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The Genesis of Thought in
the BPS Model

EPILOGUE.
This journey of the mind ends the same way it all started, a horizon in
sight, a strategy to get there and still as many conceptual obstacles and
hurdles to climb. At the end of the road there is always a new gate that
opens. For those insatiable spirits who'd rather travel than get there,
the journey becomes the destination when you search for the meaning of
life and consciousness.
The role natural language plays in the conformation and functioning of the
all encompassing global consciousness, that we hoped would be our biggest
contribution to the study of consciousness, has turned out to generate
more questions and abstractions than we had hoped to answer and bargain
for. As we discussed in chapters 12, 21, 22 above and many other places,
we had hoped to give a complete ambitious description of the amygdaloid
complex as a natural candidate for the seat of consciousness based
primarily, among other things, on its well documented participation (with
the hippocampal formation) in coordinating the avoidance reflex responses
when humans were confronted with natural life-threatening environmental
stimuli. As it turns out the stimulating natural object / event in this
case is meaning-neutral, the semantic tag being provided by inherited
life-preserving amygdaloidal audio-visual codelets as modified by
experience. We will expand further on below.
Pursuant to the analysis we have developed we have designated the ‘shores’
surrounding the Sylvian fissure (perisylvian area) inter-connecting all
sensory inputs into Heschl-Wernicke’s-angular gyrus region and relaying it
into à Broca’s area à pre-frontal executive cortex, the ‘proto-linguistic
organ’ (plo). We labored hard to weave together a meta-linguistic
distributed network headquartered at ‘plo’ and modeled to integrate
nativist considerations on syntax, semantics, referentials, phonology,
truth values, pragmatics, vector space network theory and DNA encoded
language inputs. We even thought we had found the 4-d coordinates for
Chomsky’s generative grammar as the same locus for a regenerative
semantics, all embodied by the ‘plo’. There we could combine both elements
(universal grammar & proto-semantics) and bring to life a comprehensive
theory of ‘meaning’ linking linguistic elements such as figures, signs,
noises, marks and body movements as different manifestations of a
communication urge, most reducible in principle to ‘propositional
attitudes’ configured in syntax structure and semantics. We hoped it would
represent the beginnings of a veritable truth-conditional theory of
meaning of high coherence value. We laid the foundations, based on a
reinterpretation of Fodor’s ‘mentalese’ and Piaget’s theory on language
acquisition by the newborn as discussed in chapter 5 and elsewhere. We
have scattered many seeds on fertile grounds to germinate and flourish but
still have not found the magic fertilizer concept to make them sprout into
a luxuriant independent existence.
In our opinion, the focus of any such search for a marketable algorithm
should start first on revaluating the role played by nature’s
non-intentional sounds and signs as they get incorporated into heritable
proto-semantic ‘mentalese’ ‘atomic’ codelets and second on analyzing the
relative priority assignment of verbal (and non-verbal) language in either
thought ‘formation’ and / or ‘transmission’. The priority choices get
narrowed down to the alternatives of considering language as either
causally efficient in producing thought or dependant on it. Both
alternatives either co-exist independently or are mutually dependent on
each other.
The inescapable (and expected) first big hurdle is clearly seen when
considering causality relations between two different domains, the
physical language (or its symbolic representation thereof) and the
non-physical ‘thought’. Fortunately, for starters, the choice approach
should narrow down to an manageable epistemological argumentation, trying
to avoid the constraints of wearing an elusive ontological straight jacket
fitting an ephemeral ‘thought entity’. The chosen strategy is driven by
pragmatic considerations if one can appreciate that it is more reliable to
analyze language as the basis of thought than the opposite approach
requiring more speculative activity when analyzing what ‘content’ of
thought is causing language generation. Besides, the only known way we can
be sure about subject A’s thought content is by way of subject A’s first
person account, a language narrative. Analytically speaking, the choices
are clear: either we get more tangible results concentrating on analyzing
linguistic syntacto-semantics structure as being causal to thought or get
lost analyzing the elusive vagaries about the ‘intentionality’ content of
thought or mental states as causally efficient in producing the logic
structure of language. The latter approach, besides being
counter-intuitive, would have to depend considerably more on
self-referential accounts of language users about the beliefs and
intentional mental states allegedly preceding the corresponding language
formulation on the basis of an equally questionable co-variation of
thought and language, or teleological wishful thinking or an unconscious
self-serving functional scheme of neo-behaviorists as discussed below.
However, a re-interpretation of both Grice and Fodor may well do the trick
as we discuss below. Based on all things considered and their possible
outcomes that we gambled and put our stock on the idea of a language
precursor to thought, especially after having previously suggested the
proto-linguistic organ ('plo') as the putative site for the assembling of
language-dependent thoughts, an attractive connectionist /
representationalist view of how the mind may operate. We also thought that
our approach would give the clinician an additional logic tool to predict
psychic etiologies of disease based on first person mental state
narratives as an additional input.
This places language development and ‘plo’ at center stage in our evolving
‘bps’ model of consciousness. We had reasoned early on that if an
appropriate environmental life- threatening stimulus, e.g., a snake sound
and a visual context of the scenery it came from, can trigger an adaptive
inborn behavior in a newborn species by ‘plo’ then it can also be involved
in related but more complex language elaboration. By integrating into its
species-specific genetic memory the acquired memories of existence, the
primeval sounds and sights danger cues get elaborated into a
biopsychosocial (‘bpo’) survival strategy, including a communication tool.
The role played by DNA, genetic archetypes, etc. in unleashing
chemically-mediated adaptive responses when triggered by environmental
stimuli (cues) has been discussed elsewhere in the text. This mechanism
includes a consideration of mother’s ‘baby talk’ cooing and her facial
expressions as effective primitive phonemes and cues to trigger
appropriate modifier archetypes that add on to the genetic proto-semantic
reservoir of inherited ‘meanings’. The role played by cortical ‘mirror
neurons’ in imitating behavior is reasonably well established. Thus the
inherited universal grammar links with a regenerative semantics clothed in
phonology and mimicry to evolve the sentential logic structure
(‘propositional attitudes’?). Species’ environmental survival tactics,
clothed as nature’s ‘meaningful cues’ survive by getting coded into DNA,
transmitted across generational gaps and translated in the newborn into a
proto-semantics nested circuitry (codelets). These get then shaped into a
regenerated environmental survival weapon de novo. Its presence is felt
first by reflex adaptive patterns as described and then gets
developmentally modified into a syntacto-semantic architecture. The
inherited first stage gets modified in the newborn by mothers ‘cooings’
and facial expressions and posterior environmental sense inputs.
This view of language generation places primeval semantics transfer at
unconscious nativist levels ahead of syntactic arrangements by ‘plo’. This
leaves volition and free will
at ‘the proximate cause’ level of control as discussed elsewhere. "A man
can surely do what he wants to do. But he can not determine what he
wants.", Schopenhauer once said. It was at this conjectural point that we
discovered Dr. Jerry Fodor and the ‘language of thought’ (LOT) hypothesis
which has given impetus and corroboration to our model, save for some
minor and major disagreements as will note below.
