Reflections on Hegel (and Marx)

In Hegel and Revolution, the authors Terry Sullivan and Donny Gluckstein focus on the aspects of Hegel’s thought which are likely to be of most interest and use to marxists, and this is understandable given that they are marxists writing for an activist audience, and that outside academia, it is Hegel’s influence on Marx and the marxist tradition which has been most important. However, on the whole they are fairly succesful in not painting over Hegel’s contours with marxism in such a way as to obliterate them. Here, I will take their work as a base, give some critical comments, but explore other aspects of the Hegel-Marx connection. This article is a companion piece to my article Dialectics.

The three core topics Sullivan and Gluckstein address are alienation, the philosophy of history, and dialectics, so we will begin with them.

Alienation

The concept of alienation is certainly one of Hegel’s ideas that had a massive impact on Marx and subsequent marxists, but I do not believe that it is central to Hegel’s thought on his own terms. It features in, but in no way dominates, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and receives a handful of mentions in his mature work, the Philosophy of Mind. But given the focus of Sullivan and Gluckstein, it quite reasonably has a prominent place; its significance to the early Marx achieving lift-off is immense. They deal well with Marx’s debt to and differences from Hegel regarding alienation.

A mention of Marx’s four-fold breakdown of alienation would have been good. It is found in the early work, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and, condensed, is

(1) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature as an alien world antagonistically opposed to him.

(2) The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process.

(3) Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man.

I have always found (1) and (2) congenial, and readily assimilable to the later concept of exploitation, but (3) and (4) somewhat obscure. However, I have recently come to give some recognition to (3) – if man’s species being is conscious practice, then his loss of control over such practice is a knife to the heart of his very being. I still have trouble with (4), but if we take intra-species cooperation as more fundamental to our nature and conscious practice than competition, it may be valid.

More generally, alienation captures, in a way the concept of exploitation doesn’t, the consequent loss of the entire human world to man, for example in the way his surroundings in most of the built environment around him are not under his control.

History

Hegel is quite rightly seen as one of the most historically aware of the great philosophers, but I believe there are aspects of the dynamism of his thought which are not really historical. His Logic is dynamic, with each category, owing to its inadequacy, passing over into another until we reach the final, all-embracing Idea. But the dynamism of the Logic cannot be that of history, and is not even temporal, since it takes place outside space and time. Of the Logic, Hegel remarks,

“It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.”

Hegel’s Philosophy of History was published late, indeed posthumously, and is a collection of his lecture notes and the notes of those present at the lectures existing in different versions and translations. Although Hegel did not publish a book devoted to the philosophy of history, the materials we have are deemed accurate to his thought by experts. Hegel took his lecture series very seriously, and put a great deal of work into their preparation, similar to that for his books.

There is a difficulty with his philosophy of history, in that it does not sit easily into the framework shown by the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, with its threefold division into the Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Philosophy of Mind. In some ways, the Philosophy of History cuts across the edifice of his established structure.

Within Sullivan and Gluckstein’s presentation of Hegel’s Philosophy of History they maintain that “Hegel is not an idealist in the sense of holding that everything existed as ideas. However, we do think that he is an idealist in a weaker sense. And this sense is that whilst he readily accepts that the physical and material world exists – the world of tables, trees and i-Phones – for Hegel the driving force of history is not the material world but rather ideas and, in particular, reason.” They further note that “Hegel remains the most curious idealist for in the Introduction not only does he talk about social class but he also acknowledges that the very climate of the earth affects the development of freedom.”

However, I would maintain that Hegel is indeed an idealist – an absolute idealist, or objective idealist.

What I think creates some confusion is if the threefold division of the Encyclopedia is not held in mind – Hegel has a place for nature in the whole of the second volume, and nature is second in the true Hegelian sense. Many are unhappy with the way the absolute idea, concluding the Logic, then mysteriously generates nature, but that is the way Hegel has it. (As for the status of artifacts such as tables and chairs in Hegel’s system, I don’t know, but I’ll assume they have something of nature in them. It is also notable that Sullivan and Gluckstein see social class as unproblematically material, but that’s marxism for you). And after nature comes mind, culminating in absolute mind, or absolute spirit. Hegel seems to recognize the involvement af nature as well as mind within history, perhaps with nature more dominant in history’s earlier stages and mind in its later stages.

