Dear Waldemar,
Thanks much for your analysis of Horgan’s book. I think folks are quite busy these days, so let me say that I am not sure about continuing with this book club/tour. I will share my analysis of the next chapter and we can see where to go from there. That said, let me share some thoughts. You raise some really interesting points here and perhaps this line will take us in a new and productive direction.
The questions you raise, from my perspective, get at the reason I was interested in pursuing this book. My argument is that we (our culture, the academy) lack the necessary “metaphysical system” and related “language game” to talk about these issues. Specifically, we are confused regarding the nature and relationship between mind, behavior, consciousness, the body, and the brain, and we are confused about the relationship between animals and human persons. We also confuse epistemological problems of subjective versus objective with mysteries regarding how the water of the brain (or the meat we can eat) gives rise to the “wine” of experiential consciousness.
The concerns you raise below center on the animal-person problem. In the ToK/UTUA language game, this problem is the problem of self-consciousness, the nature of the “strange loop” of self-referential awareness, and the dimension of intersubjectivity and justification…that is, the way human minds plug into each other via the information highway that is human language.
My point in raising this is that the terrain here is the nature of the fourth dimension of behavioral complexity, Culture/persons/second order and self-reflective consciousness, colored blue here to make this point. This is in contrast to other problems, which involve what is the nature of (mental/animal mind) and what is experiential consciousness? (colored red here to represent the third dimension of complexity). In UTUA, basic psychology is about the Mind-Brain-Behavior relations. Human psychology is about humans becoming primates and the nature of a self-referential self-concept.
Waldemar noted:
Apparently, both Horgan and Jung were initially amazed to discover that they were discrete selves with both a body and a mind.
Which leads me to my first query: how come psychology has so much trouble with the concept of self?
Try to imagine if the concept and the word “self” was suddenly expunged and banned from psychology?
The result would be unintelligible and un-useable.
Of course, for many years, the self was banished from psychology. This is particularly when psychology was behavioral. Indeed, from my perspective, “the self” is probably not very relevant for basic/animal psychology…or at least much can be done without it. In contrast for human persons, self-reference is central. That said, there was no really good theory of the human self, especially why it had the features it does. That is what the JH does for us, IMO. It characterizes the self-consciousness system as the mental organ of justification, the thing that allows humans to become socialized to be then persons that are members of a social group coordinated by large scale systems of justification. Both Horgan and Jung describe the strange awakening process that comes with realizing that “I am me” (or words to that effect).
Waldemar noted:
- What is personhood?
- What is psychopathology?
- What is psychotherapy?
- Why is psychotherapy so difficult and why does it take so long?
These are interesting questions Waldemar. As you know, I have thoughts about them. I wonder though if you might want to share your thoughts about them? I would be curious to hear your analysis of these concepts.
Best,
Gregg
Horgan’s book is intriguing, as is his discovery that he is an individual self complete with a unique mind - it parallels with Jung’s experience.
As I offer the thoughts below, please be reminded that my serious study of psychology and psychiatry began fairly recently.
My training and experience are in classical human medical anatomy and pathophysiology.
Still, that education leaves me comfortable with what my anatomy professor termed “distinguishing between differences."
Apparently, both Horgan and Jung were initially amazed to discover that they were discrete selves with both a body and a mind.
Which leads me to my first query: how come psychology has so much trouble with the concept of self?
Try to imagine if the concept and the word “self” was suddenly expunged and banned from psychology?
The result would be unintelligible and un-useable.
Anyway, other questions come to mind as I ponder Gregg’s work and the mind-body-self matter:
- What is personhood?
- What is psychopathology?
- What is psychotherapy?
- Why is psychotherapy so difficult and why does it take so long?
It seems our mind, or personal operating system is, in large part, constituted of the concepts worldview and self-narrative.
Superficially, these two seem amenable to self-inquiry - ie, they aren’t entirely confined to the unconscious.
But, we don’t appear to be able to do so without a lot of effort, angst, and plumbing into the unconscious, especially if we wish to make alterations.
This leads me to suppose that our personal operating system (a part of the mind?) actually is NOT fully access-able and that much of the operating system lies hidden in some fashion or location.
This hiddenness is exactly what Horgan is attempting to uncover.
And what we get, yet again, is the blind man trying to describe the elephant.
No wonder the poor beast remains unrecognizable based upon the description alone.
I realize psychodynamic psychotherapy is an approach to the content of the unconscious mind.
But psychodynamic psychotherapy is just a collection of techniques designed, created, and practiced to enable some sort of success in searching within and, hopefully, achieving some success in amending the personal operating system.
