this phenomenon? Hopefully you will be able to understand my own conception and method  if it isn't too messy and jumbled, but I perhaps wrote it better on my bad website: http://www.geocities.com/sskjman/consciousness.html. However the main text dated from April was before I had taken seriously the two official branches of thought of this kind of philosophy, i.e. of Decartes, etc.

At the moment, pure materialist monism, or interpreting the mind as nothing but a brain and made out of physical material, is popular. Dualism has been rightly buried in its pure form, but vulgar empiricism and materialism, like any, immediately relapses into idealism. This vulgarism translated into thoughts about the mind  states that because certain brains cannot develop certain ideas, it says that certain brains or consciousnesses absolutely cannot develop certain ideas when those ideas they apparently cannot make were invented  in completely different conditions.

It is true that animals in certain bodily and environmental conditions cannot invent certain actions &c., but because consciousness is about having a free will, this statement on its own obscures the conscious quality of these animals.
An idea or anything else cannot occurr without certain reactions between an individual being and its environment, creating 'images' that the consciousness can interpret. Thus even if each individual of a mass of animals is influenced by its own bodily conditions that give it distorted 'images' of reality and that each animal of the group is thus very likely to invent the same actions because of having the same limited information to consciously work with due to the same reactions with the environment does not mean they have a worse consciousness. It merely means they have less conscious awareness caused by this lack of information to work with due to an overall lack of 'advanced' brain features, such as a better memory, &c.

Thus we at least have to abstractly consider a pure consciousness, which is basically the quality of choosing to do something but limited by the body and environment which causes limits of information to make choices by, or some information such as 'hunger pain' forcing the being to make that sort of action and to create that sort of 'idea' or else it will die and lose the quality of consciousness. Thus some feelings simply end up propagandizing the individuals a species into making the same actions, for if they did not respond in those ways to those material feelings they would die. Therefore we have to reconcile monism and dualism together, and say that the consciousness is connected and yet separate from the body, and that all consciousness is basically the same in its basic quality of will-making, despite different bodily origins.

-Chris

[Green]

I'm too tired. You lost me. Maybe tommorow.

[SecurityManKillJoy]

Well, this is not really about what I think. I would be the first to admit that I know nothing. What I'm interested in is what others think; I merely put forth my ideas in an attempt to conjure up discussion. Therefore I'd like to see if maybe people agree with my ideas, but then again I'm not concerned about that either because I want to have more ideas to think about and change what I have thought already.

[ckaihatsu]

Hey, SMKJ, glad to address some of this -- I get into cognitive theory -- the last frontier, right?...!

Okay, here are some related, hopefully not-too-tangential thoughts:

At the moment, pure materialist monism, or interpreting the mind as nothing but a brain and made out of physical material, is popular. Dualism has been rightly buried in its pure form, but vulgar empiricism and materialism, like any, immediately relapses into idealism. This vulgarism translated into thoughts about the mind  states that because certain brains cannot develop certain ideas, it says that certain brains or consciousnesses absolutely cannot develop certain ideas when those ideas they apparently cannot make were invented  in completely different conditions.

On this I'd like to note that I think you're using two different types of dualism in your statement.

You're ably addressing the problems that arise from a "black-box," or behavioristic, kind of dualism.

At the same time you're introducing the Self-Other type of dualism when you invoke the context of varying social conditions. You seem to be saying that certain social conditions are required to create corresponding ideas in one's head, otherwise those ideas won't occur -- is this correct?

I suppose nothing can quite substitute for one's own raw experience of an event, but the most (socially) important features of it * can be * and * are * approximated, and described with language, though with imperfections, of course. I've heard accusations of language itself inherently being an instrument for idealism (because of its static-labelling feature, I guess) -- I would argue that, like any tool, one must stay on top of it, using it, and making sure one is not used * by * it. I think the antigen -- if you will -- is often taking care to place descriptions in some context -- discussions that facilely swirl around numbers of generalities quickly become unwieldy, often idealist.

