The shape of the mind
How is degree of consciousness quantified? A chimpanzee is more conscious than a fly; a neanderthal more conscious than a chimpanzee; modern man more conscious than neanderthal. By what measure? Is a schoolteacher more conscious than an electrician? A philosopher than a farmer?
Consciousness is a feature of an entity in an environment. Awareness of an environment, certainly. But what does that mean? An ant may not have what we typify as "thoughts" but its acts are well-coordinated with its environment to promote its survival and growth as an organism. But consider a case like Helen Keller. Bereft of the ability to survive, yet with higher functions capable of sustaining the most sophisticated operations of consciousness.
Consciousness is a feature of an entity capable of manipulating its environment. And what determines the form and function of that entity? The successive and cumulative manipulations of its environment.
An apparent circularity.
A stick can be used to bash over the head, or it can be used as a lever to roll a giant rock down a hill. Or it can be used to scratch symbols in the sand. The same basic physical form can have radically different functionalities. Therefore radically different abilities. So even if beings have the same physical form, they can have radically different 'shapes' with respect to their environments. And hence different properties as reflections of their 'shapes.' Which are different abilities.
If as a result of a purely mental operation otherwise identical physical things can acquire different properties, then these properties are instantiations of the mental. And if these properties enhance survival then they result in progressive physical modifications. So the 'shape' of the mind in the world is a product of its own mental operations (in a physical context) and not merely a physical product.
Consciousness is a feature of an entity in an environment. Awareness of an environment, certainly. But what does that mean? An ant may not have what we typify as "thoughts" but its acts are well-coordinated with its environment to promote its survival and growth as an organism. But consider a case like Helen Keller. Bereft of the ability to survive, yet with higher functions capable of sustaining the most sophisticated operations of consciousness.
Consciousness is a feature of an entity capable of manipulating its environment. And what determines the form and function of that entity? The successive and cumulative manipulations of its environment.
An apparent circularity.
A stick can be used to bash over the head, or it can be used as a lever to roll a giant rock down a hill. Or it can be used to scratch symbols in the sand. The same basic physical form can have radically different functionalities. Therefore radically different abilities. So even if beings have the same physical form, they can have radically different 'shapes' with respect to their environments. And hence different properties as reflections of their 'shapes.' Which are different abilities.
If as a result of a purely mental operation otherwise identical physical things can acquire different properties, then these properties are instantiations of the mental. And if these properties enhance survival then they result in progressive physical modifications. So the 'shape' of the mind in the world is a product of its own mental operations (in a physical context) and not merely a physical product.
Comments (47)
Do you think that it is possible to quantify consciousness.? Obviously, we know that it is linked intricately with consciousness, especially with neurotransmitters. It may be that major progress will occur in this direction. However, as far as I can see, at the present time it is hard to make absolute connections between the physical and mental.
For example, psychiatric medication may address emotional disorders and psychosis, but it can be a hit and miss affair, and this is sometimes hard to explain clearly. Another unexplained phenomena is ECT. I was against it as a student mental health nurse, but I have seen it work for some people, mainly older adults. As far as I am aware, within psychiatry, there is so much uncertainty about how or why ECT works for some people in addressing mental health difficulties.
I wonder if the mind is boundless in shape and scope. Obviously, we don't know what discoveries will be made in neuroscience. However, I am wondering if while we know that mind arises from the brain and nervous system, perhaps it cannot be reduced to the physical at all.
... mistaking its thoughts for pictures.
The key metaphor I am working on - and I don't even think it is a metaphor or an analogy but essentially true - is that consciousness determines abilities, and these essentially are a kind of shape. The mind that sees the stick as a lever "rolls" through its perceived world along appropriate natural gradients (based on that ability) whereas the mind that lacks this insight is like a block, which cannot exploit such gradients.
I'd call it a pragmatic, systems-theoretic view in which form is mutually determined by the world and mind.
