Hi TOK List,

 

  So I am doing Chapter 13 in my book, The Problem of Psychology and Its Solution. It is titled Mind²: Subjective Conscious Experiences in Animals and Humans. I am writing you all about it because I thought folks might find this interesting.

 

  In the chapter, I wanted to make a contrast between historical points of view on animal consciousness. So, I wrote about Descartes being very skeptical of animal consciousness and then, to contrast him, I was looking at the work of the early comparative psychologist George Romanes. He is often referenced as someone who was hugely guilty of anthropomorphizing and imputing massive levels of consciousness in animals. However, I am now in the process of actually reading what he wrote, especially his work Mental Evolution. It is amazing, and actually quite prescient, minus a few stretches. Check out the attached graph that depicts Romanes model of the 50 steps of mental evolution and forms the central argument. As you will see, It is remarkably close to the ToK and map of mind that John and I laid out in Untangling the Word Knot!

 

  Here is another fascinating thing. In the series, John helped me get a better frame on what Descartes really meant about “consciousness.” In Map of Mind1,2,3 terms, consciousness for Descartes was how perceptions and feelings become ready for reason. In other words, it was the jump between Mind2 and Mind3 and to have full consciousness, you needed both. Ergo, no (self-reflective) consciousness for animals.

 

  Now, we go back to Romanes. He has a 50 step latter. The first half is the evolution of animal consciousness…but animals (e.g., dogs and apes) only get up to level 28. The latter half is all human! And it is cultural evolution and self-reflective capacities. In other words, the evolution of Mind3 and the Culture-Person plane of existence!

 

  All of this means something quite remarkable. The two individuals who I was about to lay out as having the most diametric opposed views on animal consciousness agree almost completely! They agree that the ground is in the animal kingdom and it starts with a nonconscious Mind1. Then subjective experience (i.e., inner perceptions and feelings appear at some point). That is, they both would have agreed Mind2 is present in many animals. And they both would have agreed that Mind3 is the domain of the human!

 

The take home point here is that we had a HUGE problem of language and conceptual fields. The Enlightenment Gap on matter v mind blinded us to the proper language and grammar. With the proper language, we can achieve much greater clarity on what we are talking about! And when we do that, we can see that what sounded like radically different proposals (animals have NO consciousness versus animals have consciousness that resembles humans) are actually remarkably well aligned! It is all based on inadequate language games!

 

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 the Unified Theory Of Knowledge homepage at:

https://www.unifiedtheoryofknowledge.org/

 

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