Where we have hopelessly stumbled big time has been in providing a
marketable account of how our ‘plo’ processing module mediates the
transition from an on-line sense-phenomenal (or conceptual off-line) brain
codelet input (I) to a corresponding syntactically-structured
representational output (O) in a systematic one to one instantiation by
this special basic input-output system (BIOS) of the ‘plo’ processor. We
suspect that the inherited original ‘machine language’ genetic code input,
when translated from the newborn DNA gets incorporated (and modified?)
into the acquired phonemic and facial expressions input from the lactating
mother via cortical mirror neurons as discussed briefly in various
chapters. ‘Meaning’ to the newborn (proto-semantics) gets somehow
structured into a proto-syntax in the ‘plo’ processor. The neuro-humoral
reward-punishment system of Olds-Pribram (connecting nerve trunk midbrain
and ‘plo’ with forebrain executive area via Medial Forebrain Bundle) may
be intimately involved in the original and subsequent valence
classification of environmental (internal & external) inputs. Somehow a
systematic audio-visual (or other sensory) input facilitates the formation
of ‘inferential’ codelet loops that, added to other relevant modular
inputs (visceral brain, talking brain, non-dominant brain, etc) will
configure the resultant of ‘all things considered’, a "thought". Whether
this final event precedes a putative motor adaptive response or not (see
Libet’s timing data) is open to debate and should not necessarily put into
question the existence of a ‘free will’ for the reasons already discussed
above.
The big problem still remaining is, of course, how to explain what kind of
‘sentential’ logic structure guides the jazz pianist when improvising his
music, or the artist when moving the brush over the canvas? We believe
there is no conscious thought guiding that kind performance; we discuss
this problem in some detail in chapter 19.
How would one start laying out the groundwork for developing a model for a
linguistic generation of mind? Following closely on the steps of British
empiricist Locke, Columbia U. Dr. J.A. Fodor had taken a first step (see
"The Language of Thought," 1975). Henceforth neuroscientists and
philosophers alike abandoned ship on the search for explanations on the
meanings of spoken words to concentrate instead on the ‘contents’ of
mental representations in the hope that therein originated somehow the
‘meanings’ of words (see Grice’s essay "Meaning Revisited,"1982).
Within the scope of the ‘bps’ model the family is the structural /
functional unit of viable human existence (see Eric From’s "Man for
Himself", 1947) and consequently it is not far-fetched to speculate that
language may have evolved in order to ease and synchronize the
correspondence in mental states between parents, siblings and one another.
For the reasons already stated above we have to both agree and disagree
with Dummet when he stated "..that ‘the fundamental axiom of analytical
philosophy’ is that "the only route to the analysis of thought goes
through the analysis of language." Agree because it is easier to infer
from a well established language syntax structure encoding semantics than
the opposite view requiring an elusive structure of mind to infer from.
Yet, as we will argue, language structure is intrinsically semantics
neutral, its meaning to be discovered in the mental state / representation
of both speaker and listener that animate it. In so doing we must resist
the temptation to confuse the map with the territory it represents, the
cognition of ‘how’ with the cognition of ‘that’, the epistemology with the
ontology. The worst possible scenario will be, anyway, that the resulting
analysis will only translate our current grammatical description of ‘mind’
into a richer theoretical system without substantially improving on the
older explanations and remaining at square one as Wittgenstein has mocked
about the analytical philosophy effort. We have tried all along to
identify those other fundamental concepts the diad language-->mind is
necessarily related to and establishing the connections thereto.
This analytical strategy, as described, already supposes a commitment to
two important aspects of cognitive science: the content of ‘mental states’
(beliefs, desires and other intentional states) can be represented
(brain-encoded) as functional isomorphs (symbolic representations) such
that reasoning becomes a formal (logic) manipulation (computer processing)
of such representations (symbols) according to a set of non-semantic rules
(e.g., program). The credibility of such approach rests on the premise
that any logic operations applicable to syntax can be either duplicated or
emulated by a computer (after Turing). Implied here is that ‘mental
representations’, as described, carry both syntactic and semantic
properties (see below for more on properties). The important conclusion is
that thereby syntax structure programming becomes causally efficient in
both the computer and the brain as long as the relevant functions can be
formalized (programmed). This makes logical ‘inferences’ possible, the
hallmark of reasoned thinking. This way a "Language of Thought" (LOT) or
‘mentalese’ is modeled by Fodor as discussed elsewhere in the text. It is
clear that this model requires linear input sequential processing, can not
explain what it is like to have a feeling (e.g., qualia) and does not
explicitly spell out whether language communicates thought or participates
in the formation of thought (as discussed in a previous chapter where
Fodor defends a ‘nativist’ idea using a combinatorial argument
successfully). Furthermore, the ‘Mentalese’ model of Fodor supposes , like
ours, that language precedes the formation of thought but, unlike ours,
that the meaning of an assertion (its semantics) is encoded in the syntax
arrangement according to a ‘propositional attitude’ structural
representation. For example, if I have a thought that refers to George W.
Bush and the WMD, it is because that thought is a relation to a coded
mental representation that refers to the US President. If I think "Bush
invaded Iraq in 2003" it is because I am in a particular functional
relation (characteristic of belief) that has the content: "Bush Invaded
Iraq to destroy the WMD in 2003" (e.g., Tarskian semantics).
As we enunciated above we differ in non-trivial aspects of this
interpretation and believe that an in-house proto-semantic archetype
precede and dictate syntax and its subsequent development according to a
layering build-up of the inherited by the external influence of acquired
language parameters derived initially from the mother, siblings and
others. But this is just an informed intuition in its embryonic stage as
will expose below. We hold that inherited proto-semantics precede syntax
which is acquired from mother & environment.
Propositional attitude states, that is, states that occur at some specific
moment in a person's mental life, have the sort of content that might be
expressed by a propositional phrase proper to the subjects natural
language. This variation still conceptualizes mental states as either
tokened mental representations at the sub-personal nativist level (Fodor)
or images them from natural language at the personal level (Carruthers).
What is important is that it considers much more significant how the
mental encoding came into being where genetic memory (implicit and
unconscious as opposed to the global conscious or the Freud-Jung
subconscious) levels of processing are controlling in behalf of ‘bps’
survival imperatives. Our BPS model view may seem counterintuitive at
first sight but, observing how computers carry out programmed
instructions, it is easier to visualize a language generation of thought
as operations performed over the mental representations in a given
language than it is to extract a ‘meaning’ based on a particular structure
of syntax.
Is the syntax universal for all human languages? We think not. The
inherited proto-semantics IS, and it will be fashioned into the future
syntactic structure depending on the natural language acquired and other
mental development influences. This post-natal external stage of language
development only partially reivindicates the pre-Chomskian behaviorist
(classical and Skinnerian operant conditioning) understanding of language
learning and consolidation. Cognitive science alone was able to explain
the linguistic competence already observed in a year-old toddler with
little or no experience, i.e., through internal brain mechanisms. It was
the observed ability of toddlers to understand the difference between "the
cat chased the mouse" and "the mouse chased the cat" or their equivalents
formed by changing the position of the actors or their relationship (i.e.,
systematicity) and the toddler’s natural ability to generate an unlimited
number of sentences / thoughts from a limited set of lexical primitives
proper of the age (i.e., productivity) evidenced an innate presence of an
universal grammar enabling them to –in a primitive way- formulate and
confirm hypothesis. In the BPS model this is evidence of an inherited
inner primeval language we call ‘genetic memory’ which we have argued
before as to its brain location in the perisylvian geography we call the
‘proto-linguistic organ’ (plo). These generalizations may not apply to
other aspects of communications like sign, sound (music) or body language.