It is only if one takes idealism to mean an absolute denial of the reality of physical things that the label of idealist could be withheld from Hegel. As Hegel himself says, in the Science of Logic,

“Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out.”

There is an issue which Sullivan and Gluckstein deal with in their chapter on Dialectics, but which seems to me as easily to fit within their consideration of Hegel’s and Marx’s Philosophy of History. It is the issue of necessity, closely related to that of determinism. They note that “… Hegel held that the nature of categories forces them to pass into their opposite and onto a new, higher category as a matter of necessity …” The categories here seem to be those of the Logic, which as I have already noted, though dynamic, are not really historical, though something like this dynamic pervades Hegel’s system as a whole. But to contrast Hegel and Marx, they then draw attention to some famous lines of a historical nature from the Manifesto of the Communist Party –

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The part of the quotation in italics is the most important for us here.

Thus for Sullivan and Gluckstein, Hegel saw things as displaying necessity, a unidirectional movement, but Marx saw how contradictions are resolved as involving contingency, and as not being predetermined. “Rather, their resolution was dependent on other things, in particular how the struggle between classes was fought, won and lost.” What I wish to note here is that though Sullivan and Gluckstein talk of contingeny, they do not mention the possibility of multiple possible outcomes, but simply replace Hegel’s unidirectionality with a bidirectionality, one direction good, a sublation, the other bad, a mere destruction.

They seem to be having their Hegelian cake and eating it. Such a binary way of looking at things is echoed in the stark alternatives of Rosa Luxemburg’s (or possibly Karl Kautsky’s) phrase “socialism or barbarism”. Now, I don’t wish to deny that some options, especially political ones at the present juncture, might be as indicated, but rather to indicate that the basis in dialectics for such a line of thought involves hidden assumptions, or perhaps that dialectics itself might need some reworking.

Dialectics

Sullivan and Gluckstein’s treatment of dialectics is good, especially considering that it is a notoriously difficult subject, and that they subsequently downplay the Logic and, relatedly, recent concern with the influence of Hegel’s Logic on Marx’s method or conceptual construction.

They make the notable point that Hegel sees his Logic as a logic, rather than some sort of metaphysics, or an ontology, because it is driven by necessity, and necessity is one of the hallmarks of logic. I tend to think of Hegel’s Logic as a metaphysics or an ontology rather than a logic, but Hegel and Revolution here draws attention to a pertinent point.

Sullivan and Gluckstein also give a good, though brief, account of the core of Hegel’s dialectical movement. I take the liberty of diagramming it my own way thus –

The base of the triangle would seem to represent negation.

Two concepts which should find a place on this diagram, either on a vertex or an edge, are sublation, and negation of the negation. They may well be synonymous. They seem to me to be labels for the dashed arrow on the left, or perhaps sublation is the dashed arrow on the left, and the negation of the negation the arrow on the right. But that’s until someone persuades me otherwise…

[I should, at this point, say more about determinate negation, using Charles Taylor and Michael Rosen, and John W. Burbidge on the to-an-fro becoming a new concept]

But the authors are clearly happier with matters such as alienation, history, and the state, than with concern for Hegel’s logic and Marx’s method.

They seem to put this as an either / or, but surely an adequate treatment would cover both (as indicated, their treatment of the dark arts of Hegelian logic, though brief, is quite good). They downplay the significance of Hegel’s Logic in their Conclusion, but it is the foundation of his mature system, and takes up 1 and 1/3 of the 4 books he published as such, or, if you divide the Encyclopedia into 3 books, 2 of his 6 books are concerned with Logic, and it has priority within the sequence in the Encyclopedia.

But perhaps the quest to hunt down the Hegelian elements within Marx’s method is somewhat chimerical and has got out of hand. Nevertheless, I will here set “Hegel and Revolution” aside and mention some aspects of this.

