In the January, 2009 issue of Brain in the news ( The Dana Foundation), there’s an interesting article, In Search of the God Neuron, by Steven Rose which reviews some recent books on the alleged problem of mind and brain. The reviewed books include several that take a materialistic position and one that takes a dualistic position. Professor Rose isn’t satisfied with either position but doesn’t propose a way out of the fact that neuroscientists and philosophers of the mind in the modern world have made much progress understanding the mind though they haven’t a plausible suggestion what that mind might be. I’ll move on to restate my position on what sort of entity a human mind is.
The brain has evolved as part of an organism which is descended from organisms which survived, but what’s most important about the mind-like aspects of a human being is that creature’s totemic tendencies, its ability to put itself in the place of its prey or any external object it seeks to understand or use. Undoubtedly, survival is necessary for this process to have gone on and to continue, but that hardly provides any sort of causal explanation or narrative description of what really happened when our ancestors implausibly, by the needs of survival as conventionally understood, developed a mind capable of not only writing symphonies and painting masterpieces in oil, but also capable of inventing plumbing and exploring the properties of time and space and matter and energy. As neuroscientists try to deal with those aspects of the human being we call ‘mind’, they’ve failed to encounter the importance of the totemic nature of the human brain when it reacts in a creative and aggressive way with its environments, including the jungles of the hunting peoples of Central Africa and also the rather abstract environments to which Newton and Einstein responded.
In the totemic mind of ancient hunters of elk, we see the possibility of modern hunters of the secrets of God’s Creation, hunters who carry out their quest in the acts of shaping their minds to manifest the very actions and traits of what they study. There is nothing mystical going on here, simply normal events in a universe which rewards, at least with survival and perhaps reproductive success, those who are able and willing to reshape their minds to encapsulate their environments, to put themselves in the place of their prey for greater success in hunting, more recently to put themselves in the place of Nature in pagan terms or of the Creator in Christian terms. It’s interesting that Einstein was an atheist more than not but one of his speculative strategies was to put himself in the place of the Old One. At other times, he’d ride a wave of light, putting himself in the place of a photon.
The ultimate in totemic thinking is to try to put yourself in the place of God as Creator, often seen as the father of the pagan gods or the Old One, a perhaps fictitious entity who has that good, old God’s-eye view of matters. God as Creator creates and what He creates seems quite subject to study, even the most abstract of His manifested truths. A Christian should even regard it to be his duty, or the duty of some in the body of Christians, to investigate God’s Creation and to make sense of that Creation as the setting for the story of salvation.
The human brain with its totemic ‘circuitry’ has survival benefits and that totemism gives us a mind first understood by St. Thomas Aquinas as an entity which shapes itself by responses to its environment. I’m going further here than Aquinas or his interpreters over the centuries and apparently further than modern neuroscientists, but I’m confident that our best path forward is to speak of truths and knowledge as coming to us from the things, things which are true as Aquinas told us to the giggles of most metaphysicians. I’m certainly not saying that our brains see truths or obtain valid knowledge perfectly, but we can do a pretty good job for apish creatures.
It’s important to realize that abstractions are part of being human, just as much a part of the trade of a plumber as that of a mathematical physicist though the idea of pipes to move fresh water and sewage have become part of our cultural apparatus in a way that hasn’t yet occurred with the idea that space and time are actually one spacetime which is well described by something called ‘differential geometry’. We think that such conceptual apparatus as that of general relativity is inherently difficult but the principles of hydraulic engineering which are now part of the thinking of any competent plumber took far longer to be developed and accepted. Galileo had one heck of a time convincing some engineers that water couldn’t rise to an arbitrary height — he told them, and he was right, the water couldn’t rise to go over the hill which lay between the reservoir and the city needing the water.
Higher levels of human intelligence involve the ability to creatively respond to one’s environment. The Pascals and Einsteins, the Homers and Goethes, the Bossuets and Barzuns, move ahead of the rest of us, and so do some of those who tinker with internal combustion engines in their garages. Whether it comes to understanding the physical world or the characteristics of human beings of a particular age or understanding the flow of events we call human history or understanding the movements of pistons, the answers — of any sort — come as a human being actively responds to the world and don’t come from some sort of abstract realm separate from the world. Abstractions lie deep within concrete being and not alongside concrete being.
The human mind isn’t to be adequately described or understood in terms of any worldview that separates the concrete and the abstract, as do idealistic and dualistic ways of thought, nor in terms of any worldview that denies the reality of the abstract or the concrete as do reductionistic ways of thought. So far as I can see, the only worldviews capable of giving us a rich and plausible narrative of developing being and the developing human mind have to be based upon the Christian (Creator-centered) philosophy of methodical or moderate realism, which sees truths as coming to us as we respond to the parts of Creation we can perceive or plausibly imagine.
Things are true.
Truth is to be found in the things and relationships and processes of that world in which organisms strive to survive, that is, they strive to survive by responding properly to that world filled with truths, however obscured they are by textbook standards. Some can even respond to certain clues invisible to most of us, responses that are the lifeworks of Newton and Mozart, Goethe and Blake.
As I’ve said before, abstract truths represent a deeper level to being, the directly perceptible level being concrete being. Think of being as a plant with a rich network of unseen roots which not only reach deep into the earth but also are intertwined with the roots of other nearby plants which are intertwined with the roots of still other plants. Moreover, there is much earthly substance down below the reach of the most extensive root-system. The human mind has the unexpected ability to penetrate to the roots by first shaping itself to the entities and relationships and processes of the above-ground, or perceptible, world. Then we can even go to depths only implied by those plants and their roots.
The usual explanations of aspects of reality not fully or even partially explained by what can be seen fall into two groups:
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Reductionistic: Wave your hands and say the difficult-to-explain aspects are epiphenomenon or otherwise ‘non-existent’. All that really exists is the plant-parts we can perceive or perhaps the top layers of soil which can be chemically analyzed.
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Dualistic or idealistic: The difficult-to-explain aspects of the plants are explained by imperceptible components of the plants or invisible plants growing between the ones which can be perceived.
As I’ve written often before: the human mind isn’t separate from created being in all its concrete and abstract levels. Understanding the human mind and proper nurturing of the mind isn’t separate from the understanding of being, and the skills of working with that being, in all its concrete and abstract levels. The mind can’t be understood as a container or processor which holds facts or truths which come from it. The mind has to be understood as being formed by active processes of response. To the extent we can speak of the mind as a container, its shape is determined by its contents. To the extent we can speak of the mind as a processor, its activities are an internalization of the interactions between the human organism and its environments.