The Destructing Mind

Does thinking of the mind as a phenomenon of purely physiological origin have consequences for the way we interact with the world?

What brought the question to mind was a thought last night – that in my youth colours seemed more vivid and that many more of them were apparent then as well. Turning then to a painting on the wall I found that the colour had returned much as my clothing or hair become perceptible as soon as I consciously address them. From there it took me to the Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ (which I haven’t picked up for several years) and the concept of the mind as a funnel or filter, rather than an entity constructing my reality from pieces of information gathered from the world. The problem boils down to this; does my mind seek out the world to piece together some comprehension of it, or does the world essentially force itself on my mind?

This concept seems useful when I consider all the stimulus I regularly exclude and which can interfere with decision making. Similar structures must also be present in other organisms (including non-humans, think of an insect’s compound eye and all they see in a glimpse). I suppose then, to take things away from the depths of philosophy, it is really a matter of attention. I will come down of the side of Huxley.

sensation>>perception

Sensation is greater than perception. Not only is there more in the world than I consciously perceive, but there is also much more that I sense than I consciously perceive. Looking at the keyboard (an admittedly horrible typist), I am ignorant of the scene surrounding it. My elbows rest on the desk, my dry winter skin is tight across my nose, the ventilation runs noisily in this public building. All this sensation is unnecessary to the task at hand (this writing), and in excess will quickly become detrimental to it.  The foreground becomes my focal point and the background essentially fades away.

Yet this also assumes that attention is not only quantifiable, but limited. A professor today, taking a mild diversion from class, explained the ways in which to juggle two sets of objects in two hands, while doing so and cycling seamlessly through the different methods. For a learned task attention becomes much different. Is there a limit to learning beyond the number of hours in a day?

Having toyed with the rudiments of cognition, I’ll leave further details to the more adept. If the mind is an antenna then for me it turns to the signals, against a constant background of noise. The means which it uses to distinguish ever newer and more complex signals are as of yet a mystery to me.

Regarding the title; the mind takes sensation, which is capable of becoming true perception, but destroys this potential within it by ignoring it until it has left recent memory. Once gone from memory, that unique event ceases to exist as a possibility of experience.

Thank you to Jeremy Burman for helping me to clarify some early ideas

Existential Biology

The science of the nineteenth century was dominated by the perfectibility of knowledge. Fueled by the analytic/systematic distinction provided by Kant, the European thinkers of the day were bent on elucidating all the empirical rules that governed the universe. Even if the universe was infinite everything was potentially knowable and humans were capable of detached observation that could elucidate and name all these facts and rules.

Credit Mike Libby Insect Lab - Click for Link

As the nineteenth century came to a close reductionist empiricism had sown the seeds of its own demise. If human beings were themselves the product of the chance and rational processes of evolution, driven primarily by their own personal struggle for existence, were they really capable of detached observation? Where was the selective pressure for pure rationality? Would primitive man have benefited from quietly contemplating the origin and nature of the saber-tooth tiger while being stalked on the savannah? Certainly not, selection would have favoured those who had a rapid aggressive and emotional response, those dominated by the strong intent to live.

This reality began what would now be called an ‘existential crisis’ in philosophy that would eventually bleed into the natural sciences. Of course one of the major products of this crisis was existentialism itself. Not too oversimplify, but these developments can largely be traced to one very influential thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche turned German philosophy on its head. A self-proclaimed futurist, his writing defied the analytic methods of the day. Even his more direct exposés relied on allegory and metaphor. Yet some of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century found his philosophy indispensable. Martin Heidegger, the foremost student of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, would write literal volumes on Nietzsche. From this German foundation would grow the French school of Existentialism with Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This school in turn would usher in the most modern era with the likes of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

All well and pretty with a lot of important sounding names being dropped (the neophyte names the thinkers rather than the ideas he can’t understand), but what does it have to do with modern biology? Biology is the science tasked with understanding the nature of life itself. By the early twentieth century the advent of quantum mechanics had provided adequate grounding to explain most commonplace physical and chemical phenomena. Yet even the most advanced quantum theorist was at a loss to explain that most basic fact of human existence: Conscious thought. Husserl went back beyond Kant to the study of consciousness as proposed by Descartes. In his Cartesian Meditations he systematically examined the phenomena of thought and awareness and coined, in a Freudian tradition, the ego cogito. Translated literally as the ‘thinking self’, this conscious self is tied inexorably to the unconscious, and cannot step outside. It is a continual actor and presence in the world. Every step taken leaves a print, and this being is incapable, especially when considering its own self, of not changing the world around it. The twentieth century definition of self had found its birth and would inform a whole generation of philosophers.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, psychologists had begun the struggle with irrationality and identified the hidden unconscious. Yet the natural sciences at that time were still dominated by the Cartesian assumption that humans are a separate class of beings. Whatever may have been deemed necessary for the understanding or explanation of human beings did not have any implications on the understanding of animals or other living things.  As noted above, the understanding of human beings as a product of natural selection that allowed psychology to look more objectively at its subject would eventually find its way into biology. Certain biological phenomena appeared to defy naturalistic explanation. How could a goose imprint on a human being, displaying the non-human equivalents of love and devotion to a being to which it had no real selective relationship? Lorenz demonstrated traits that could not have been selected for directly, but instead required the selection of higher order cognitive processes. For all intents and purposes it appeared that animals were capable of what was a rudiment of abstract thought.