Totality (and the understanding and reason)

Marx seems to follow Hegel in his conception of what properly theoretical work should consist in, or what its results should look like – a system or totality with the least arbitrariness to it, and the highest level of integration or integrity that its subject matter allows. This sort of integrity is what reason achieves, and the lack of such real integrity is displayed in work of a lower level, that which is a result of the mere understanding, exemplified by those whom Marx called the “vulgar economists”, who earned his scorn.

To put the matter in terms of method, the understanding will grasp its subject matter as being made up of a bunch of different “things”, which it will, as well as it can, get into some sort of an order. But reason will find a necessity to the inter-relation of these different “things”, and the more the subject area does indeed have a unity, the better it will be able to do so.

However, outside our theories, just how much anything, even everything, really does form a totality, I will leave open.

Opposition

To indicate the sorts of oppositions which can be seen to structure Marx’s Capital, the following diagram from David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital looks useful. However, I am not competent to assess it properly, or analyze its Hegelianism or lack of Hegelianism.

Levels of Abstraction

[movement between theory and data?]

Hegel and me

It is the grandeur of Hegel’s vision which I find most inspiring. He builds a system in which so many things are given a place, and it is the integration, the focus on the totality and the unwillingness to give the arbitrary too much room, which exemplify a certain kind of philosophy.

Regarding his mechanism of contradiction, opposition, negation, I think that impulse is more one from my nature than from Hegelian influence – I am a dialectical thinker, who will always look around for what is falling outside the system, but with a desire thus to widen the system. But it has to be done in an honest way. And there are dangers to The System. Any system.

Hegel and Marx – A Comparative Checklist

Contradiction

_____Hegel

_____Marx

For Marx, contradictions can be latent, but when they become manifest, express themselves as crises.

The primary contradiction within capitalism is that between the relations of production and the forces of production. This generates class struggle.

The Marx Dictionary, by Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde, gives an able summary of Marx’s use of the term contradiction (emphasis and segmentation added) –

__________Grundrisse

“In the chapter on money in the Grundrisse (1857-1858), when
examining the relationship between money and commodities, Marx specifies
four contradictions that are present.

He begins with the contradiction within the commodity between the particular nature of the commodity as a product, or its use value, and its general nature as exchange value, expressed in money.

The other contradictions involve the separation of purchase and sale by space and time,

the splitting of exchange into mutually independent acts

and the twofold nature of money as a general commodity to facilitate exchange and a particular commodity subject to its own particular conditions of exchange.”

__________Capital III

Fraser and Wilde also observe that “Marx’s exposure of the contradictions of capitalism is completed in Capital 3 (1864-1865), particularly in his discussion of the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall and its implications. For Marx, the desperate race for profit drives the system to more volatile and precarious competition, but it is always running against the problem of finding effective demand. Capitalists need low labour costs to make their profits, but they need consumers with money to buy their goods. This can lead to situations in which over-capacity of production goes hand in hand with unemployment.”

Negation

_____Hegel

_____Marx

Unity of Opposites

_____Hegel

__________Logic II Essence

__________determinations of reflection – identity, difference and opposition

_____Marx

__________Capital I

__________unities of use-value and value (and see the diagram above, under the heading “Opposition”, for an indication of what a fuller treatment might look like).

Quantity into Quality

_____Hegel

__________Logic I Being – Measure

“It is said, natura non facit saltum; and ordinary thinking when it has to grasp a coming-to-be or a ceasing-to-be, fancies it has done so by representing it as a gradual emergence or disappearance. But we have seen that the alterations of being in general are not only the transition of one magnitude into another, but a transition from quality into quantity and vice versa, a becoming-other which is an interruption of gradualness and the production of something qualitatively different from the reality which preceded it. Water, in cooling, does not gradually harden as if it thickened like porridge, gradually solidifying until it reached the consistency of ice; it suddenly solidifies, all at once. It can remain quite fluid even at freezing point if it is standing undisturbed, and then a slight shock will bring it into the solid state.”