Such therapy, and others, do not, however, describe the detailed nature, location, and operation of the hiddenness.
Maybe, a lot of that hiddenness storage and utilization occurs in the cerebellum, which has an immense collection of neurons - which seems an awful waste of effort just to enable me to pick up a coffee cup without spilling it.
Granted, that’s a barely disciplined speculation - but what and where are the other candidates?
So, yes, I have a response to Horgan’s description of the mind/body weirdness.
I suspect that Horgan’s book will only reveal the mind's multifaceted nature and that it’s really hard to describe holistically - ie, reductionism isn’t doing the job.
Perhaps the UTUA lexicon will provide a means to reach an holistic weirdness description - but, I’m not sure it will reveal the location, nature, and operation of that which seems to be hidden.
Or, alternatively, it may provide us with a totally new perspective of the big picture which enables greater understanding - ie, new data and information to enable new knowledge and maybe new wisdom.
Waldemar A Schmidt, PhD, MD
(Perseveret et Percipiunt)
503.631.8044
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. (A Einstein)
Hi List,
Welcome to the book tour of John Horgan’s Mind Body Problems. I hope you will consider joining me on this tour. It represents a great opportunity for us to the “disorder of things” (to borrow a phrase from John Dupre’s book that offers a similar perspective).
My hope is that we might be able to use this survey to map out these problems and, having done so, explore how the problems are organized and framed by the ToK/UTUA system. My central thesis is that the academy lacks a language game that is up to the task of being consilient across our broad systems of knowledge and that the ToK can advance the ball strongly in the positive direction here. Crucial to this is getting the right frame on the relationship between mind and body (and consciousness, subjectivity, awareness, experience, matter, energy, information, the concepts of self and personhood, brain, and so forth).
I see this book tour as being similar in spirit to the wonderful tour that Steve Quackenbush provided us when he explored Pepper’s 1942 book, World Hypothesis back in January. That tour allowed us to see the various metaphysical systems and root metaphors that have been developed. Similarly, this book allows us to map the many mind-body problems that are all tangled up. For each chapter, I will offer some summary thoughts, and include an attachment that has the book along with my free-floating commentary in red.
The plan is that each Monday I will post a new summary of a chapter. Below is the Intro Chapter, The Weirdness. Next Monday, I will post my thoughts and reactions to Chapter I on Christof Koch and his views from neuroscience and information integration theory (Neuroscientist: Beyond the Brain).
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Summary of The Weirdness (see also attached):
Horgan’s introductory chapter provides an overview of the “weirdness” that is the tangled mass of knots that make up the “mind-body problem(s).” It highlights the fact that there are many issues intersecting with each other simultaneously. Tied up in the “mind-body problem” are problems associated with conscious experience and subjectivity, the problems of self-reflection and free-will, problem of moral values, and so forth.
What is striking to me in reading it was how “unmoored” it is. Not in a looney or crazy sense or disorganized sense. Rather, as I read it, I felt like I was a tumbleweed drifting across the conceptual problems tangled up in talking about mind and matter. There is no effort to box things in, or separate and sort out. Rather the focus is just that they are knotty and knotted together. This is partly the point, as it reflects Horgan’s own admitted position of being a skeptic on knowledge, mind, and science. That is, he thinks we have approached our limits in terms of our capacity for coherent understanding of the world via science. That is the narrative that he wants us to internalize overall. This book adds to his previous works (such as The End of Science) by highlighting what I would call the fragmented pluralism of our current knowledge systems.
That experience of being a tumbleweed bouncing across a field of problems is highly consistent with what a person can feel like who tries to understand the field of psychology. Indeed, that is one of the things that draws me to this book. The problem of psychology in the academy has strong parallels with the mind-body problems that Horgan bounces around.
As such, this affords us a welcome opportunity. We have a reasonably well-informed skeptic highlighting all the various problems tangled together. That means that via the book we are being given a tour of the confusion that the ToK System is designed to untangle. That means we can use this book to see if the ToK is up to the task of effectively framing and untangling the problems. My running commentary allows you to see how I am constantly wanting to map and frame the problems he is talking about. At the end of the chapter in the attachment, I start to sketch out an inventory of these problems, which I have a feeling might be a helpful frame for a paper or some other work.
One more comment. Particularly striking to me is that absence of the talk about behavior. The concept of behavior and the various kinds of behavior is at the center of unraveling these knotty problems.
We can now consider this thread launched. I look forward to others’ questions, thoughts, and reactions. At some point I will likely reach out to John Horgan and let him know we are doing this.
Best,
Gregg
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