I think "intelligence" describes a certain modality of consciousness. What I'm suggesting is that some modalities are more paradigmatic of consciousness than others, those in which it is maximally self-determining or self-shaping. Creative evolution, to steal from Bergson. Certainly humans are evolving at a rate unparalleled by other species in many ways.
Ok. Mistaking is a uniquely mental operation.
The person who designed the app certainly can. I've never heard of a photon making a mistake.
Ok. Then I can offer: referring (as a semantically competent speaker) to its thoughts as pictures.
To be honest, a proper (contra Chinese Room) semantics is the whole of it. Confusing thoughts and pictures is just the hard problem that isn't really.
Well, my (complete) presentation is really systems theoretical in its orientation, so semantics is "high level" versus the kind of natural operation I'm describing.
I think one can speak of being more or less aware, which must imply consciousness. Most people (myself included) are less aware right after waking up, than say, in the afternoon. Likewise, if someone has several drinks, after a point one can see a "decrease" in consciousness.
But you're main point, of either being conscious or not still remains.
I agree with Wayfarer ( :yikes: ), it's binary not "a matter of degree" like a dimmer. Why think this? I understand things this way:
• pre-awareness = attention (orientation)
• awareness = perception (experience)
• adaptivity = intelligence (error-correcting heurstic problem-solving)
• self-awareness = [re: phenomenal-self modeling ]
• awareness of self-awareness = consciousness
Except for the last (sys. 2), every other cognitive modality (sys. 1 (aka "enabling blindspot for sys. 2")) is autonomic and continually manifests a non-zero degree of functioning (thus, quantifiable?); "consciousness", on the other hand, is intermittent (i.e. flickering, alter-nating), or interrupted by variable moods, monotony, persistent high stressors, sleep / coma, drug & alcohol intoxication, psychotropics, brain trauma (e.g. PTSD) or psychosis, and so, therefore, is either online (1) or offline (0) frequently – even with variable frequency strongly correlated to different 'conscious-states' – during (baseline) waking-sleep cycles.
I'd counter that the universal experience of being a child versus being an adult is exemplary of a difference of degree of consciousness. Speaking from personal experience, the "horizon" of my awareness now extends much further, encompassing not only places I've been, different types of new things I have encountered, but, most importantly, awareness of ongoing patterns of things about which I have gained knowledge. All of which was not just unknown to me as a child, but completely inconceivable. It is a short step to extending some degree of consciousness to lower life-forms. Which I think most people do extend. It would make a good poll.
This confuses "consciousness" with experience (or form with content); like an empty balloon, "consciousness" stretches as one grows from childhood to adulthood as the accumulation of experiences fill and shape it like being blown-up with air. We gain experiences, consciousness, as you say, "expands"; my consciousness becomes more experienced, not "more conscious".
No, it doesn't confuse anything. It corresponds to 'degree of awareness' which conforms with what I'm talking about and focusing on. If you want to call something else consciousness, that's your prerogative. You are providing an explanation, whereas I am providing a description. I think that my description of the phenomenon is better than your explanation to the contrary.
I remember when I was little, and still in elementary school and even into my teens, there were adults, including some teachers, who held that view -- that I am less conscious than they are. I still remember how one teacher said about me to someone else, in my presence, "It doesn't feel anything".
I was there, I felt, yet they referred to me as "it" and that I don't feel anything.
If anything, the idea of there being different degrees of consciousness is first and foremost an ideological one. Assuming different beings have different degrees of consciousness serves a particular ideology -- such as that it's okay to treat children like cattle, or that animals don't feel pain or much of anything (and it's therefore okay to farm them for meat and other products, in ways that are "economical" for humans).
These are all non-sequiturs. If anything, partaking by degrees of the same consciousness as us should afford rights, not subject to ignomies. Buddhists don't step on insects.
As I offered, I consider this type of awareness, situational awareness, to be the exemplary state of consciousness qua consciousness. This is why the highest level of intentionality presents at this level situational expertise, to look at it in Searle's terms.