_____Marx

__________Capital I

“A certain stage of capitalist production necessitates that the capitalist be able to devote the whole of the time during which he functions as a capitalist, i.e., as personified capital, to the appropriation and therefore control of the labour of others, and to the selling of the products of this labour. The guilds of the middle ages therefore tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the number of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small maximum. The possessor of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the middle ages. Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.”

Negation of the Negation (Sublation?)

_____Marx

__________Capital I Chapter 32

“The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”

Essence and Appearance

_____Hegel

__________Logic II Essence

_____Marx

__________Capital III

“‘all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided’”

Universal—————————-Particular————————–Individual

(Abstract Universal)——————————————————-(Concrete Universal) (Totality)

_____Hegel

__________Logic III The Concept – Subjectivity – Concept

_____Marx

__________second outline of Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

I. Universality:

1. (a) The emergence of capital from money.

(b) Capital and Labour . ..

2. Particularizing (Besonderung) of Capital:

(a) Capital circulant, capital fixe; Turnover of Capital.

3. The Individuality of Capital; Capital and Profit;

Capital and Interest. Capital as value, distinct from

itself as Interest and Profit.

II. Particularity:

1. Accumulation of Capitals.

2. Competition of Capitals.

3. Concentration of Capitals .. .

III. Individuality:

1. Capital as Credit.

2. Capital as Stock-Capital

3. Capital as Money Market. In the Money Market Capital is posited in its Totality.

note also the importance of the category of Totality for Lukacs

Alienation

_____Hegel

__________The Phenomenology of Spirit – Self-alienated spirit: Culture

“the Spirit whose self is an absolutely discrete unit has its content confronting it as an equally hard unyielding reality, and here the world has the character of being something external, the negative of self-consciousness. This world is, however, a spiritual entity, it is in itself the interfusion of being and individuality; this its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but it is also an alien reality already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own and in which it does not recognize itself.”

_____Marx

__________Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

(the concept of Alienation is strongly related to that of Exploitation predominant in later works)

State

_____Hegel

__________Elements of the Philosophy of Right

__________Philosophy of Mind

_____Marx

__________Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

History

_____Hegel

__________Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

“The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom”

_____Marx

__________The German Ideology

__________Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Cyclical Presentation of the Theory

James D. White, in Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, observes that

____for Hegel,

“Each series or cycle of categories contained three elements corresponding to the moments of Universality, Particularity and Individuality which made up the Concept itself. The pattern was repeated from the initial rudimentary categories to Hegel’s entire system of philosophy. In this way Hegel adhered to the principle of Speculative philosophy that what was true of the system as a whole should be true of its constituent parts. And since the moments of the Concept progressed from Abstract Universality through Particularity to concrete Universality, the movement of the Concept was cyclical; it returned to its point of departure. This cyclic character pervaded all levels of Hegel’s system.”

and, regarding Marx,

“The cyclical method of exposition, Marx believed, corresponded to the actual working of the capitalist system. In fact, many of the movements he described were cyclical, since they concerned the circulation of money or commodities, or cycles of reproduction and accumulation.”

Some Notes on Hominization

From Woolfson – The Labour Theory of Culture

From Woolfson – The Labour Theory of Culture

Bipedalism / Upright walking
Hands freed
Tools and Tool-making
Diet – high protein
Language
Social being – socialists tend to emphasize co-operation rather than competition as our most fundamental social intra-species nature – also note that many species are social
Brain size
Consciousness
[There is also an argument that bipedalism left a lot of space in the head for an expanded brain.]

High level of flexibility of human consciousness and social practices.
Perhaps unpredictable conditions, e.g. climate, necessitate flexibility.

__________________________________________________________________________

“One can distinguish man from the animals by consciousness, by
religion or by anything one likes. They themselves begin to distinguish
themselves from the animals as soon as they begin to produce their
means of subsistence, a step required by their bodily constitution. By
producing their means of life men indirectly produce their material
life itself …” Marx and Engels – The German Ideology

But 1) do no other animals produce their means of subsistence, and 2) in what sense do hunter-gatherer societies “produce” their means of subsistence, apart maybe from cooking? According to Wikipedia, hunter-gatherer societies have dominated for 90% of human history.