Communication for ‘bps’ survival is predicated upon an efficient and
reliable reciprocal sharing of ‘mental states’ between a language producer
and a receiver and includes linguistic and extralinguistic modes of
conveyance of intentionalities, a true ‘Theory of Mind’. As we said
earlier, a system of information-carrying linguistic symbols as such, in
either mode, are in principle neutral in meaning content until decoded by
a receiver, regardless of whether that was the intention of the producer.
It may just as well had been unspecific. The semantic content is not
intrinsic to the arrangement of symbols except for an intended or
un-intended receiver who must extract its meaning if able to synchronize
her mental state with the producer.
We may extrapolate further and say that DNA composition, regardless of
species, carries equivalent unit ‘symbols’ (sugar, base, phosphate) and
when assembled and transmitted by inheritance will not carry intrinsic
information as such except for the species it was intended for who must
extract it via archetype activation. In this case we have to assume that,
other than the unlikely heritable somatic mutations (?), the information
coded into the germinal DNA was the result of a just as unlikely
Lamarckian-like encoding of environmental survival information which gets
transmitted by inheritance and then activated in the newborn when
triggered by an equivalent relevant stimulus in the new generation. This
way newly hatched chicks will react violently to a proyector slide showing
a hawk in flight and not when showing a duck (by reversing the direction
of same slide). This is a species-specific inherited response. A similar
argument holds for the avoidance response triggered when we see (for the
first time) a spider or a snake moving our way. The species-specific
survival kit of multi-modal (e.g., audio-visual) code for environmental
specific information constitute a genetic memory of sorts, to be activated
should the same danger cue be present in the new environment. These are
solid experimental facts, regardless of their mode of inherited
transmission. This is reminiscent of Grice’s ‘natural meaning’ that
requires no intentionality other than that present in the mental state of
the receiver. If present, following a presentation of the ‘neutral’
stimulus, a chain of reactions will ensue providing a meaningful adaptive
response. The environmental stimulus is also affective neutral but
adaptive responses will have an affective positive, negative or alert
valence. There is not such thing as a neutral affective response. This
fact can be equated with our pain-pleasure affective system (see Olds,
Pribram and others) associated with peri-acqueductal grey (PAG), medial
forebrain bundle (MFB), hypothalamus and cingulate cortex. It is a common
experience to classify sensory, body proper or dreams input according to
this primitive affective state which we choose to postulate as a primitive
‘affective meaning’ tag associated with phenomenal, conceptual, qualic or
motor experience. We are not now able to precise whether the input
information is tagged at the receptor, afferent pathways to intermediate
association neurons or at the amygdaloid complex as discussed in other
chapters, but it has the salutary protective effect of screening and
classifying all information input into the central brain. As we also
discussed elsewhere, the amygdaloidal complex controls the relay switch
that immediately activates a neuro-humoral Cannon-type response when
confronted with a life-threatening stimulus or an endorphin-type euphoric
response when the environmental information valence is positive. When in
doubt (alert status), the organism will ‘freeze’ and wait until more
contextual information arrives from the hippocampus social memory as
explained elsewhere.
The proto-linguistic organ (plo) associates combo, coupling amygdala,
hippocampus and cingulate cortex develop embriologically early on in
preparation for a more delayed myelinization of primary and secondary
sensory pathways converging into angular gyrus and a more complete
cephalization of functions requiring communication (Wernicke-Broca
maturation) in coordination with an executive and adaptive-dispositive
forebrain. This is the type of intrinsic brain universal grammar anlage
that is posited in the newborn serving as a foundation for future
linguistic development as sensory input and social interactivity gets more
sophisticated inside the context of the particular natural language
adopted from the parents. This way the natural language syntax structure
will be learned and layered on the inherited proto-semantic structure that
guides and colors its subsequent evolutionary profile. This summarizes the
first stage.
Thus far there has been no overt intention to exchange information between
two cognitive agents, only an unconscious, stereotypical, species-specific
adaptive response to environmental cues whose information content /
meaning is extracted internally based on an activation of the genetic
memory archetypes controlling and unleashing appropriate physiological
effectors (glands, smooth and skeletal musculature).
The second stage of linguistic development in the newborn is based on
re-enforcing the proto-semantic data base by adding new elements from
mother’s facial expressions, cooing sounds, baby talk and surroundings and
classifying them into subsets of the three primitive affects as they
become effective in reducing hunger, pain and general comfort. All this
activity goes on at unconscious and subconscious levels and limited to
expressing degrees of pain / pleasure affective equivalents reciprocally.
The most important brain mediator in these developments are the cortical
‘mirror neurons’ discussed elsewhere in the text. Thus true communication
starts by extracting meaningful information from an environmental cue in
the first stage and in addition from mimicry, both from mother’s sounds
(phonemes) and facial musculature expressions (as analyzed at oculomotor
center) as visual, auditive, tactile and kinesthesic resolution develop
further. As discussed elsewhere in the text, a primitive first order
awareness, mostly sense-phenomenal consciousness, will develop as soon as
the newborn realizes she is different from the doll, the crib, the mother,
etc. and not an extension thereof (see Piaget’s "The Development of
Thought", 1977). At this stage (first year of life) Broca’s ‘talking
brain’ connecting pathways are not developed sufficiently to entertain
propositional arrangements of motherß à son communications, a requirement
to share beliefs, a sine qua non for effective reciprocal communication
and a true ‘Theory of Mind’.
To illustrate, it has been demonstrated (Kaplan, 1989) how primitive
indexicals (context-sensitive
expressions) become modified by linguistic maturation of speaker as well
as from extra-linguistic context experience which varies (in content and
meaning) with time, location and intentions. It is important to keep in
mind that indexicals are ‘sui generis’ in that their content in context A
is derived from (refers to) an object in that context and not a
description of A.
Only when the toddler believes (mental state) ‘that p’ (e.g., baby is
hungry) and overtly communicates ‘that p’ (body language) such that mother
extracts that meaningful information from the baby’s cue and incorporates
it by identities (both genetic and social memory) into her own meaning of
the ocurrence, has a belief being shared. At that point they have shared
beliefs sans much elaboration of linguistic proficiency. The shared
information, the semantics of it all, reflects an internal state of the
mind NOT an external state of the world.
This view carries important consequences. My view of existential reality,
e.g., my belief system, primitively inherited as argued, may have been
influenced originally from information extracted from environmental cues
but ultimately will be a ‘view’ of the internal state of my own mind,
always hoping that it corresponds one to one with external reality, but
NOT necessarily so! The eventual linguistic competence achieved will be
the result of the contribution made by both genetic and social memories in
creating a mental state -in harmony with the adopted natural language-
(initially via mimicry mediated by mirror neurons) from the internal,
semantically-coached combinatorial syntax architecture. Consequently,
commonly shared natural language does not validate the truth value of
literal linguistic meaning, even among identical twins! Identical world
state is no guarantee of identical internal mental states among niche
dwellers. Vive la difference!
It is clear to us that any model of consciousness conceiving language as
its genesis or exclusive conveyance must insert in its development,
besides the classical neuroscientific level of explanation, cognitive
(representational theory of mind, RTM), connectionist and quantum
mechanical algorithms to fill in the gaps left by the other’s explananda.
