Hi TOK Folks,

  FYI, continuing with mind/brain/behavior issue, I spent some of the day reading through Bruce Goldstein’s (2020) The Mind: Consciousness, Prediction and the Brain. It is a short book, “less than fifty thousand words” as Goldstein puts it. I can recommend it for offering a nice summary of the neurocognitive functionalist account from a cognitive science/psychology vantage point. The book lines up directly with Mind^1a in our Map of Mind^1,2,3 . That is, it is the neurocognitive functionalist/information processing and communication aspects of the Animal-Mind plane of existence. Also, it basically corresponds to how I define the mind as the information instantiated within and processed by the nervous system. I can also recommend it because of how it offers good insights on the mind as a predictive system.

 

  Interestingly, it offers a chapter on consciousness and defines it exactly as Mind², in that it is the first person, subjective experience of being. However, despite identifying consciousness as such, he has no clue how to frame it in relation to “the mind”. This is evident in his final summary statement ending chapter 2 on pg 63…”Now, as we move on to chapter 3, we leave unscientific speculation and the hard problem of consciousness behind to devote all our energy to describing what physiological and behavioral research has revealed about how the mind works. To begin this discussion, we consider how creation of the mind involves mechanisms that are largely hidden from view.”

 

His final sentence of the book is also worth quoting… ”Our photographable brain contains within it everything we need to create the mysteries of everything our invisible mind creates.”  

 

Folks, as cool as this stuff is from within the cognitive science perspective, it is clapping with one hand when it comes to genuine understanding. MENS knowledge is committed to the exterior vantage point, but that does not mean that the only language we can speak is science. Indeed, I strongly recommend you speak other languages. Consider that my personal existence is framed by an interior epistemology. That is, the only observations I can see are in the field of Mind2. The idea that the whole of the mind is “invisible” and that musings about conscious experience is “unscientific”—and thus should be ignored by implication--is absurd. It is because Goldstein, like basically everyone grounded in a MENS knowledge frame, is trying to explain everything from an exterior epistemological vantage point, which is just plain silly. This is what Wilber rightly criticizes when he goes after the unhealthy dominance of much modern scientistic thinking.

 

[Another angle of criticism is opened by considering this email. What are these propositions by extensions of my mind? (i.e., Mind^3b). I did not see much in the book on Mind3 and culture.]

 

Bottom line, MENS is a valuable way of thinking, but it is outdated we need to move from it to a Wisdom Oriented MENS knowledge system. According to UTOK, it should be framed by the “quadrant quadratic” of each individual relative to the Garden, which can be thought of as a holistic onto-epistemology that maps the ontic reality and orients us, via the metavalues of dignity, well-being and integrity, to what might and ought to be in the 21^st Century.

Best,
Gregg

   

 

 

Hi TOK Folks,

 

For any of you who remain interested in the cognitivism versus behaviorism debate in psychology, the attached 2011 chapter offers a good review, defending the behavioral perspective, but also showing how the move to 4e cognition results in bridging concepts.  There should be no mistaking the fact that the UTOK readily solves this problem with its Map of Mind^1,2,3.

 

  First, we can note that this dispute is all about Mind¹, which is about generating a neurocognitive functionalist account of mental behavior. The sides go round and round because they lack the right grammar and map of the right relations in the conceptual field.

 

  To advance the ball, it helps to step outside this arena and note that neither traditional behavioral nor neurocognitive approaches really address Mind2 (i.e., phenomenological consciousness). Here is David Chalmers recently explaining to Sam Harris on Making Sense this issue:

 

It is useful to start by distinguishing the easy problems-which are basically about performance functions—from the hard problem which is about experience. [Some] easy problems are: How do we discriminate information in our environment and respond appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from different sources and bring it together to make a judgment and control our behavior? How do we voluntarily control our behavior to respond in a controlled way to the environment?...

The easier problems fall within the standard methods of neuroscience and cognitive science What makes the hard problem of experience hard? Because it doesn’t seem to be about behavior or about functions. You can in principle imagine explaining all my behavioral responses to a given stimulus and how my brain discriminates and integrates and monitors itself and controls my behavior. You can explain all that with, say a neural mechanism, but you won’t have touched the central question, which is, “Why does it feel like something from the first-person point of view?  

 

Note that the difference Chalmers is talking about is the difference between Mind1 and Mind2 (and, of course, no one is even touching Mind3, where all of this exchange is taking place!).

 

Bottom line, to first we need to weave the behavioral and neurocognitive accounts together in a functional/mental behaviorism. This makes sense because live cats behave differently than dead cats. Both can fall out of trees, but only one lands on its feet and takes off. Falling is a physical behavior. Landing on your feet and taking off is a mental behavior and YES the adjective makes all the difference. Doing so allows one to realize that neurocognitive functionalism can provide a general scientific ontological and epistemological frame for Mind1. However, as Chalmers notes, Mind2 is a different ballgame.

 

Indeed, as I pointed out in this popular blog, Chalmers does not appropriately specify the nature of the problem, because he calls it the hard problem. There are in fact two hard problems associated with Mind2. One is epistemological in nature and the other is ontological. The epistemological problem stems from the language game of MENS. It only sees things and processes (i.e., behaviors) from an exterior epistemology, so it is, by its very grammar of justification, blind to interior subjects and their perspectives. The ontological problem is that we don’t know the mechanism of how neurobiological activity generates the experiential point of view.

 

The point here is that we can readily untangle the worldknot with the right system of understanding.

 

Best,
Gregg

 

 

___________________________________________

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
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Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.

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