Relatedly, marxists often talk of “conscious labour” as the distinguishing feature of humanity. Here, I would suggest that it is the concept of consciousness that is doing all the heavy lifting in distinguishing humanity from other animals, but “labour” as central to man, his essence, has a pleasing ring to marxist ears. Without the adjective “conscious”, “labour” can be attributed to animals or indeed plants.

(Personally, I would attribute consciousness to many animals, but hold that human beings have a higher level of consciousness than animals.)

I do not wish to dispute the importance of labour to human nature, and I recognize that practice and activity are bound up with our nature, and with aspects of it such as (our level of) consciousness, and language. Marx is surely right, in the Theses on Feuerbach, to imply that philosophy has a tendency to emphasize only the contemplative aspect of our consciousness, and forget the practical or active side.

Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality, would have us be aware that “the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate”, and I think such a consideration applies to our level of consciousness.

Clarifying this philosophical anthropology is important to assessing the relevance of marxism to environmental and ecological concerns.

Reflections on Sartre

In my early 20’s, I kinda lived for a while in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It had a mystique – heavyweight and continental – but also seemed like it could plug a gap; I’d become left-wing and was adapting to marxism as the de facto theoretical edifice of the left, but was interested in psychology and the subjective side of things. Sartre’s existentialism seemed like it could take up the slack on that side.

I came to break with it, though that might be a pretentious way of putting it, and adopted a fairly straightforward materialist, physicalist, naturalist position. (I believe that for a major philosopher, Sartre is one of those who has the least interest in the pure sciences, and perhaps at the time I detected this.) I have been, since, fairly determinist, though accepting of indeterminism as indicated by quantum mechanics, and unpredictability as outlined in chaos theory and considerations of complexity. Regarding free will and determinism, I’m what’s known as a compatibilist, but with the objective as more fundamental than the subjective.

But – there’s something about Sartre. I think that he is nevertheless correct to say that we are stuck with our free will. I would say – we have to act as though we are free, and to pretend otherwise is to act (or not act) in bad faith.

Thus, if I were to say “Whatever will happen was already set to happen at the big bang – so I don’t need to think much about any of my actions,” I would be trying to take my own involvement out of situations, even if it is true that everything was inevitable at the big bang. (Quantum mechanics indicates that it wasn’t.)

Sartre finds fault with a false identification with one’s role – for example, when a doctor remarks “As I doctor, I believe / want …” since this is to try to escape our inescapable freedom. Perhaps the same might apply to some of the ways we talk with the rise of identity politics – people say things like “As a black woman, I feel that …”, “As a gay man, I believe …”, etc.

I can see a problem with Sartre’s view, however; it seems to deracinate a person from identity, role, and traditions perhaps too far. It doesn’t recognize the extent to which the social aspects of humanity extend into the individual.

Relatedly, Sartre’s ideal is of an individual constantly on a sort of emergency footing. He famously said that (French) people were never so free as they were under the nazi occupation, meaning that then many choices, sometimes of life and death, had immense risk and so meaning. But the other side to this is the positive value of comfort, habit, and routine.

Regarding Sartre and marxism vis a vis the freedom / determination dialectic, I think a lot of marxist talk on the profundity of “Men make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing” (from the opening of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire), or the similar quotation Andy gives from Engels, is rather inflated in its claims for great significance. From memory, it seems to me that the “BUT” is the point at which Marx goes on to elucidate the many restrictions on freedom, which are in terms of the restriction on men’s minds of past ideas. In other words, it is the stuff after the “but” which has the emphasis, and which is the point Marx is making. He does not deal with the limits from either side between freedom and determination, and does not give some amazing synthetic resolution to the philosophical problem of free will and determinism.

I would say that sometimes we have more room for manoeuvre, sometimes less. This is the way “freedom” is understood in ordinary language, and has much to commend it. How, why, and when we have more or less freedom is a matter I will leave open.

