The (very) Big Picture

Where to start?

Summing up the human condition in a nutshell is perhaps a characteristic preoccupation of our species. We are obsessed by ourselves. What are we? What are we doing and why? What is the meaning of it all? And make it short, please ...

Over the centuries, it seems we do make some kind of progress but, in doing so, the questions become deeper and more complex. As old ideas die out, they are replaced by richer world views that bristle with new questions that we didn't think to ask before.

Myth

It is certainly important to understand the role of myth, since we are always absorbed in it. In fact, myth only works when you are scarcely aware of it (like the proverbial fish in water). But becoming aware is a crucial first step: one that very few seekers make. Billions of us are still trapped in a religious world view without truly grasping the difference between the stories we are accepting as a framework for reality and reality itself. There is a good reason thinkers like Carl Jung paid so much attention to the common architecture of myth (the "archetypes"). Many others have charted this territory in different ways. (An extended contemplation on one particular myth - the Messiah - is presented here).

I've recently watched Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States". Although a bit preachy and over-simplified, this series does a good job of shaking us out of the mythology that prevailed in the 20th and 21st century. The "good guys" were promoting individual freedom and human rights (The USA being the "city on the hill"). The "bad guys" (commies) were out for world domination, turning us all into mindless robots. Of course the truth is far more complex (perhaps so complex as to defy simplification or classification). The frightening thing is that an endless sequence of US Presidents (and many others) took the mythology as reality and more than once drove us to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  This is not so different from the serial catastrophes of the Crusades in the Middle Ages. It is the acting out in reality of a purely fanciful creation of the human mind.

The most obvious symptom of mythical thinking is the tendency to turn all the information we have about the world into some kind of story, replete with "good guys", "bad guys", a beginning, an end and some kind of moral message. Unfortunately, the real world is not inhabited by these archetypes and the effort to turn our experience into a coherent story always has a procrustean bed aspect.

Julian Jaynes used the term "narratization", that refers to a feature of the conscious mind to turn everything into a "story". Myth is the grand result of this tendency and perhaps a hint that we cannot escape it as long as we have minds at all. We are all myth-made men.

Mind

At the center of all the grand myths is some kind of theory about the human "mind" or "soul". Most religions assume that the mind and the body are somehow separate and that the fate of the mind (beyond death) is of crucial importance.  The fate of the soul is taken to be the central issue when it comes to the meaning of life. Anyone who accepts this acquires the baggage associated with the ritual requirements to ensure immortality, but also enjoys the benefit that no further questions need to be asked about "meaning".

In 2017, we are dealing with a the terrifying consequences that come out of seriously believing that this world is just a stepping stone to paradise. People who believe this can be particularly deadly enemies, since they want, more than anything else, to be killed. Failing this, they want to spend their lives convincing others to believe as they do. Again, we see the influences of fanciful reality over the real world, as we did in the Crusades.

Especially since the mid-20th century, Science has taught us a lot about "mind". Although we can't expect the idea of the soul to be cast off by the masses (it has a terrific intuitive appeal plus the attraction of fending off further awkward questions), it is now possible for anyone with the time and inclination to learn enough about mind to understand that you need a brain to have one. But it's "early days" with this insight. In the brilliant "Surfaces and Essences", Hofstadter and Sander show the importance of analogy to thought. New ideas emerge from old ones. We have a terrible time "boot strapping" new ideas when reality presents us with something genuinely new. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are good examples of this difficulty. There is nothing in ordinary experience that is "like" the sub-atomic world, nor is there anything in our experience that is "like" the way space and time really work.. The mind is another example. There is nothing "like" the mind. At present, "models" of the mind struggle to create workable analogies:

• Mind as computer. This is basically the attempt to "reverse engineer" the model based on known external behaviour, then postulating some kind of machinery vaguely similar to computer devices. Daniel Dennett's  "Consciousness Explained" is an example of this, but the analogy is wide spread - almost assumed in much "philosophical" writing on the mind.
• Mind as a process going on in the brain. This is assumed by the "computer" analogy, but many writers, especially neuroscientists, make the brain assumption without quite noticing it. The main difficulty is to imagine what else could be going on. Barring the existence of some heavenly realm, where else can we find "mind" but in the brain?
• Animals have something "like" a mind, so we can learn about the mind by studying the brain of animals, especially chimps, mice etc.

I'm more of a systems analyst than a philosopher. Over the years, I have developed an instinct for sniffing out hidden assumptions ("A Systems Analyst Assumes Nothing"). "Surfaces and Essences" showed me the first crack in the "mind/brain" model. What if "Mind" is the interaction between brain processes and other "external" phenomena, especially language? For example, is it possible that "intelligence" is a property of our language as much as our ability to process language? "Surfaces" delves into the role of analogy in language, leaving the reader with a deep appreciation for the hidden "wisdom" of language, along with understanding of how the brain (mind) instantly creates analogies "on the fly" and effortlessly understands them. By the way, this was also a strong hit that the mind/brain is not some kind of computer - a personal insight that comes from a reasonably intense long-term relationship with computers.

As I continued to pursue this line of thought, I read quite a few books on neurology. If you read books by neurologists, you don't encounter the computer analogy very often. Neurologists talk about how the brain actually works (there is a lot of guesswork and an appreciation of the vast gulf between what we know about brains and what we want to know about minds ).

Daniel Bor's "Ravenous Brain" educated me on three concepts that are so closely related as to be almost the same thing:

• Consciousness - the "feel" of being in the world
• Working memory - what we can hold in mind at any moment
• Attention - we all know what it means but it's hard to define. Yet we can see its presence from the outside in simple EEG's. We do know that certain parts of the brain need to be active if the subject is "paying attention".