I have no problems with "pure materialist monism" and in "interpreting the mind as nothing but a brain and made out of physical material." I think anything outside of this definition would effectively be a concession to idealism/dualism.

It is true that animals in certain bodily and environmental conditions cannot invent certain actions &c., but because consciousness is about having a free will, this statement on its own obscures the conscious quality of these animals.

This statement -- probably unintentionally -- utilizes dualism by relying on the construction of an individual 'free will' as the starting-point for defining human consciousness.

I come from the point of view that sentient creatures are not so much *biologically* inferior to humans, as they are *linguistically* and *historically* inferior.

Animals in the wild really don't have anything beyond the family and tribal unit. No oral traditions, no dreams-of-a-people, no elaborate work-plans. Animals have shown that they have fine memories -- elephants, for example -- but if they can't pass it on, then the next generation just repeats the cycle of (experientially) learned behaviors.

I often entertain the thought that perhaps, in a world which interfaces smoothly (through technological aids) with animals' consciousnesses, we would see more sentient animals choosing to live people-like lives, possibly at the level of learning-disabled people...(!) That would mean creatures consciously knowing and expressing a personal history, some sense of personal connection to history, feelings of empowerment, plans for the future....

It merely means [animals] have less conscious awareness caused by this lack of information to work with due to an overall lack of 'advanced' brain features, such as a better memory, &c.

I don't think animals' lesser sophistication is mostly due to lesser memory abilities as much as it's due to a solid lack of *historical* memory.

Our advanced consciousness is mostly due to our brains catching up to our early use of tools (thanks to becoming upright) and verbal language.

Verbal language opens up a whole realm of social ties and group abilities, creating possibilities for larger groups, and then, in some areas, surplus food.

As a device, though, any brain that can engage an internal mental environment to create better-than-chance choices/behavior in the outside environment is said to be "Popperian" (Dennett), as above "Skinnerian" (behavioristic, or "black box" dynamics) and "Darwinian" (genetically favored over thousands of generations). Dennett, in _Kinds of Minds_, indicates that only *simple* *invertebrates* would fall beneath this Popperian level. (!!!)



Later,

Chris









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[SecurityManKillJoy]

I have no problems with "pure materialist monism" and in "interpreting the mind as nothing but a brain and made out of physical material." I think anything outside of this definition would effectively be a concession to idealism/dualism.

Of course a pure consciousness might not exist, but for me it's important to at least abstractly consider it. Otherwise we can get into that black box and vulgar Darwinist behaviorism which tries to say that ideas develop in this fatalistic path of evolution, but that animals and 'lesser' beings can never go on this fatalistic idea-making journey of creating a language, creating tools, etc. They make a pure correlation between body parts and consciousness, which I think can be a pitfall into idealism itself because it sounds like a mechanical kind of materialism, which Bishop Berkely pretty much proved relapses back into subjective idealism.

At the same time you're introducing the Self-Other type of dualism when you invoke the context of varying social conditions. You seem to be saying that certain social conditions are required to create corresponding ideas in one's head, otherwise those ideas won't occur -- is this correct?

I might be using more than one type of dualism, but I'm also trying to 'dialectically' connect all of those ideas with materialist monist empirical proof to reconcile each 'opposing' mode of thought. Therefore my system is that the abstractly thought-of pure consciousness is the brain and yet separate from the brain, and that the body and brain give it images of reality for the consciousness/free will to work with as well as those body capabilities to use.

The social conditions do indeed determine the beginning images for the genesis of different conscious actions and ideas, but they wouldn't be doing that if there were no body limits. Then again at the same time the body is the creator of consciousness as far as we know. Even so historical environment limits can only give certain types of conscious awareness which further evolve as the animal makes actions based on this starting image and gradually makes more images for itself, but the basic quality of consciousness is still retained no matter what kind of ideas or whatever it has. Language is just an invention made possible because of certain images of reality that aided humans in inventing certain uses for their body parts, and then those could be consciously worked on for themselves over time as they changed their environment more and made more images and ideas on how to change it.

