Waldemar,
  Thanks for your note. The kinds of issues being discussed here on the nature of personhood and the like are exactly the kinds of issues I am interested in tackling in my current book, The Problem of Psychology and Its Solution. The argument is that psychology has been missing a clear metaphysical map to define behavior, mind and (self-reflective) consciousness.

Waldemar writes:
A uniform, concise, coherent, and consilient lexicon would be an immense step forward! I am interested in your comment about the dimensions of behavioral complexity. If you would, please, reveal and define more about the nature and identity of these four dimensions - or more, if there are such. Is there a blog on this?

My current book highlights that psychology, has, since its inception, faced a "crisis" in that it has never defined its subject matter. Perceptual consciousness, the unconscious, mental life and adaptation, behavior and human behavior are all concepts that have been tried, but failed. The ToK suggests another approach. It starts with a map of behavior, which can be translated into the Periodic Table of Behavior<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201706/periodic-table-behavior-psychology>. The PTB makes a point that has completely eluded psychologists, and that is that there are different kinds of behaviors in nature. Behaviors of objects are different from behaviors of organisms which are different from the behavior of animals which are different from the behavior of persons. In addition to the blog on the Periodic Table of Behavior, here are two supplementary blogs on psychology's confusion about the meaning of both behavior<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201504/understanding-behavior-the-tok-system> and cognitive<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201703/is-what-is-wrong-the-core-psychology>. So, one of the key things we should be doing from a ToK/PTB perspective is to be clear if we are talking about physical/material behaviors, biophysiological behaviors, neuropsychological behaviors or socio-linguistic behaviors. Once we can define behavior via the ToK, we can then define Mind as the third dimension of behavioral complexity, the set of mental behaviors. And we can define the mind as the information instantiated within and processed by the nervous system.

Notice I have not said anything here (yet) about consciousness. Attached is a snipped from my current book that describes the mind and mental behavior of a praying mantis. In the lexicon of UTUA psychology, the praying mantis clearly exhibits mental behavior and has a mind (a brain that processes information). But the mantis likely has no inner experience. That is, it is basically like a robot or a philosophical zombie<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie>. We can use the praying mantis to say that it is functionally aware and responsive. It clearly functionally recognizes what is itself and what is not itself and "sees" prey and predators and acts accordingly. But it (probably/maybe?) lacks an inner sense of felt experience. That is, it is behaving akin to how I behave when I sleep. I get "uncomfortable" and move around when I sleep, but there are no lights on inside.

I think the evidence is pretty clear that what first evolved is what I am now calling a "doing mind," that is a procedural action system that operates based on basic control systems, but lacks an inner world or a subjective theater of being. Of course, it might have that. We don't know. But I will say that if it has a second order conscious state, a capacity for self-conscious reflective awareness, then my map of mind and behavior and consciousness is wrong.

Bottom line: Behavior needs to first and foremost be defined broadly, as change in object field relationships. Then we need to define different kinds of behavior. Some kinds of behaviors are mental behaviors. Mental behaviors that first evolved were doing behaviors that lacked any kind of conscious, subjective experience of being.

Waldemar writes:
Regarding self, I see it as a dimensional entity. For instance, I don't perceive bacteria and other unicellular organisms as having a "self" - at least in the sense I describe (briefly) below. For that matter, many (most?) multicellular life forms (such as a tree or barnacle) don't seem to have such a self. But, some do and they dos and such senses of self occur in a gradation - although, the variety of self types  would be hard for me to thoroughly describe. Apparently, great apes, some cetaceans, and even some birds, appear to have a sense of self - the mirror test helps here. Such a sense of self appears perhaps to be quite complex in the primates. And, perhaps most complex in Homo sapiens - or, at least we like to think so - until we know what it's like to be a bat, we can't be sure. These perceptions are heavily influenced by my life experiences and the Unified Theory.

So, now we are getting into self and consciousness. For me, we get into what I am calling the "feeling mind." Attached is a paper on the evolution of conscious feeling. The feeling mind is guided by perceptions and experiences of pleasure and pain. In UTUA, this is the P - M => E formulation.<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201306/perceptions-motives-and-emotions-control-theory-model> This represents the beginning of a "core experiential self" (the Damasio Ted Talk on consciousness touched on this). The experiential self could, perhaps, be defined in terms of a continuity across sleep-wake cycles. Certainly, that is the way I experience it as a human-the lights of my experiential self turn off as I sleep, flicker as I dream and come back on the next morning, and I have a sense of continuity across all of that. In terms of its evolution, there is much debate about when and what kinds of brains are required for subjective experience (AKA sentience). The attached article puts it with the "amniotes" or land vertebrates.

By the time we are at birds and mammals, and especially social mammals, I presume there is a core socio-emotional self system. I see it as an emergent whole brain coordinating phenomena. I see it as regulating and guiding the doing mind and feeding back on it. It grows as brains develop increasing levels of sophistication. The evolution and development of the cortex can give rise to a thinking mind phase, where the animal can effectively simulate actions and consequences (crows are, for example, clearly thinking creatures<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaITA7eBZE>) in the way I mean this term.
Thinking is particularly sophisticated in social mammals (I like Safina's work on this<https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&p=safina+animals+thinking+feeling#id=51&vid=0515ec45e4324a96e7302ea2d2b76241&action=click>). This kind of thought is the precursor to genuine second order self-knowledge. Humans run ahead in this "thinking mind" direction, with their exploding cortex. Then language, which allows them to symbolically tag their mental simulations in the form of nouns (things), verbs (changes over time) and adjectives (differences between things or changes in things). Then, of course, we get the problem of social justification and then the concomitant explosion of systems of justification and their evolution (and then technology and the whole shebang up until this conversation). This is the "talking mind" and it is the game changer that turns primates into persons. The concept of a person is an entity that can justify (and take responsibility for) its actions on a social stage. Human beings are a kind of primate that grow up to be persons.

I think I will end it for now and return to your four questions next week. I am headed to a Sartre conference tomorrow with Steve Quackenbush and will be diving into Sartre's notions about personhood, facts and values, how we justify who we are, and the nature of the human condition.

Does this make sense? My goal here is that if we have a nomothetic analysis of the structure of the human mind and the meaning of behavior, mind and consciousness, then we can place idiographic lives into this structure and see that each individual is an instantiation of these elements.

Best,
Gregg

___________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)

Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.
Check out my Theory of Knowledge blog at Psychology Today at:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/theory-knowledge

Check out my webpage at:
www.gregghenriques.com<http://www.gregghenriques.com>





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