Bor spends a lot of time localizing this function in the brain. Good for him. In the long run, it's not too interesting to know where all this is going on, but it is important to know it's going on somewhere.

Bor's thinking about attention is mainstream. There is a limit to the number of "chunks" that can be held in "working memory". Maybe from 4 to 7. This is why it's hard to remember a 10 digit phone number, for example. But we "chunk" things. A "chunk" can be as simple as a number. A word can be a chunk. An entire idea such as Special Relativity, can be a "chunk". How is this possible? "Surfaces and Essences" provides the clue. Analogies create categories and categories (specifically the way the mind treats situations as special cases of categories) are "chunks". This opens the door to understanding the incredible power of the mind which is, on the surface, only able to deal with a handful of things at once. At bottom, it is our experience of reality itself that is being "chunked". Since computers have no such experience, they must "learn" about the world in an entirely different way than we do, resulting in a gap - perhaps unbridgeable - between the computer "mind" and ours.

Another theme ran through my reading, almost always just beneath the surface. For example, how often can the mind/brain change what "chunks" it's dealing with? The answer seems to be around 40 times per second (the frequency of brain waves associated with attention). That's about the same rate at which movie frames create the illusion of motion. Not a coincedence. 

The introduction of brain waves (synchronized action of billions of neurons) and the "time dimension" opens the door to some interesting speculation about how the mind brings things into attention - especially its ability to cause us to "re-experience" things in our "mind's eye". There is an analogy with holography, which map a 3-dimensional scene into a spacial frequency map. The 3-dimensional image can be recovered from the 2-dimensional image (hologram) by shining a light of the right frequency through the hologram. It's a vague analogy but it provides me with a glimpse of how the brain might work that is not analogous to a digital computer.

This same line of thought makes me think more about how the business of the brain is to bind the mind do what is going on in the "outside world" in a physical process (not a "computation"). I'm also reminded of the Zen idea that the world and the mind are, at bottom, the same thing. Whatever that "thing" is, the distinction between mind and the world is an illusion. In any case, as long as we lack a powerful analogy to help us with a model, we need to be constantly reminded that the brain is an object in the "real world", not some kind of abstract algorithm, as assumed in much of Science Fiction and the pseudo-Science we see in Kursweil's "The Singularity". We can't be "uploaded" into a computer any more than we can "upload" an orange.

Systems

There is a tendency among philosophers to attempt to "boil things down" to one "thing" - it's called synthesis. A systems analyst always boils things down to "systems", which have lots of moving parts.

This has consequences.

• The "mind" can be seen as a system consisting of the brain, the world and human culture. Each of these "subsystems" can be unpacked. This unpacking process is called "analysis".
• Evolution is a story of systems - mostly systems of genes evolving together - not the story of individual genes somehow conveying advantages all on their own. This becomes even more obvious when you consider symbiotic relationships. There is really no such thing as an "individual". Co-evolution between species (ecosystems) is the rule, not the exception.

Society

My subtle challenge to the "mind = brain" assumption is that the "mind" has as much to do with the "outside world" as it has to do with what happens between our ears. I don't deny the essential role of the brain in all this (no brain = no mind). I'm must saying that the brain is not enough to create a mind. In a very broad sense, you need a world. In a narrow sense, you need culture, especially language. To make sense of "mind", it therefore becomes necessary to speak of many minds together in the context of their environment. One "frame" of this experience can be called a "situation". It is obviously impossible for a brain to participate in a "situation" without massive "programming" from culture. Understanding what is "going on", what actions are possible and acceptable, and what outcomes can be expected depend entirely on what has been learned from culture and experience. Very little is "hard wired".

Of course, the "very little" that is hard wired is endlessly fascinating but I'll leave that aside for now. A good introduction to this topic can be found in any book on the neurology of vision which is extremely well-studied.

This perspective leads me to the need to balance my study of the lone mind-brain with study of minds in action. That's history, for example. It also ties back into my long-term concern that individuals can be assimilated into large complexes I called "dragons". Moving beyond that, the question becomes a study of how minds work together in history. It's like looking at rivers rather than water molecules. Both perspectives are "true" in the right context and at the right scale.

One challenge to the "dragon" context is the points in history where the decisions and personality quirks of one individual utterly change the course of history. "Dragon Theory" allowed those who succeed in manipulating or controlling the dragon to also be assimilated into a specific role demanded by the dragon's "metabolism". For example, the fascist movement needed a strong man like Hitler or Mussolini. There was a "slot" in these movements for such individuals, just as there were lower-order "slots" for functionaries, generals, propagandists and so on, right down to the compliant citizen who worked hard to deny what was going on.

Bottom Line 

For the moment at least, I'm happy to proceed along the following lines:

• Rejection of ancient mythology, including ideas such as God and the Soul, in favour of what we actually know about the Universe (which can also turn out to be a modern myth).
• Understanding human nature in context, regarding theories about individual mind/brains with suspicion.
• Humans always act in the context of some kind of myth, some particular language, some particular culture, some particular political assumptions, some particular economic theory. We are always, to some degree "assimilated", but it is crucially important to understand how this assimilation works. In particular, it is important to challenge all the assumptions that tend to limit the possibility of creativity. 
• In the big picture, solution to our many problems depend on breaking out of old paradigms and creating new ones. This breakout always begins with individuals asking awkward questions but must, in the end, spread into the culture as a "movement". It typically takes generations for this "Paradigm Shift".
• The process of discovery must also be a process of participation and involvement. The "meaning" of our life is not to be found in terms of the individual life, which is a hold-over from the mythology of the immortal individual soul.