What is Mind?: Creating Meanings

[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000]

Intentionality in the doctrine of Aquinas does not require consciousness, but it does require acting to create meaning instead of just thinking. This view is shared by the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J.J. Gibson, and the pragmatists. We sniff, move our eyes, cup an ear, and move our fingers to manipulate an object in order to optimize our relation to it for our immediate purpose. Merleau-Ponty called this dynamic action the search for maximum grip, which is the optimization of the relation of the self to the world by positioning the sense receptors toward the object intended. His conception is equivalent to Aquinas’ assimilation. [page 28]

We act “to create meanings”. I go beyond that, following Niels Bohr in believing we create reality. But creaturely creation isn’t true creation from nothingness. In fact, once the Almighty had brought Creation into being from nothingness, He Himself began to shape. We have far lesser powers than He has to shape, but what we do seems important to the Lord. And even our lesser powers are given to us by the Lord Almighty who knows the good or bad we shall do.

Later in the book, Professor Freeman tells us:

All that brains can know has been synthesized within themselves, in the form of hypotheses, success or failure, and the manner of failure. This is the neurobiological basis for the solipsistic isolation that separates the qualia of each person from the experiences of everyone else, and it is the neurophysiological confirmation of the inductive principle of unidirectionality that originated with Aquinas. [page 90]

This is true but is misleading from the Christian viewpoint simply because the world is more than a collection of objects. The objects of our universe play a role in the story which is this world, the universe seen in light of God’s purposes. The clock and the approaching train in the movie “High Noon” are imbued with meaning because of the role they play in the story. The entities in our horror movies and in our real fears when we’re alone in a dark wood carry meaning because of the role that certain types of predators play in this world, in God’s story. Left handedness has ‘sinister’ connotations because most men are right-handed and have traditionally shaken hands with that right hand which can more effectively wield swords or knives or stones — a left-handed man can shake hands and still have his best weapon hand free for a devious act. The cross carries certain meanings because of the role it played in Christ’s death and those meanings come primarily from Christ’s free acts but secondarily from the Roman decision to execute in that way.

Each object in the universe is enmeshed in the various webs of meanings which are generated as God tells His story:

  • the expansion of the universe beginning with the so-called Big Bang and the consequent birth of gas clouds and stars and galaxies,
  • the evolution of life on Earth,
  • the evolution of the human race and the development of a brain capable of encapsulating God’s world by processes first discussed by St. Thomas Aquinas and, more recently, described in biological detail by various neuroscientists including the pragmatists Gerald Edelman and Walter Freeman, and
  • the incarnation of the Son of God in human flesh and His mission, suffering, crucifixion, death, and resurrection.

There’s much more though the last item on my list is the most important of all: Christ’s life and death and resurrection are the central purpose of Creation. More exactly, the self-sacrifice of Christ, His ultimate act of love to the Father, is the central purpose of Creation.

In this story, the story being told by God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, each object is an object of divine love. But I’ll retreat a little to matters of physics: Einstein told us we live in a universe. I’ve extended that claim: the universe becomes a world when seen in light of God’s purposes. A world is unified, coherent, and complete.

The universe is one and — moving through time — becomes one story, coherent and complete in a way not possible for a mere collection of objects. We are characters in this story being told by God who is Himself the absolutely dominant character. We can’t speak clearly about all of this because we don’t have a way of understanding ’cause’ or at least a way of speaking about ’cause’ in terms that respect revealed knowledge and empirical knowledge or the speculative knowledge (mostly philosophy) that binds them together in a human system or worldview.

We have much work to do before we can find proper ways of speaking about God’s world. For now, I’ll remind the reader of the first line in the quote which began this posting:

Intentionality in the doctrine of Aquinas does not require consciousness, but it does require acting to create meaning instead of just thinking.

While we need intellectual understanding and coherent forms of discourse, they will emerge — if at all — along with our acts of worship and prayer, along with our acts of community-building and character formation in our selves and our children, along with our acts of feeding the poor and caring for the sick. These very acts seem to me to tell us that meanings are shared.

In a sense, Freeman is right that meanings are private, just as he would be right to claim that a human mind can’t understand this world in which we are born and develop. Aquinas told us that the human mind is the sort of entity which can, in principle, understand this world though any individual mind is incapable of understanding so much as a flea. In a similar way, a human being is the sort of entity which can contribute to the meanings of God’s story which is this world and a human being can also, in principle, understand those meanings. The fact that there is an isolationist aspect to our meanings is a result of the limitations of our individual selves and not a result of an inherent isolationist aspect to human nature, just as our inability to understand the world is a result of the limitations of our individual minds and not a result of an inherent inadequacy in human intellectual nature.