[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000]
Professor Freeman and his students made an important discovery in the late 1970s: the brain response to what is seemingly the same stimulus is not always the same. They trained rabbits respond to various odors, using sawdust twice in the experiments, once in the latter part of 1976 and then again a few months later. They were surprised at first to see a that different brain response. They realized over time that context, including time, affects the ‘meaning’ drawn from a perception even when that perception seems exactly the same as one from a few months earlier.
Over the course of his text — I’m about halfway through the 150 pages, he’s pointed to indications of the private nature of meaning for any intentional animal, rabbit or man. Most of his points are valid when presented against materialistic philosophies which see simple extraction of ‘meanings’ (what can that word mean to a materialist?) and against cognitivist (mentalist or idealist) philosophies which see meanings as somehow floating about separate from substance — nowadays some idealists in the philosophy of mind speak in terms of information theory. I’m not always sure how to separate those bodies of thinkers since some materialists quickly fall, by way of software concepts, into the information theory school of thought — which is an idealism, even a dualism.
So far as I can tell, Freemans’s arguments, based on actual experimental results, will be very difficult for materialists or cognitivists to handle, if they’ve bothered to try. I wouldn’t expect either materialistic or idealistic (Realist) theories to die down no matter how good the arguments might be in favor of methodical realism, which is one descriptive term for Thomistic methods. In fact, pragmatism of the sort advocated by Freeman and pioneered by William James pretty much falls into that general description of a methodical realism which allows biological creatures to form their minds by interaction with their environments and to maybe move up towards some sort of vision of a world, or just it’s physical aspects — a universe. Since this is how our minds are actually formed, this is how we should try to understand the world. In different terms: this is how we should do philosophy.
The sort of pragmatism which follows in the footsteps of James works well at the initial stages of this process where the mind is shaped as it moves out into the world but fails at the higher level where contemplation pulls meaning from what has been learned. Meanings are not constructed in the individual mind in any absolute sense but they are constructed as efforts to discern the meanings which are part of this story being told by God. On the other hand, we do participate as God’s servants in shaping the world and, hence, we do participate as God’s servants in manifesting meanings in physical reality.
To return to those rabbits: if ‘meanings’ had to be constructed or if they came through the processes of perception and response to those perceptions, then Freeman would have to be right in his greater claim that meanings are private. Each animal, being differently situated and having different biographies, would construct or extract a meaning for itself for each situation. Any sane thinker would realize there’s a lot of overlap in meanings but there would be my meanings and your meanings, my truth and your truth.
Neurological experiments would almost always indicate that meanings are private because we’re characters in the story and we’re probing by way of perception and then cognition, probing to discover how the world works and what the world means. It’s also true that each of us as an individual has limited information, limited skills in extracting accurate perceptions, limited cognitive skills and motor skills in responding to our environments. We make mistakes in extracting meanings. We have incomplete views biased by our limited emotional and cognitive associations. We also make those sorts of mistakes, and others, when trying to extract simple quantitative information from our environments and that doesn’t mean that there is no objective quantitative relationships out there.
In fact, the mention of quantitative information leads me back to that source of Hellenistic metaphysics: mathematics. Different experiences — as private as they can be, and different abilities and ways of thought amongst mathematical thinkers don’t cast any doubt upon the existence of objective truths in mathematics. At first glance, the objective truths of mathematics seem different from meanings, but I’ve cast doubt upon that based upon modern understandings of randomness.
What we know as mathematics is an archipelago of islands raised out of an absolutely infinite sea of perfect chaos. (See The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: God as the Creator of Truths and The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: What is Mathematics?.) Our universe is a story being told with manifestations of truths chosen by God. The meanings around us are those which lie in God’s story and in our responses to God and His world. There is a strong element of the ‘personal’ in all of this but the meanings we discover are not truly private in the sense of being isolated from the meanings others discover. Those meanings are personal, with aspects of the private, because of our limitations and because we have to try to discover most of the meanings in what lies around us — we don’t perceive the entire universe in its spatial or temporal extent.
The world moves on and it can be considered a bit of a mystery story: the key lying on the threshold means something different after the murder of the lord of the manor but it means something different just with the passage of time. It means something different to each person who comes upon it, choosing to ignore it or maybe even failing to see it, thinking it to be damning evidence or merely a sign of the carelessness of that lord of the manor. And it may carry multiple meanings, but all of those multiple meanings are founded in the objective reality of God’s one story, however many smaller stories are interlinked within it.
That rabbit which responds differently to the same stimulis, sawdust, at different times is an entity which ‘knows’ it’s in a story. It’s trying to always adjust to the flow of events rather than reliving the same events as if it were a song on a cassette tape.