Animals in the wild really don't have anything beyond the family and tribal unit. No oral traditions, no dreams-of-a-people, no elaborate work-plans. Animals have shown that they have fine memories -- elephants, for example -- but if they can't pass it on, then the next generation just repeats the cycle of (experientially) learned behaviors.

I don't think animals' lesser sophistication is mostly due to lesser memory abilities as much as it's due to a solid lack of *historical* memory.

At this moment some given animal most likely doesn't have any ability to develop a historical consciousness, but then again this cannot be known until the individual animal starts interacting and reacting with the environment and that we can see it get subsumed into the tribal relationship given the 'images of reality' its body has given it to work with. Even if the whole collective of animals ended up on this path, we cannot know it will keep happening until the new individual animal starts reacting with its environment and starts inventing actions based on the information it recieves. But of course most likely, it will, based on experiental memory, end up that way, like the collective, and based on all the other factors and limits.

Our advanced consciousness is mostly due to our brains catching up to our early use of tools (thanks to becoming upright) and verbal language.

Perhaps tool-making helped develop the brain because of the action, but that only gave more or more stable unconscious bodily conditions for the being to make use of. A better brain would only increase the chance of a certain conscious historical development of an idea, such as tool-making. It rests on conscious action and the use the being makes of the body for such ideas as tool-making to finally occur and then be improved on with generations. I say this also in order to avoid pure behaviorism again.

I often entertain the thought that perhaps, in a world which interfaces smoothly (through technological aids) with animals' consciousnesses, we would see more sentient animals choosing to live people-like lives, possibly at the level of learning-disabled people...(!) That would mean creatures consciously knowing and expressing a personal history, some sense of personal connection to history, feelings of empowerment, plans for the future....

I do agree with the dream of trying to make animals more 'human', even if it is a long ways off. Animals shouldn't deserve, as conscious beings, to be stuck in a cycle of primitive communal societal conditions and the antagonisms that entails just because of its body state. They also don't really deserve to be in a body-based caste in human society, even if it is a long ways off before humans can historically develop a means of production that doesn't need meat in the economy.

[Psychic sailor]

Have you heard about activity theory? Google it, especially Leontiev. How does that relate to what you are writing about?

[SecurityManKillJoy]

I have not read Leontiev yet; I only knew his name. Just from superficially scanning activity theory and its flow-chart, I like how it shows the interconnection of the individual, community and all of the objects of the community, and how individual actions can cause change everywhere and then re-affect the individual. But of course I don't really like the fact that it claims that humans are the only conscious beings, as it seems to be saying on Wikipedia. But I have always accepted the subject-object relationship and the fact that people construct external and internal tools. However reducing the internal and external processes to a means for nothing but a goal sounds too basic. But we can still see the idea of tools mediating between the individual and external conditions in Das Kapital, and with Ilyenkov he goes into how a tool can be idyllic or non-idyllic under specific circumstances, but I haven't studied that a lot.

So I just don't like this simple plan-goal system activity theory appears to say, because a lot of metaphysical reductionists tend to make everything seem like there is a specific reward or goal attached to everything, which is just a one-sided consideration at best. To me an object fulfills different needs depending on the ideas of the individual or collective and how the individual and the specific class or collective historically view that object. The individual's views depend on how much information he has to work with in order to make a need for himself and, as an example, must know his body, whether by vulgar  instinct or, in other words, by the reaction between chemicals of the body and the environment that 'propagandize' the being before it can make 'ideas' of its own or whatever other kind of ideas or actions the being makes in order to 'satisfy' bodily needs based on these instinctual starting images of reality. Or, more simply, we can say the person/animal must reconcile the objective disunities in the body such as a lack of energy which can cause the metabolic process to slowly stop, but the being still must have a subjective 'idea' that he must 'satisfy' this 'need' in some way or else death will happen.