There are important conceptual areas of basic disagreements that must be
negotiated, e.g., meaning, property, relations, etc. If the complexity of
the challenge is overviewed under a BPS human survival optics then the
relevant areas of investigation / analysis become clearly framed into one
or more of the 5 classical aspects of a super-complex reflex arc:
receptor, sensory circuits, interneuronal integrating circuits, motor
circuits and effector. Only the retinal receptor and its associated
afferent pathways to occipital V1 cortex and intermediate collateral
branches to mesencephalon and diencephalon is very well documented.
Likewise, the efferent arm of the arc has only been pretty well studied in
the oculo-vestibular reflex analysis of Llinas and Pellionisz involving
the cerebellum and neck musculature. Most elegant theoretical renditions
have sprung from such approaches, e.g., Crick’s cortico-thalamic 40Hz
binding theory and Churchland’s vector phase transformation theory,
respectively. We do not anticipate a significant improvement on the level
of research sophistication when directed at these two arms of the complex
reflex arc. This leaves the interneuronal complex of integration as the
natural and eventual focus of attention. The brain wetware can be
considered as a compacted interneuronal phase transformational complex
where sensory input gets massively transformed into motor adaptive output
during normal functioning (see Glynn’s "Anatomy of Thought",1999 and
Feinberg’s "Altered Egos", 2001).
Once the visual (or any other receptor) deconstructs the seeming
continuity of the environmental sensory scenario into digitized,
discontinuous events reaching the interneuronal compact, there is a vector
phase transformation and different algorithms continue the deconstruction
into codelet (Kantian?) categories. The totality of the sensory codelets
gets classified, partitioned and allocated different virtual or real
macro-locations in the not-so-hard disk of the wetware, whether in modules
or in a recurrent distributed network fashion. It becomes the task of the
interneuronal compact to reconstruct the ‘original’ or equivalent
representational scenario when called for (the binding problem). The
resulting integral may not be necessarily provide an adaptive solution in
neuropathology but will always reflect the dynamic equilibrium state of
the constitutive modular elements charged with ‘bps’ survival strategies.
Passed this test the ‘solution’ needs the intervention of an executive
implementation to coordinate the best fitting adaptive response of the
effectors at the motor end of the reflex arc. This view is the typical
functionalist picture.
Bridging the sensorimotor divide we find a theorist trying to identify a
suitable algorithm appropriate to the computational task of the
neurological wetware and capable to deliver an implementation task to the
effectors. This is no easy task because the algorithm must satisfy
isomorphic requirements of the input-output divide, a transducer of sorts.
It would help if our theorist would precise the best symbol representation
of the massively parallel information flow to ease the transduction from
input to output. Our mind is the algorithmic symbol processor in the
interneuronal compact. Let’s see how the argument may likely develop at
the analytical philosophy level and the unavoidable constraints and
paradoxes it generates in the process. But consciousness research can’t
stop at the test tube and oscilloscope lab, at the tip of the iceberg’s
view.
Now comes the qualitative jump of
Fodor (1981) when he proposed the view that mental
states are ‘relations’ to symbolic representations. If the implied
‘meaning’ adscribed to a logic propositional construction ‘relates’ to a
‘mental state’ in se, the latter will come to inherit the semantic value
and intentionality (meaning) of the construction where the syntactic
arrangement determines the semantic ‘meaning’. E.g., the President
(subject S) believes (attitude a) there are WMD inside Irak (proposition
p) or <Sa that p> in modal logic. A mathematical purist may argue that a
strict canonical interpretation of set theory requires that an
interpretation of semantics must map the relevant terms exclusively into
mathematical objects, an obvious impossibility here, which argues for the
inadequacy of syntax to determine semantics. A complete demonstration is
beyond the scope of this essay but we can see at least that the meaning of
proposition p is not identical with the meaning of its representation p*,
the identity p=p* is untenable because it implies that there exists a 2
place relation between an inscription and its semantic value and further
assumes the possibility of an inexistent correspondence (thought sharing)
of meaning between a language producer and the receiver, unless mediated
by a linguistic convention, something we argue can only be found in a
genetic memory mediating interface. It may be further added that there
exist many mental processes not reducible to algorithmic manipulations,
especially when the argument is drawing from outside the defined problem
domain and is thereby not purely inductive or processable by rule-based
techniques. In the best possible scenario, that model does not provide for
an ‘understanding’ of the computations and, while it may be suitable to
explain a first order type of ‘awareness’, it would be useless for higher
order conceptual and introspective consciousness as argued many times
before. The same argument would still apply if a concatenative linear
symbolic processing is substituted by a non-serial, sub-symbolic
distributed type (see McClelland’s "Parallel Distributed Processing").
Smolensky’s tensor space brings in interesting possibilities when coupled
with n-dimensional space accomodation of quantum mechanical
interpretations of consciousness.
If we focus on the transition p-->p* = what-->how we realize that for p*
symbols to become a ‘mark of the mental’ their ‘content’ must have the
‘property’ of being about something else (in the Brentano sense), i.e., it
must have ‘intentional’ states (e.g., desires, beliefs, hopes, etc.). One
may ask, how does arranging the symbols into propositional statements
animate the symbols with linguistically derived intentions, as in a
computer? The program representations may have content-laden states but no
independent intentionality. Why not reverse the causality vector and
posit that an intrinsic, inherited, original intentionality ‘in
potency’ may realize that semantic potential via the acquired
natural language tool and / or in response to appropriate environmental
triggers, as we propose? Fodor’s Psychosemantics is a variation of the
‘bps’ internalist approach when it holds that the interactive causal
connections of the representation with the external environmental reality
it stands for provides a sort of derived ‘meaning’ that fuels the
represented symbols to influence the behavior of the rest of the system!
This clever explanation is in sharp contrast with that of analytical
philosophers of the same ‘internalist’ persuasion who argue that
intentionality need not be independently present in the physical state of
a given symbolic representation, that it builds its semantic content from
causal connections with other co-existing physical states (nodes) of the
system (program). Both of these positions still imply that any
supercomputer could have meaningful states without being necessary its
being introspectively aware of its own states. These models may explain
sense-phenomenal consciousness (awareness) but never a higher order type
of introspective consciousness. Apparently Dennet, contrary to Searle,
does not think that the introspective consciousness (self-awareness of
intentionality) supersedes in importance the information-bearing,
behavior-driving functionality of derived intentionality. This robotic
animation with computer-derived, other directed intentions is
counterintuitive to say the least. An unconscious patient (still a better
computer than any built!) can not generate intentions simply because it
can not attain self-consciousness, an absolute sine qua non. As Chalmers
suggested, you can substitute every neuron with a silicon chip and the
resulting robot, like the unconscious man, can not have qualia or generate
intentions independently. Searle expressed the same concern with his now
famous thought experiment, the "Chinese Room".
