vol 2: Synopsis
part I: Motivations and possibilities
page 7: Mind
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Mind
Each of us experiences our own divinity. Of all things, death is most certain, and its inverse, birth. No element of the universe is guaranteed survival. Our best strategy is to adapt to changing circumstances. Compared to the rate of change around us, our bodies are relatively fixed. It is through adaptability of mind that the human species has dominated Earth. Mind as we understand it is not confined to us, or even to animals. We see intelligent mental function at every level of complexity and specialization from particle to divinity.
Aristotle, in his discussion of mind, wrote the famous passage comparing mind to an unwritten page: 'What the mind thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet which bears no actual writing'. Aristotle, On the Soul 429b32 Mind is an ability to become other, to step outside oneself.
Mind is the source of consciousness, the ability to stand outside myself and watch myself thinking. The ability to become other is unlimited: I can watch myself watching myself thinking, and so on.
I am aware of my own thoughts and feelings and how they move me to act. I attribute the same awareness to other people. So I think things like 'I wonder what she thinks I'm thinking'. My mind enables me to picture situations in my life and work out ways to deal with them.
Survival requires that I collect resources and avoid dangers. Most of us spend most of our lives thinking about what to do. We are motivated by the thought that careful though will help us to devise a profitable outcomes and avoid pitfalls. The survival value of mind is that it can explore possible lines of action much more cheaply than exploration by action.
Mind lies between experience and action. It is the central element in the control loop: look, think, act. It is mind which processes the data obtained by looking to devise the strategy embodied in action. I sense my environment and act upon it. My environment, in return, senses me and acts upon me, so it is natural to assume that it too has a mind.
Mind is particularly useful when things go wrong. The modelling power of mind enables us to overcome error. If we look at the world as a network of communications, mind serves as a creator of 'headroom'. Shannon's theory of communication tells us that we can communicate without error over noisy (error prone) channels if we have enough headroom, that is spare entropy. Shannon
Mind does the encoding and decoding that implements Shannon's ideas, enabling us to share meaning. Shared meaning enables shared work and shared fitness. The process by which mind encodes and decodes messages is often called insight. Lonergan Understanding what a message means requires 'intellectual' insight and understanding how to express one's thoughts requires 'practical' insight.
The transfinite model of a communication network shows us how we can extrapolate from our own experiences of communication up to the mind of god and down to the minds of atoms.
The mind of god comprehends all possibilities. Although each of us sees but a tiny fraction of god, there is no restriction on which fraction. Bit by bit, we can imagine and share our visions of god.
Traditionally, god's manifestation to us is called revelation. As the next page reveals, revelation in natural religion comes not from ancient books, but from every experience of every human life.
Further reading
Books
| Aquinas, Thomas, and Kenelm Foster, Sylvester Humphries (translators), Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, Dumb Ox Books 1959 A translation of William of Moerbeke's latin text of Aristotle's On the Soul (a brilliant little treatise on life written 2300 years ago) together with a latin commentary by the Angelic Doctor Thomas Aquinas. Here is an ancient foundation for the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul. Amazon back |
| Aristotle, and (translated by W S Hett), On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, Harvard University Press (USA) ; William Heinemann Ltd (UK) 1975 Introduction: 'This collection of treatises belongs to subjects on the borderline between bodily and mental. Aristotle was the son of a doctor and himself a biologist, who believed in experiment and dissection as a means of collecting evidence. Thus his views on the soul are influenced by his physiology. Yet he never falls into the meshes of materialism, and appears quite certainn that the body cannot possibly explain the mind. ...' Amazon back |
| Cummins, Denise Dellarosa, and Colin Allen (editors), The Evolution of Mind, Oxford University Press 1998 Introduction: This book is an interdisciplinary endeavour, a collection of essays by ethologists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers united in the common goal of explaining cognition. ... the chief challenge is to make evolutionary psychology into an experimental science. Several of the chapters in this volume describe experimental techniues and results consistent with this aim; our hope and intention is that they lead by example in the development of evolutionary psychology from the realm of speculation to that of established research program' Amazon back |
| Damasio, Antonio R, The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , Harcourt Brace 1999 Jacket: 'In a radical departure from current views on consciousness, Damasio contends that explaining how we make mental images or attend to those images will not suffice to elucidate the mystery. A satisfactory hypothesis for the making of consciousness must explain how the sense of self comes to mind. Damasio suggests that the sense of self doe snot depend on memory or on reasoning or even less on language. [it] depends, he argues, on the brain's ability to protray the living organism in the act of relating to an object. That ability, in turn, is a consequence of the brain's involvement in the process of regulating life. The sense of self began as yet another device aimed an ensuring survival.' Amazon back |
| Dehaene, Stanislaus, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Oxford University Press 1997 Jacket: 'In recent years, many excviting scientific discoveries have begun to unravel how the human brain performs mathematical calculations. ... Evolution has endowed each of us with an innate ability for arithmetic, an intuition of numerical quantitites which, combined with our uniquely hman ability for language, stands at the core of our ability to create machematics. In The Number Sence SD offers the first comprehensive and accessible synthesis of this new field of research and its wide ranging educational and philosophical implications.' Amazon back |