Should. Doesn't mean that it does. Look at arguments for antisemitism, racism, meat-eating: many of them are based on the idea that some beings are lesser beings and that it is therefore okay to treat them in ways that would be unacceptable to our peers.
What do you think is the maxim behind that?
The first precept against killing, since all life is sacred. And all living things partake of Buddha nature.
:up: Yep. So, we create our own reality? We create ourselves? - within physical constraints, including the constraint of being a node in a lineage of life.
If consciousness is understood as a pragmatic modelling relation "we" have with "the world", then this ever-larger ability to anticipate the actions and reactions of our environment are what we would mean by a "deepening" consciousness. We learn from experience to predict the world better. And to do that in terms of an "us" or "ego" that has some ever-larger set of plans and goals.
So this is what sorts out the homuncular circularity of viewing consciousness as some sort of state or substance - the paper being folded into origami forms - that stands outside the modelling of the world. The egocentric nature of the point of view that develops with experience is itself part of the model. It is the "other" to the "world", indeed.
The broader the outward horizon - seen in terms of all its potential goal satisfactions - the matchingly more focused and narrowed our sense of self becomes.
A child has a less exalted sense of selfhood to match its less well stocked collection of knowledge, habits and goals. Its sense of self is vaguer, less temporally organised in terms of a complicated life-defining agenda. Intentions are rather immediate - food, love, comfort. Only with socialisation does the self become defined as that part of the modelling relationship which stands for a focus of rational, rather abstracted, economic and cultural intent.
So the wider the field of view that gets constructed, the more pointlike in terms of a time and place becomes the anchoring self. A child is just at the circus. The adult may have a thousand concerns about other things they could be doing, other ways they ought to be reacting, to the scene at hand.
"Consciousness" is thus a process, a functional or pragmatic relation, which is formed by its two ends, its complementary poles. At one end is a generalised point-like sense of self as the potential actor in a world. At the other is "the world" as the complete set of potential actions as currently best understood by this actor.
So consciousness, as a modelling relation, starts with a strictly reflexive sense of selfhood and worldness in some primitive, memory-limited, organism like a sea slug. In other words, no real richness in terms of either an experienced world or an experienced self. No second to second drama that comes from having a capacity for attentional processing on top of habit or reflex learning.
But any animal with a large brain and plenty of memory/planning circuitry can run a model with a matching level of self vs world complexity.
Then humans added language on top of neurons and genes as a way to trap or organise information. Socialisation took self~world modelling to a completely new articulate plane.
A cat is not self-conscious. That is, it doesn't model the world as a complex web of social relations between autonomous conscious selves. So it just exists rather directly in the world much like a child, but without even a child's beginnings in a socially constructed state of awareness.
Us humans are self-conscious because the reality model we learn does have us included as social actors. That huge extra demand of being an autonomous willing individual is the further language-scaffolded habit we learn to take on.
This makes the selfhood part of the modelling exercise even harder to actually appreciate.
It is part of the mythology that there is this world "out there" exactly as we see it. Ripe with possibilities if one is an actor able to spot them.
But also, a social model of the self also demands a Cartesian-level separation. Fullscale dualism. We are supposed to be minds - brains in a state of consciousness - that thus exist somewhere beyond the world ... and even, as we become science-informed, the brain's modelling of this world.
The homuncularity in conventional understanding of "consciousness" is not so much an intellectual failing as a key part of our social training. It is a displacement out of the childish immediate and a projection of the self into the same realm of rationality and abstraction as matches our socialised view of our working environment.
It has to be that we push back the cognitive horizons in both directions. We push the anchoring self well outside animalistic immediacies - shove the psychological vanishing point right outside our sense of the here and now of material being. And in that way, we set ourselves up to be at home in the much larger world which is a world filled with all the potential satisfactions to be explored by a rational, articulate, social and abstract res cogitans.
So we are the origin point formed by having so many "shapes" of action or states of intent available to one coherently integrated neural system. Or as humans, the origin point for the space of actions available to a suitably encultured and economically enabled creature.