But advocates of functionalism, surviving branch of logical positivism,
adopt a neo-behaviorist stance when defending that a mental state is ‘what
it does’, its functionality being based on its causal efficiency in
producing a measurable result. Thus p = p* = p** where the result p** =
neither a structural or functional isomorph of p, leaving many
intermediate black boxes between the real life intention p and the
observed behavior p**. This myopia of course implies that a simulation = a
duplication if only the result is considered. Pain or pleasure qualia
being, in this interpretation, just mental states known to be experienced
by activation of their corresponding neural centers. Only in theory can we
possibly isolate an independent property that depends exclusively on the
way the underlying system is organized, an example of Chalmer’s principle
of organizational invariance. It has been demonstrated (Siegelman, 1994)
that some massively parallel connectionist distributed networks, as we
would expect to find in the CNS, can not even be simulated in
supercomputers. If some conclude: a. that a super computer is able to use
environmental information creatively, b. that it understands and even have
a conscience, and c. that evolutionary selection is predicated on overt
behavior, then we can safely bet that they will selected by evolution to
succeed humans. Any takers among functionalists? :-)
Many readers would ask, what difference does it make whether the brain
bears the mind or causes the mind state? After all, their argument goes,
the semantic content in representations can only be judged by the measured
effects it is able to produce, it need not be of a denotational character.
The computer does not rely exclusively on its manipulation of
structure-sensitive language symbols, it also connects to the external
world by analog transducers and correlates interactively with hard-wired
chip connections and other aspects of the program. Besides, they continue
to argue, do humans always understand? The truth is that humans have been
largely hard-wired by nature, both internally and externally, to react, to
parse and create associations between linguistic elements and their
denotations, like machines do.
This all may be true in part but no computer has ever been animated like
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella doll and remain so independently!
We may want to fancy splitting hairs with Fodor’s dictum that: "mental
states are ‘relations’ to symbolic representations." and ask further if
one can consider the undeniable physiological correlates characterizing
the experience of a ‘mental state’ (e.g., anger) as a ‘property’ of an
appropriate symbolic representation. The symbols must be able to
instantiate their property content (e.g., anger) or at least derive it
from other measurable properties that can be instantiated by appropriate
manipulation of logical operations. One can code ‘is angry’ any number of
ways and provide examples of its instantiation in sport figures, etc. as
exemplified by measurable correlates, themselves codifiable in any number
of logically quantified relations to other symbol representations (pulse,
heart rate, pressure, etc.). Still the code does not have an independent
life of its own and depends on an interpreter (receiver) for the
instantiation to take effect. This is the easy example, what if the
linguistic predicative expression is ‘sui generis’ and can not be
instantiated, e.g., ‘he is an angel’, or a ‘square circle’, a ‘round
square’ or a ‘virgin’? How do you define the properties of un-instantiables?
Do they exist empirically or
inside any space-time dimension, can they be exemplified, are they
necessary or contingent, can they be individuated? We must remember from
previous discussions that ‘being’ is very different from ‘existing’. Can a
symbolic representation catch all of these nuances? Can they instantiate
these properties minimally, with or without their affective component or
qualia? If you are a neo-behaviorist or a scientist all you may care about
is that, no matter how different their intrinsic properties, two or more
properties are the same if they cause the same nomological or functional
effect in their instances. This way a brachial plexus chemical block by
injection is identical to cutting the same nerves connection to the arm
you are trying to anesthesize!! Not all objects can have exemplifiable
properties accurately constituted (encoded) as specified by axioms, like
circles or squares where identities can be established as long as the
abstract specifications in the geometry theory are met. We say that
properties that necessarily have the same encoding extensions are
identical, but properties that necessarily have the same
exemplification extensions may be distinct, like the
exemplification of the property of being ‘round’ in different objects,
e.g., round squares = round circles. Empirical properties (low order
logic) are handled differently from the ‘many placed’ (high order logic)
'properties' of metaphysical entities. As long as there may be a
demonstrable causal effect empirical properties may be assigned higher
order status.
The antecedent arguments clear the way for a better understanding that the
‘relation’ between an object and its symbol representation may be properly
considered as a property itself. Relations have orders or levels also,
from the two place relation (e.g., <Republicans believe the President> or
<the contender is taller than the incumbent>) to the ‘many argument
places’ relationship that arguably give credence to symbolic
representations of meanings in a computer program where the symbols are
also related to other programs, hard-wired chips, transducers, sensors,
monitors, etc. When the relation is to non-instantiable properties,
including math constructs, metaphysical logic conclusions, etc., then the
resulting conclusion or model will depreciate in credibility even when it
may describe the truthful reality account. The same thing holds for
propositions when considered as limiting cases of properties.
Instantiations may not qualify as properties because they become their
object, i.e., there are no intermediaries and they are no longer related
causally. The Transubstantiation religious ritual instantiates the body of
Christ in the ‘Host’ in a symbolic, non-empirical way, which truth becomes
validated in those with that belief (faith).
This preceding elaboration brings us finally to the reason why our ‘bps’
model position that an inherited proto-semantics that precedes formal
syntax structure in the generation of language and thought is more tenable
than the classical causation view that reverses the vector of causation
syntax--> semantics. ‘Meanings’ (‘that p’, e.g, beliefs) should be
considered in all cases as complex predicates in the propositional
attitude equation <Sa that p>. A syntactic structure of a complex
predicate is not meant to exhibit the internal structure nuances of a
complex property; but rather to evidence in a general way that property's
position in the logical network of properties. An eminently structured
specification like linguistic syntax should aim at becoming a natural
device for singling out a specific member among a structured realm of
possible entities, by identifying it by its place (its logical location)
in that domain. The ‘bps’ model makes it possible for language syntax to
become that kind of device when nourished and fashioned by a genetic
memory input and early environmental influences within the context of an
adopted natural language. It is our belief that, unduly influenced by the
successful use of complex hyperstructured predicates and structured
metaphores to denote empirical, structured specifications (measurable
properties) in Artificial Intelligence (AI), have driven some of the best
analytical minds into the naïve faith belief that ALL properties are
literally structured. We have provided examples to illustrate how even the
definition of what a property is, is put into question! For all we know,
the complex mental ‘properties’ themselves may not even have a tangible
structure to get hold off and translate into symbols.
Dr. Angell O. de la
Sierra, Esq.
Deltona, Florida Winter 2003
Hope you enjoyed it!

Additional
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AESTHETICS,
CHOREOGRAPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
(Artwork makes the fleeting
immanent join hands with the eternal transcendental)

Introduction.
A
brand new 21st. century has, all of a sudden, dawned upon us. When we
hopefully look back at the ledger in contemplation of our harvest for the
past millennium we feel deceived that we put all our stock in the
scientific methodology account, that we acted in utter disregard for
centuries of accumulated experience regarding the limitations of
rationality in solving the essential problems of existence. How can any
objective thinker ignore the self-evident fact that non-rational forces
lurk at the foundation of all creativity and of reality itself? The past
20th. century has been mired by the blinding spotlight of the
pre-Socratic neo-Apollonian forces of logical order, as exemplified by
the mind-boggling technological advances witnessed. Meanwhile,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the existentialist warning caveats are
faintly heard as a whisper coming from the far away desert of ‘oblivia’.
But, almost three years into the new millennium, it is becoming
increasingly evident that logic has turned the tables on man! The quest
for knowledge, that noble human endeavor, is becoming justified only in
so far as it serves the interests of that very life that made it
possible, first things first! We certainly need not gyrate 180 degrees
and turn our backs to the panoply of accumulated logical representations
of existential reality, be they the linguistic, anthropocentric metaphors
/ metonyms of our models, systems or other ‘universal constants’. All we
have to do is to always keep in mind two things: that their truth value
is contingent upon the reliability and constancy of their source of
origin and the general, higher life purpose they must serve to justify
their presence. Once we apprehend, through deep introspection, and ponder
about the hierarchical positions of life itself vis a vis the fruits of
its living activity is that we can focus on the arbitrariness of human
experience. Our ‘truths’ ultimately result in convenient self-serving
conventions / strategies driven by an unconscious urge for biological-psychic-social
(bps) survival in our environmental niche. Repose, security and
consistency are optimized to guarantee perpetuation of the human species
by reproductive activity as the ultimate principle of the universe.
Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and many others keep reminding us, across
centuries of experience, that bps activity is “..a mindless, aimless,
non-rational urge at the foundation of all of our instinctual drives, and
at the foundational being of everything there is..” in the physical world
we are integral part of.
We need not and we know not, what
guides human activity in its compulsive and inevitable search of
strategies for its own perpetuation but we suspect the answer is hidden,
perhaps irretrievably so, inside his ‘irrational’, non-logical world. We
know that the continuation of universal life (see Insensible Life,
Telicom 1999) beyond conception, whether comfortably floating inside the
womb or as a newborn on your nursing mother’s lap, is all about
multimodal sensations all about you. From then on the ascent of man is
predicated on how successfully the genetic baggage he brings along copes
with the changing dynamics of the ecological niche he did not choose to
survive on. It all starts with an original encounter with that apparent
labyrinth of sense phenomena in the external physical world of objects,
their attributes and relational events. We have described how, with the
help of his inherited endowment (amygdaloid complex), he starts –early
on- to learn about his future cultural abode as translated by nursing
mother’s baby talk and facial expressions. Soon thereafter his
proto-linguistic organ (temporal cortex, amygdale, hippocampus,
prefrontal cortex) become readied to transform the protective reflex life
into a more sophisticated interactivity with the external chaotic world
of sensations out there, beyond mother’s lap. Sense receptors become
selective, only that portion of reality with survival value need
accessing the brain. Then a small fraction of that reality converges into
our sense receptors that transform the university of chaotic sensations
first into monadic action potentials which are then funneled into the
rest of the brain to be transformed, as time goes on, into richer quality
perceptions which finally all emerge as part of a concept adapted to the
circumstantial event of pertinence. The latter will thereafter guide the
execution of adaptive survival strategies, a linguistic narrative or a
memory thereof, not necessarily in that order. We have described these
events in previous writings. Biological survival is getting a good
footing on life which guarantees later on a viable reproductive transfer
to succeeding generations. Is that all there is to human life? Except for
the concept formation activity and its expression as a narrative language
of communication, how is life different from that of other subhuman
species?
What we really do not know is what
happens with that portion of the outer world intuition (objective
physical reality) that either the sense receptors excluded or, if not,
could not find its way into a logical sequential narrative or a sequence
of adaptive motor response activity? What happened to that portion not
processed by the logical, ‘talking brain’ Turing machine? Is it there in
the brain?, if so, how do we know it? Is that all there is to existence,
the eternal changing of hats from homo-sapiens to homo faber? How does
artwork fit into that dyadic view of existence?
Arguments.
The
transition sensation (object) à perception à concept we just described is by and large a
unidirectional vector describing ‘a grosso modo’ how we form (and store)
mental ideas (ideal objects) about physical objects in the environment in
their absence. We have described how may sense-phenomenal consciousness
work as a bio-psycho-sociological (bps) survival strategy (http://ydelasie.0catch.com/SelfConsciousness.htm
), and more recently, how free will may, when guided by the ‘talking brain’,
may also become just another more sophisticated survival strategy (http://ydelasie.0catch.com/id7.html
). This has been the ‘easy’ part in the development of the bps model
because, in principle, their fundamental tenets can be arguably reduced
eventually to sentential or symbolic language and translated into a
complex artificial intelligence computer program sans qualia. What is not
so easy is to understand, least to explain!, is the role and bps importance
–if any- of the non-logical, non-linear, irrational part of the brain,
the one we will attribute with the generation of aesthetic activity. We
believe that the aesthetic object provides an insight into the workings
of that irrational aspect of existence. Art expression, in its many
manifestations as the traditional fine arts of music, architecture,
sculpture, painting or poetry, becomes amenable to our analysis if we
premise its justification as the result of an inevitable human urge to
communicate universals, that which gets lost in the day to day, crisis to
crisis logical business of adaptive survival in the ecological niche. Is
art practical, common, does it have a bps survival value? If not, what is
it then good for, pleasurable delight only? We don’t know and wish to
learn more about this unique human activity.
We suspect the aesthetic object is
intimately related to the important human subject à physical object reciprocal temporal relation, now
and always. This intuition may
result difficult to assimilate for a physicalist frame of mind whose
parishioners may not have the required objectivity to see through and
rise above the ordinary world of objects in the space-time domain. It is
never easy to wear a scientific hat and simultaneously state that there
is no reason in the world why existential reality should be exclusively
translated into scientific, mechanical and causal terminology. Is that
all there is to life? If that is the conclusion of the reader, he should
stop here and continue reading elsewhere with his hard-science horse
blinders because the worst blind wishes not to see! For there is yet
another aspect about the truth of existence not present in the outer
spatio-temporal domain construct and which requires for its efficient
apprehension the kind of epistemological sensitivity to establish a
communion with aesthetic, analogical, expressive and metaphorical
entities for their proper discernment.
Any
good objective observer of human life in the metropolis is justifiably
mesmerized by the recent advances in the biomedical and quantum
mechanical fields of research endeavor. Not as obvious to the researcher
is the discernment of a bps pattern seen as an inevitable human social
behavior across history, one that finds man trying to conquer the secrets
of his physical environment à of his own internal environment à the resources of other humans. According to
philosopher Adorno, such consistent historical behavior is patognomonic
of an irrational fear of the unknown as expressed in his assertion:
“Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized". We may know what we
all carry in the genetic baggage of conception but we don’t know in what
airport we are going to land at birth. "Humans believe themselves
free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown.”, he continued.
There are two ways to de-mythologize the content of our empirical,
physical world of sensations, the logical approach of scientific
methodology that brings order according to the resolution of our sense
organs our combinatorial brain capacities to categorize and sort out the
contents of our brain data-base; the other way reckons with the other
world of sensations outside and their inside equivalents in our heads,
those that remain un-expressed by the talking, logical brain processor? Is
it because of their lack of survival adaptive value? Is bps survival all that is important
to the human species? What about spiritual survival? What is that?, the
materialist would undoubtedly choreograph! The answer is an easy one,
unless you are in denial about your extra-physical experiences, if you
had none.., you don’t know what you are missing!
Unfortunately
for those lacking an open mind, not many people inside our global economy
are able to enjoy the state of mind tranquility that propitiates the
aesthetic perception in its full dimension, either because of the
syndrome of cultural attention deficit disorder or that primitive urge
for the vicarious enjoyment of the ubiquitous virtual violence in TV. In
reality, it takes more abstract intellectual prowess to attain and
maintain a state of pure aesthetic perception (not measurable in IQ
tests!) to access and transform the universality of concepts into
expressible art form. The artist processing sequence is the reverse
vector of subject à object relation found in the
viewer. The artist transforms the spatio-temporal domain of the empirical
world into the mind’s ideal object(s) domain guiding the execution of the
motor transduction that creates the artwork object.