| Fodor, Jerry A, The Modularity of Mind , MIT Press 1983 Jacket: 'This monograph synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory. Fopdor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organisation underlying biologically coherent behaviours. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of facultu psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates fetures not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artifical intelligence.' Prof. Alvin Liberman, Yale University, Amazon back |
| Hofstadter, Douglas R, and Daniel C Dennett, The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul, Bantam 1985 Jacket: 'In this unique, mind-jolting book, DH, the author of Gädel, Escher, Bach, the intellectual best seller that won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize, and Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of the widely acclaimed Brainstorms, explore the meaning of self and consciousness through the perspectives of literature, artificial intelligence, psychology and much more. ... ' Amazon back |
| Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Haughton Mifflin 1990 Jacket: 'At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing.' Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' Amazon back |
| Styron, William, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, Picador/Jonathan Cape 1992 'To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression ... if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy ... men and women who have recovered from the disease - and they are countless - bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.' Amazon back |
Papers
| Calder, Alan, "Constructive Mathematics", Scientific American, 241, 4, October 1979, page 134-143. 'This approach is based on the belief that mathematics can have real meaning only if its concepts can be constructed by the human mind, an issue that has divided mathematicians for over a century.'. back |
| Narashima, Roddam, "Essay Concepts: Divide, conquer and unify", Nature, 432, 7019, 16 December 2004, page 807. 'Werner Heisenberg said that Prandtl had "the ability to see the solution of equations without going through the calculations". Prandtl demurred, "No, I strive to form in my mind a thorough picture ... the equations come only later when I believe I have understood ... [and are] good means of proving my conclusions in a way that others can accept." His papers have a simplicity and directness born of supreme self-confidence. They do not trumpet their success or criticize others, but just get on with solving the central problems using all the tools available - observation (plenty of it), mathematics, calculation and modelling. Prandtl's methodological eclecticism set the style of fluid dynamics reseach in the twentieth century. No wonder G. I. Taylor called him 'our chief' and helped nominate Prandtl for the Nobel prize he never won.'. back |
Links
| Mind (National Association for Mental Health) 'Mind is the leading mental health charity in England and Wales. We work to create a better life for everyone with experience of mental distress by: advancing the views, needs and ambitions of people wityh mental health problems; challenging discrimination and promoting inclusion; ... In all our work we promote our values: autonomy, equality, knowledge, participation and respect.' back |
| David Chalmers Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: An Annotated Bibliography 'This is a bibliography of recent work in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of artificial intelligence, and on consciousness in the sciences. It consists of 5702 entries, and is divided into six parts, each of which is further divided by topic and subtopic.' back |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab 'The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has been an active entity at MIT in one form or another since at least 1959. Our goal is to understand the nature of intelligence and to engineer systems that exhibit intelligence. ... Our intellectual goal is to understand how the human mind works. We believe that vision, robotics, and language are the keys to understanding intelligence, and as such our laboratory is much more heavily biased in these directions than many other Artificial Intelligence laboratories.' back |
| Mind Association OUP Journals - Mind 'Mind has long been a leading journal in philosophy. For well over 100 years it has presented the best of cutting edge thought from epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mind. Mind continues its tradition of excellence today.' back |
| Queendom.com Queendom 'Queendom is an internet magazine with a difference: We provide an interactive avenue for self-exploration with a healthy dose of fun...and thus the motto serious entertainment. We develop our own professional quality interactive tests, giving readers the opportunity to look into their own personality, relationships, intelligence and health. But we don't stop there. We offer advice, community, surveys and trivia quizzes on every subject imaginable - all ways to learn and explore what it means to be human. ... ' back |
| Ulrich H Gerlach Linear Mathematics in Infinite Dimentions: Signals Boundary Value Problems and Special Functions 'Mathematics is the science of measurement, of establishing quantitative relationships between the properties of entities. ... The effectiveness and the power of mathematics (and more generally of logic) in this regard arises from the most basic fact of nature: to be is to be something ... Stated negatively: a thing cannot have and lack a property at the same time, or: in nature contradictions do not exist, a fact already identified by the father of logic some twenty-four centuries ago. Mathematics is based on this fact, and on the existence of a consciousness ... capable of identifying it. Thus mathematics is neither intrinsic to nature (reality), apart from any relation to man's mind, nor is it based on a subjective creation of a man's consciousness detached from reality. Instead, mathematics furnishes us with a quantitative link that connects reality to our consciousness. Mathematics allows our consciousness to grasp, in numerical terms, the microcosmic world of subatomic particles, the macrocosmic world of the universe and everything in between.' back |
| Washington University Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind 'This dictionary is intended as a free resource for all those interested in the philosophy of mind.' back |
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