I can read the Leontiev and Vygotsky archives on marxists.org, but no time really right now. Please correct me if I bastardized any theories or that they are completely bad assertions. But I'll say right now that I never really wanted to research Vygotsky based on he was a pure behaviorist, but I'll do it now, finally. I should probably proofread them for the archive administrator anyway.

[Psychic sailor]

But I'll say right now that I never really wanted to research Vygotsky based on he was a pure behaviorist, but I'll do it now, finally.

Vygotsky was no behaviorist. He did perhaps more than any other individual researcher to show that behaviorism was not tenable (and un-marxist as well). His paradigm was competing with Pavlov's (the Soviet version of behaviorism).  although behaviorism at least acknowledge that there is an object, this is not enough. Vygotsky's contribution was to convincingly show that between stimuli and response, there is a mediator, or expressed by other means, between every  subject and object there is a mediator (S-M-O).

In the other aspects concerning Leontiev you seem to be basically on the right track.

[SecurityManKillJoy]

Oh, sorry, I thought Vygotsky was some promoter of Pavlov. I still haven't had time to research him yet, or Leontiev. I only read that probably superficial Wikipedia page on him. Besides that I've only read Felix Mikhailov's book and a few things by Wallon, and I started reading Wundt a little bit (the psychologist who tried to surpass materialism and idealism).

I think some of neurolinguistic programming's principles match mine, based on the Wikipedia page about it, but I have no idea why it has that kind of name. Anyway, what I don't really like about some psychology is its hardline deterministic stances at times or in Freud's case that we are determined by childhood sexual experiences and the like, but they offer no active solutions to overcome such determinisms, if in fact they do exist. Well, maybe they do through therapy, but this costs money for the "victim" and the psychologist would probably say that they are being determined in new ways rather than being liberated from a determinism. Also that some psychologists want to know the subject so well and predict it so well that it pretty much ceases to be a subject, and in that case we'd have to question how any being could ever do anything at all. Of course I don't think absolute free-will exists, but absolute determinism and absolute knowability of a subject seems absurd to me and anti-conscious.

[ckaihatsu]

SMKJ, P.S.,

I created a graphic diagram in order to make a visual representation that resolves the objective-subjective relationship. Hope it's helpful:

http://entertainment.webshots.com/photo/2357460110046342459GSTVMO


Chris

[SecurityManKillJoy]

Yes, I like that chart. It might be somewhat debatable about what exactly is positive or negative though, but no matter. Nobody on this board would believe that class warfare wasn't a positive development, in some way, if not in all ways.

[lurkingeye]

Taking an extract from your posting
"Thus we at least have to abstractly consider a pure consciousness, ( my emphasis) which is basically the quality of choosing to do something but limited by the body and environment which causes limits of information to make choices by, or some information such as 'hunger pain' forcing the being to make that sort of action and to create that sort of 'idea' or else it will die and lose the quality of consciousness."

There is no reason from what you say, why we do need to consider a pure consciousness. While it is a valuable technique to undertake abstraction. The purpose of the abstraction is to consider underlying processes which are real. It seems to me that the philosophical construction of pure consciousness (to pun the term) is indeed a pure abstraction, that essentially lies within idealism.

Consider this... What you are describing elsewhere in your post are aspects of experience which shapes what we call consciousness, that is it gives it colour, image, relationship.  What is the puzzle, which you make suggestions towards is 'how do original ideas spring up?' - if I am not representing you incorrectly, or expressing this too crudely.

Your conclusion from this is to consider some type of 'base line' or 'primary motive force', which is your suggested abstraction of pure consciousness. (again put me straight if I am mis representing you). This provides the theoretical basis to consider the emanation of new ideas.

I would suggest to you that there is a complex materialist explanation. Firstly consider the concepts embodied in Marxist dialectics. An excellent explanation of this is  the Ted Grant / Alan Woods book Reason in Revolt, on line at: http://www.Marxist.com/contents.htm  Part One deals with the aspects of dialectics within a materialist context - if you are not familiar with this already.

The reason I suggest this and draw your attention to it, is we are looking at process. Here I simply mean the way that things manifest themselves within the material world. An explanation of the process of this is an understanding of dialectics.