For those bored physicalists that
still remain reading this far, it is fitting to underline the fact that,
in our opinion, the work of artist, while attempting to express an
universal predicate quale (love, beauty, pain, etc.) embodied in his
chosen object(s) his artwork also represents simultaneously an embodiment
of the quintessence of his emotional life. We try real hard as scientists
to describe and explain phenomenal consciousness (qualia), the artist
does the next best, for those able to translate the message. The artistic
inspiration describes a process by which the bps existential content
undergoes a depuration, a de-individualization until what remains is no
longer the artistic narrative of Joe Blow’s individual pathos, but that
of the universality of men, an aesthetic phenomenal consciousness akin to
the high order metaphysical abstraction attained by cosmologists during
their contemplation of infinite progressions.
The antecedent expresses the
content of the most successful artistic expression, the pure form, the
universal of all times in the context of real time, that belonging to the
existential circumstances of the artist. As philosopher Ortega used to
say, “man is both him and his circumstance”.
In the real world of galleries and symphony halls
we can obviously distinguish also what we may call a ‘committed’ art
where content undergoes only a partial purification and form takes second
place to an intellectual content, usually political in nature. This in an
obvious conflict between the Apollonian universal and the Dionysian now
and here, the pre-Socratic logic and modern irrational, emotional mind
sets, as exploited by Hegel and Marx, forcing art, in our opinion, to
lose its autonomy forever. This fact of political history ties aesthetics
to the social component (s) of the bps model in that it provides an
empirical handle (emotions) to penetrate logically into the structure of
‘committed’ art. But, in addition, this historical turn of events brings
serious problems to the classical view of art as a reservoir of universal
truth-value contents. Whose truth, we now ask? We arbitrarily chose to
call it an average truth in a moment in history, a delimited universal of
sorts. In this respect, when comparing the spontaneous creation of a work
of art to the deliberate act of studiously creating a mathematical or
physical model, we consider the truth content in artistic expressions as
more reliable accounts of cultural anthropology and history than the
corresponding textual scientific literature accounts, however
dialectical, discursive, graphical, acoustical or non-propositional the
former may tend to be. The real challenge to the art critic or historian
is never an easy one, he must be able to link the universality of the
object (artwork) represented to the transient flux dynamics of the socio-historical
context in which the artwork finds itself. Form and content have their
independent dialectics. Bps equilibrium is the only invariant in this
existential scenario. The net result will always be that aesthetics is
out of phase with the ongoing social conventions yet, paradoxically, its
most reliable hallmark and thus its magnetic appeal to the fine human
intellect, like telling us “the more things change, the more they stay
the same”. The eternal object and the transitory subject joining hands in
one instant in time, always contrasting the existential “is” with the
utopic “should be” and creating the illusion they can ever coincide. The
essence of life and consciousness is change; the challenge of the artist
is to identify the form the universal entity of interest must assume to
harmonize with the ongoing position of the existential kaleidoscope. A compromise way of finding an optimal
relationship of the given genetic past at birth (b) with the social future
(s) in the present psychic existence (p). The studious must not lose
sight of the fact that artwork is epistemology’s representational way of
providing transitory meaning to
the adaptive efforts universals (joy, sorrow, anger, frustration, etc.)
display in expressing their content during various stages of history,
ranging in form from the sketches inside primeval caverns to Andy
Warhol’s decorated boxes in the middle of contemporary New York City. Art
is choreographed consciousness! In a very special way, art is a metaphor
expressing man’s inexorable search for his identity, origins and destiny,
i.e., his essence in the context of his existence as Heidegger
would put it (see also http://ydelasie.0catch.com/New%20SelfConsciousness.index.htm ).
To the extent that aesthetics
transcend the sensory experience to become amalgamated with the social
context in which it presently exists, it becomes part and parcel of the
Kantian transcendental aesthetics, a way of correlating the experience
into the totality of knowledge of the artist initially and the viewer at
the museum later on. As we outlined elsewhere (Concatenation of Different
Levels of Cognitive Processing, Telicom 2002), the objects, their
attributes and their dynamic interactions in the contextual background,
as an integrated sum of sensations get coordinated from an external 4-d
manifold into a perceptual brain analog isomorph. In a subsequent stage
the percept evolves into a concept according to its match with other
categories of thought. To differentiate this parallel, non-linear,
non-propositional processing from the classical sequential Turing
processing in the ‘talking brain’ module we’d like to call it
‘transcendental logic’. How this analog representation at the
occipito-parietal cortex (V1 to V5) becomes accessed by other relevant
consumer systems, e.g., limbic, amygdaloidal, hippocampal &
prefrontal during the formation of the mental image is unknown and it is
not clear at present whether it precedes and guides the elaboration of
the adaptive motor response (basal ganglia, cerebellum, premotor, area 4)
or is contemporaneous with the motor activity. Same tandem processing can
be described for any of the sense modality sensations, whether taste,
odor, sound, kinesthesia, temperature gradient or even a code-phenomenal
memory initiating the transition percept à concept inside the brain. This way the various
elements of the blooming apple tree in the yard get grouped and
integrated to the wet-ware apple tree analog isomorph inside the brain
for identification purposes before new codelettes are added as the
process advances into the form of a perception as we explained before.
(Phenomenal Consciousness as a Survival Strategy, Telicom 2003). This
description constitutes the transition phenomenology à epistemology, what makes knowledge to happen. The
net result is that nature’s chaos of sensations become transformed into a
concept, ready to be articulated as a poem, a painting, a symphony or a
performance, all with a thrust of intentionality, semantic content,
purpose and action. It is now the role of the viewer at the museum to
differentiate this marvel of unit integration creation presented to his
senses. For the viewer artwork intuition is now subject to a reverse
processing, one of association by contiguity in 4-d space-time,
similarity, recency, frequency, intensity and above all, by the meaning
the scene has as it individuates into the viewer. We believe that the
artist unconsciously selects, from a universe of sense modalities present
in the external object, those best suited to become integrated into the
concept he has in mind to express. Out of a myriad of colors, shapes,
animations, etc., only those fitting the mind mold get access to the
perceptual or conceptual stage probably by selective inhibition of
attention, as mediated by reticular activating system (ras).
Surprisingly, the brain determines the content of physical reality! For
the artist the external world intuition ends with the construction of the
concept to be expressed; for the artwork viewer the process is reversed,
a deconstruction. When both artist and viewer share the same culture,
integration = differentiation. For viewers of dissimilar cultural
backgrounds the challenge of the author is to preserve the universal
content of the artwork unmasked by the variant elements of context, the
form may change but not the its universal semantics.
At this point it is important to
realize how the logical brain imposes a-priori modes of perception to
organize and provide meaning to sensations coming in from sense
receptors. Reality is in the brain, not the scenery. Our brain activity
has invented the concept of dimensionality to be able to catalogue all
modes of sensations; they will now exist in time (a measure of the
object’s change in attributes) or
in a volumetric space (location). Therefore we do not find an explicit
demonstration of anything exceeding 4-d space; hyperspace remains a concept
to be inferred as Kaluza-Klein work demonstrates. This way the brain
controls the outer world content, as it molds the sensations originating
therefrom into the universality of space-time structure. We have
discussed in previous publications how a ‘proto-linguistic organ’ (plo)
may incorporate audio-visual and other modality codelettes of
communication into an integrated algorithm amenable to generate a
concept, a thought or a memory readily accessible from a language
consumer system. Unfortunately we have not developed the equivalent of a
generative grammar to guide the transition sensation à perception à concept (art). This order and
unity is neither to be found in the external object or its functional
states, it is the human mind and intellect that imposes order and unity,
something John Locke could not apprehend when he wrongly sentenced:
“There is nothing in the intellect except what was first in the senses.”