The questions addressed daily in the humanities defy even the most advanced quantum explanation, yet all are products of the human mind. These and all other conscious phenomena are genuine emergent properties, impossible to explain from even the most complete explanation of lower order components. Existentialism – exploring the human actor as embedded in a world that is not of its choosing or creation – is a well developed philosophical perspective that allows for a certain degree of deeper explanation.  That which cannot be addressed by our current naturalistic understanding of the world will benefit from any dissection of their traits that incorporates the phenomenological and existential paradigms,  well developed in the early post-modern era.

Post-script:

Incredible artist website for which I did not feel comfortable using images without permission:

Vladimir Gvozdariki – Mechanical works, all around incredible site and works

How to Hatch a Mammal & Why Evolution Matters

In terms of development mammals are weird. We have clearly evolved a set of wacky adaptations to allow us not only to mature entirely within the parent, but also to do so without the huge supply of yolk common to most other animals. Think of your regular egg. That big ball of yolk is covered by a single plasma membrane and provides everything that chicken needs for the roughly twenty-one days it takes to go from laying to hatching. As a freaky aside, that entire chicken (if fertilized) will grow from a small white mass (the blastodisc) visible on every single store-bought egg. Mammals, not having that whole bunch of rich and yummy stuff to eat in the weeks it usually takes them to develop, instead do a whole bunch of crazy things for which there is no real comparison elsewhere, except that a lot these structures (the amnion and alantois) are also present in the the eggs of birds and reptiles. What we’ve got here is a whole suite of adaptations used grow new organisms on land, which would be completely mind-boggling if you didn’t consider the 600 million years (that’s 219 billion days, to put it in perspective) that it has taken these systems to develop to their current state.

Embryology of the Soul – The Science of Ernst Haeckel

There are a number of ways the soul, a theoretical conundrum as indemonstrable as the creator herself, could have come to be. Ernst Haeckel tells us that it’s not taken a bit from mom and a bit from dad, nor does it lie in wait until called upon, and it’s not a germ passed from Adam on down. It just is, and arises as such at the moment of fertilization, not coitus. While this strangely drawn argument could collude with certain anti-abortion sentiments, it is actually from the mind of man who considered himself a staunch liberal and free-thinker. Darwin’s champion in Germany, lover of that compounding of words so fancied in German, is credited with  first identifying the kingdom Protista and coining the terms ecology, phylogeny and ontology. A vexing character whose books on evolution far outsold Darwin’s Origin and Descent of Man, Haeckel was lambasted by Stephen Jay Gould for his “irrational mysticism” who also characterized Haeckel’s science as “dogmatic, unfounded and distinctly non-Darwinian.”

Beyond Blender – Biology With Computers

A model of the structure of ATP synthase - found in nearly all animal and plant cells.

Since I became interested in Blender several months ago I have been convinced of the potential applications of modelling in science. Obviously communications are greatly enhanced by the 3d models we can easily make these days, but there are also people out there using modelling to investigate basic science questions relating to biological systems. One such individual is Aleksei Aksimentiev, at the University of Illinois. Check out this brief podcast (and associated article) from EarthSky.org:

The Un-founding of A Contemporary Political Ecology: An Introduction

For the first four months of 2010 I spent a great deal of time trying to elucidate, as a member of the pos-post-modernist era (an era so ill-defined we haven’t gotten around to naming it yet), what a political ecology means. Beyond just defining this broad term, I had tasked myself with building it particularly in the context of social problems such as crime, abuse, poverty and homelessness. The ecological enters from my faith based belief that the formula for human happiness includes an inextricable coupling of the natural and artificial worlds.

Ecological Man

Contemporary understanding of what it is to be human has been morphed again and again by advancing scientific understanding. First the human went from the animistic spirit thing, then on to the the polytheistic and monotheistic soul as a specific embodiment of god(s). With the dawn of the renaissance and positivism religious definitions finally became moot and the search began anew for an all encompassing definition of humanity.  Mechanistic Cartesianisms came to dominate and have done so through much of contemporary thought, causing conflict and contention with the religious definitions of the self that attempt to reconcile themselves with the modern world-view.

Hobbies for the Sane: How to be a Blend-nerd

Crafted from my own handiwork - note that any abnormalities represent disfigurations of the artist and not faults in the program.

The image above represents the product of the several tutorials I have gone through in the last few months since I discovered Blender, a free, open-source 3d design program. All told, this piece took about 90 minutes from start to finish. While there is a steep learning curve for the product, the weeks spent getting to this point are due more to the other things going on in my life –  I’m not a graphic designer of any kind and have no formal training. I would estimate a combined total of fifteen hours reading and mucking around to get to the final model which I produced just this afternoon. While I do have a fairly capable computer (AMD Phenom, 6GB Ram, Radeon 5770), I think the earlier versions of Blender (v.2.48 for example) would run on most contemporary machines.

Phone Date with a Sexologist

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Fred Berlin, MD PhD, of the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore and founder of that same institution’s ‘Sexual Disorders Unit’. I had wanted to keep our conversation short as I felt somewhat unjustified taking up a renowned doctors time when I myself have absolutely no credentials, but found him so attentive and willing that I wished I had prepared a set of more focused and detailed questions. Below I’ll paraphrase his responses to the general topics I inquired about while my memory is still fresh. As a quick disclaimer: I do not propose or intend that these views be taken as those of Dr. Berlin, of Johns Hopkins Medical School, or of any affiliated institutions. These are simply my own interpretations from a brief telephone interview.

Sex and Violence? – Ask the Duke

**Also posted on :Game/States:**

With the pending release of the much delayed Duke Nukem Forever, we find ourselves at another one of those highly frequented intersections of video games and society, that of sex and violence. Duke Nukem is once again following the same old premise; aliens have come to take our women and impregnate them. Only the Duke can save them.