That is how I see your initial point about available actions being the definer of any sense of conscious self. As a reciprocal deal, constructing that space of shapes is also the construction of a point of origin or vanishing point that gives the modelling its coherence - its experienced sense of being centred as well as open-ended.
:up:
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, the self and sociation definitely becomes integral to what consciousness is.
Specifically, I like the notion of mental shape because shapes have specific properties, and our properties or abilities 'fit' with what I've described as environmental gradients. I think objective reality itself can be viewed in terms of physical gradients. Density, for example, if you reduce it far enough; density has significance only insofar as a region of one density adjoins a region of a differing density. In which case, it isn't so much what the density of one region or the other is, what is significant is the density gradient between the two regions.
Yes, the mental certainly seems to occupy a unique and irreducible role in evolution. I don't know if we create reality so much as shape it. Maybe those are not really different. Form become content.
Yes, this is exactly the sense in which I cited Searle on intentionality and background abilities. Exactly. Situational awareness.
In the ecological or enactive approach to psychology, perception is a recognition of environmental affordances - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
I think this concept fits well with the approach of embodied or embedded cognition as well.
What exactly does Searle say about intentionality and background abilities?
Quoting Pantagruel
The example is Searle's, from the book Rediscovery of Mind.
I think it is misleading, and therefore incorrect to call this immaterial property "shape". What you describe is that the same physical object can be used for a multitude of purposes. Hence the same "shape", the shape which the object has, can have different functions. "Function" is determined by purpose which is dependent on a goal. So "function" is determined in relation to the goal. It is incorrect to say that the function of a thing is a property of the thing, because it is really a feature of the thing's relation to the goal. So we cannot correctly call it a property or "shape" of the thing.
Quoting Pantagruel
The problem with this perspective is that our capacities always extend beyond our properties. This you describe in the op when you say that the same physical object can be used in multiple ways. "Property", if could by applied to usage, would refer to the current usage, and cannot go beyond that, as it is incorrect to say that something has a property which is not currently existing. But if a creature produces a new intention, has a new goal, then the same physical object might be be used in a new way, and this may become a new property (if property could be applied to usage). But as I explained above, the capacity of the object to be used in all sorts of different ways is not a property of the object itself, because it does not exist within the object, as it is dependent on the mind which views the object with intent toward a goal.
Exactly. As Descartes says, "the will is much wider in its range and compass than the understanding." And yet not everyone discovers a bashing stick can be a lever.
But for the person using the stick, whatever functional effects that stick confers de facto become properties of that person in the context of the world. If someone attacks me, and I have access to a stick, it is a property of mine that I will bash him over the head. Just like it is a property of glass that it will shatter when struck. It's called a dispositional property.
If you use "properties" in that way, referring to the function of a thing, then you must respect that functions which the object does not currently have, though the object has the capacity to be used that way if approached by the right mind, are not actually properties of the thing, because it is not being used that way. Otherwise the thing has all sorts of different properties at the very same time, in violation of the law of non-contradiction.
True. And as I suggested, different people with the same physical capacities can nevertheless have very different abilities. Will and understanding are definitely factors. The properties of a conscious entity are much more complex than those of a material object.
Of course. The example I cited is from page 195 of the original MIT press hardcover.
A given individual Mind has its own set of experiences, which cannot be quantified.
Forget about trying to quantify life. It is what it is and it's continuously changing.
If I have a new experience, then my state of being is different subsequent to that experience and prior. It seems reasonable to view this as an additive change. One doesn't have to quantify absolutely to recognize a relative difference.
Experience is a strange little breast. Experience does create change (a creative action), but is it additive? I would say it is transformative.
Interestingly, you used the term creative. I think creation implies novelty, hence something being added.
This is a Mahayana/Vajrayrana view. Other Buddhist schools would point out that by killing, one accrues "bad karma" for oneself. A Buddhist might also argue that killing is wrong because it doesn't solve the problem of suffering, even though one engages in kiling for the purpose of solving the problem of suffering.