The modern equivalent would be to explain qualia exclusively on the basis
of neurotransmitter activity, as suggested by recent observations on
drug-induced hallucinatory states. It has even been suggested the
co-existence of two qualitatively different conscious states from EEG
data (Fred Travis, “Beyond Ordinary Consciousness”). We would be blind
and deaf to audio-visual sensations unless there is in place beforehand a
concept (algorithm) to assign them a semantic content. Things in nature
cause the generation of conceptual thoughts and the latter give meaning to the
former. Science and metaphysics are thereby inseparable, something the
staunch physicalist wishes not to admit, a myopia by adoption! The
natural world of our experience is a mind manufactured article! We have a
tendency to blame the poor resolution of our sense receptors for not being
able to capture the totality of attributes of the ‘thing in itself’, the
Kantian ‘noumena’. The artist’s mind compensates by making a
representation in the form of a ‘meta noumena’ essence by preserving the
universality negated to ordinary sense experience or to the logic mind
processors, creating in the process a special transcendental dialectic.
Professionals of the hard sciences tend to look
down upon artists, especially in HiQ societies. Perhaps they do not
realize that, as scientists, they can never work hands on, directly, with
the invisible, inaudible ‘things’ their rigged instrument transducers
digitally or analogically represent. Their claim to have subdued and
tamed nature by ‘their direct’ measurement and analysis is unwarranted.
All too frequent, when they try to extend their grasp beyond the
appearance of things, they free-fall in a vacuum of antinomies, as when
trying to explain infinite regressions or progressions, the ontology of
consciousness or first causes. The artist does not have such problems,
for time and space do not exist out there in the natural world of his
intuitions except as an unconsciously imposed structure by his brain to
experience and extract the semantic value therein hidden. The
‘meta-noumenal’ essence is nothing less than the existential ontology of
the object, another way of expressing its circumstantial semantic
content, now and later on, a mind’s view of ‘objective’ reality.
When we try to apply the same analysis to
theological intuitions or alleged revelations claimed by people of faith
we come to the interesting conclusion that the absolute truth of
theology, just like that of the constitution of matter in the hard
sciences, can not ever be demonstrated by theoretical logic and
paralogisms appear as frequent as antinomies when we stubbornly try. It
could well be that, just like our minds imposes a logical structure on
objective reality -as such or as represented in memory- we can make sense
of its presence by linguistic sequential or artistic non-linear , non-propositional
processing exclusively. When we filter the content of non-objective
reality, as experienced in a revelation, there is no alternate known way
of processing other than a logically mediated narrative or artwork.
Another possibility is that, like the ‘noumena’ of the physical
object, the ontology of
theological entities are not accessible to available brain logic filters
for processing, we have not even identified the sense or non-sense
receptor that initiates the process! A reasonable compromise might be to
conclude that religion may rest safer on the foundations of the practical
reason of the moral sense than the logic of the theoretical reason.
Conclusions.
Art
has been equated with civilization’s storehouse of felt values. It is not
an exaggeration to say that, of all human endeavors, art resists best the
passage of time. Not a big surprise either because some elements of the
human experience are invariant regardless of how cleverly its form may
seem to change when finding its expression in the context of concomitant
historical existence. When one takes a brief look at the salient moments
of recorded western history, whether in Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages,
Renaissance, Enlightenment, Baroque, Classics, Romantics or post
Modernists, there is one common denominator, man’s psychic world of
reality as manifested in his observable and recorded behavior. Man has
always felt desires (appetites, impulses, instincts), expressed emotions
(ambition, spirit, courage) and cultivate knowledge (thought, intellect,
reason) all by a combination of uncontrollable strategies that make him
acquisitive, jealous, erotic or combative, as skillfully exploited in the
narrative gems of Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante, among others. Man’s
psychic like is the invariant, the universal as it finds a voice in an
ever changing Heraclitean scenario of history. It would seem as if his
sense of enjoyment of his inalienable right to be free tempers and
determines the content of the psychic expression. Thus we can contrast,
e.g., Platonic art exalting order, control at the expense of liberty, the
very soul of art. Yet Plato is a dreamer with a goodly endowment of
fervor, passion and ‘push genes’, the cultural revolutionary that gave
birth to The Republic. Aristotle enjoyed the order that Plato, the
Athenian hot blood, had to work for, and his Macedonian psychic calm gave
him more leisure to ponder on aesthetics to realize it springs from a
natural impulse and craving for an emotional expression of what the
external social restraints and circumstances mean to man internally. But
always stressing that those feelings, while providing the harmonies and
sequences (form), was not enough, for it needed the intellect to guide
the structure and development, the backbone unity of the finished work.
Thus art is a sublimation of social energies of restraint, a form of
purification by an intellectually guided catharsis. Yet we do not see yet
in Aristoteles the clashes of
inner conflicts and personalities we see in the tragedies when the
socio-political scenery was rapidly changing.
It is
of historical interest that France and England, both willing heirs of the
Greek tradition produced pragmatism in England (Bacon, Hume, Locke,
Berkeley) and, in France, a period
of Enlightenment lead by no other than the raucous 18th. century
Voltaire, “a creature of air and flame!, the most excitable man that ever
lived! The phlegmatic Hume would say of artwork: “If reason is against
man, he will turn against reason.” Voltaire’s version of same would be:
“Dialectic is the art of proving anything and believing nothing.”
Rousseau would preach in exaltation of instinct and feeling above
intellect and reason, “Education makes man clever, not good.” (La
Nouvelle Heloise). These two examples show same cultural background inheritance
as perceived by the Gallic and Anglo-Saxon perspective.
Finally
we will mention briefly one of the most prolific historical hiatuses in
art expression, the relatively short Romantic period, and how it was
impacted by the Germanic perspective by contrast. In plain 19th. century
we seem to have returned to late Greece with Nietzsche and his disdain
for the rational, pre-Socratic influence in art. (Thus Spake
Zarathustra). Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s mentor toed the same line. One
could fill volumes talking about this period whose unquestionable leader
was France who had the power and intellectual sensibilities to execute
the virtual animation of the image the motionless effort of the Germans
had perfectly conceived in their minds earlier.
In this author’s opinion, the
prevailing western intellectual and artistic trend during the new 21st.
century will have its roots in the emerging European Union while deeply
influenced by Asian philosophies percolating in through the smaller
Indo-European member republics. It all started before with Kant of
Scottish and German descent who nicely balances the intellectual with the
non-rational forces. His critique of pure and practical reason
masterpieces have inspired this bps model; his life theme summarized his
vision of all of reality which we willingly incorporate by adoption; he
was committed to save religion from reason and the latter from
skepticism.
If architecture is, as Goethe
conceived it, “frozen music” ,
plastic arts symmetry is static rhythm, dance is an animated eulogy to
freedom, color is the beauty encasement of form, then aesthetics, in
general, is the choreography of a liberated consciousness.
Dr.
Angell O. de la Sierra
Deltona Lakes, Florida Spring 2003
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