The idea of this process is the starting point. The second element is to consider how we can apply or understand this in the context of the 'mind'. The mind, as we call it is the conscious expression of brain activity, as the totally of a unique persons social, historical and biological development and personal history. That is it is the sum total of the historical development of the person, taking into account all these factors. There is a dialectal inter play between the external environment (the social, economic and political, experienced through time) and the biological (the chemical and physical, experienced through personal growth and time).

This gives us a general understanding of the process, but does not necessarily explain how precisely the process works, within the brain. This ignorance, has historically given rise to various interpretations by idealist philosophy that this consciousness emanates from god in one way or another (choose your particular philosopher, including Descartes)

We of course nowadays understanding something of this, ...and this again is discussed in later chapters of Reason in Revolt. Although science still has to definitively identify the precise process of the development of consciousness - as an outcome of brain activity. Although I am sure this understanding is on the horizon.

One attempt at this is the work by Steven Mithen. I don't fully agree with him, as some of his work tends towards speculation. Nevertheless he provides some space for thought and consideration. His particular approach is to attempt to understand the process of the mind in the context of emergence of humankind as a species. His assessable book 'The Prehistory of the Mind', discusses his ideas and provides a rationale for the phenomenon of 'new ideas' springing up (something he called cognitive fluidity) - which of course returns us to the point in your post.

I've gone on at some length, but can develop this if the discussion moves that way. I hope this was a useful response.

[SecurityManKillJoy]

I don't really like the original post at all anymore. However the point of making a divide between subjectivity and all of the memories, influences, body conditions, etc.,  is so that we don't mechanically state that the subject is merely yet another object and is merely the sum-total of memories/influences. Therefore I say this to avoid subjective idealism and its twin mechanical materialism. There's no way that subjectivity and consciousness can be reduced to a pinpoint thing such that it can become fully knowable, because the subject makes use of things in the first place, and so it has no location or any 'thingneess' or any of that except that it takes on an autonomous selfness in control of only one body, etc. I think that we shouldn't get the processes confused with the subjectivity, because ultimately the processes are not subjectivity itself, but rather what the subject controls.

That's all I'm saying. I see the idea of 'if we know the brain completely, we know all of consciousness' as too mechanical and one of the contradictions that arises is how someone can absolutely observe oneself, which is akin to splitting oneself into two 'I's, which doesn't make any new object anyway. I'm not against seeing all the interlaced material processes and the objective knowable form of subjectivity, but ultimately subjectivity is all the same, whether it exists beyond material reality or not, and it shouldn't be equated with the physical processes that create its objective form. Subjectivity only differentiates in what data it has to use, what body it has, etc. Obviously it isn't a new idea, and I probably shouldn't have made this topic in the first place, but I had some additions to it after I spent time comparing Marxism with Lockeian materialism. I think anything new I created is gone though.

I'm not really caring for the term 'philosophy' anymore, or use of such methods, but I'm sure one could say that the word 'consciousness' in my usage as something free which merely has limits on it, regardless if its origin is material reality, is metaphysical. But I simply use it to see how all beings are connected together, and how ultimately they can do anything because that's what consciousness actually is (creating actions, ideas, etc.). So at the very least, I say if subjectivity itself is absolutely nothing more than a single limited process, then we have vulgar materialism whereby one being can be superior to another in an absolute sense because one being is capable of making certain ideas and actions, and this other one absolutely cannot, and changing its body that it uses to make use of data in too drastic a way would only kill it because that's all the beings is: a pure object.

Then this brings up another contradiction because vulgar materialism claims a consciousness can be absolutely snuffed out, and yet other conscious beings who are still experiencing time are really existant, and if all conscious beings died out in the universe then time or anything else wouldn't mean anything until new conscious beings came about to experience it (time and all else would pass infinitely fast). So therefore I have to say that all beings live on in some active way, even fi the amount of selves increases or decreases, or if individual selves don't actually live on with all of their experiences in some other-world.