I disagree with the metaphysics / ontology of “Being and Nothingness” at least as well as I understand and can remember it – Being-In-Itself is not a block, but highly differentiated and complex before consciousness comes into the world. So Being-For-Itself is not the only way that difference, etc., can come into the world.

But Sartre is still kinda right in terms of living – often, people say they MUST do something, or they CANNOT do something, in an inauthentic manner. To realize that we are more free than we often make out to ourselves can be healthy and exhilarating. So I think Sartre can be good in a sort of therapeutic way.

Again very much from memory, I thought I’m make some additional remarks about the two categories of Sartre’s magnum opus, as displayed in its title – i.e., being, and nothingness.

Being is on the face of it relatively simple – the being-in-itself. Nothingness is very much connected with the subject, consciousness, the individual, being-for-itself, and its inescapable freedom. The parts I remember are that being-for-itself has its projects – aims, purposes, goals, etc. – and these involve some kind of negation, aiming to make things other than they are. This introduces nothingness into the world. Sartre talks of going to the cafe to meet Pierre. He sees that Pierre is NOT there, but this not being there of Pierre is not something that is within being-in-itself, but something brought into the world by the for-itself.

To turn back now to being-in-itself, Sartre sees it as having, without the differentiations and negations brought into it by consciousness, only a sort of sheer positivity.

To me this metaphysics or ontology puts too much on the side of the subject. It is in many ways dualistic, Cartesian (as I think Sartre recognizes). But by being so it rips man out of nature.

But whatever the shortcomings of their metaphysics / ontology, there still seems to be something suggestive about these ideas.

Mind and Brain

[Under construction]

Is the mind the brain? Does the brain “do” the mind? My answer is a qualified yes. But presently neither I, nor anyone else, knows how. We do not as yet have a grand theory, but we have some pieces of the puzzle, and some of those pieces have been slotted together into larger wholes.

I find this matter intrinsically interesting, but must state from the outset that I am an amateur in the fields of both cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, and that I did most of my reading on these matters back in the 1990’s, so I may be a bit dated.

I am a materialist at heart, and my “will to materialism” motivated, and still motivates,  most of my enquiries into this and related matters.

Here, I will pass over the reasons why we might look to the brain to elucidate or locate the mind in the first place, rather than, say, the heart, the whole body, or nowhere. I address such quibbles briefly in “The Mind Ouroboros”.

I will consider the matter of the mind in two chunks – the first, scientific, or at least involving attempts at the foundation of a science: neuroscience and psychology – and the second, philosophical, namely philosophy of mind.

Psychology

Psychology made its claim to be recognized as a science mainly in the nineteenth century. My focus here will be on the rise of Cognitive Psychology, and its triumph over the Behaviourism which dominated the mid-twentieth century. So I must simplify matters and not consider developments or schools of thought prior to Behaviourism.

Before the Revolution

Behaviourism                                                                   Pavlov         Watson        Skinner

The behaviourists took their stand on being scientific – they wanted only to work with things which could be observed and experimentally verified. Familiar images are, for its beginning, that of Pavlov’s dogs, and for its height, rats in mazes. The behaviourists avoided mentalistic terms, such as “mind”, “consciousness” etc., preferring terms like stimulus, response, conditioning, and behaviour. The title of B. F. Skinner’s major book, “Science and Human Behavior”, is indicative of the stance. We thus have the paradox that the dominant school within psychology in the mid-twentieth century was not very “mental”.

The behaviourists also did not believe that a knowledge of the brain would be of much help. There is no entry for brain in the index to “Science and Human Behavior”, and only a few mentions of the nervous system. Early on, Skinner concludes a brief discussion of such matters with “The causes to be sought in the nervous system are, therefore, of limited usefulness in the prediction and control of specific behavior.”

Some have detected a political aspect to the behaviourists’ focus on conditioning – an interest in controlling individuals within society in the interests of social stability. Comparable points have been made against Parsons’ (sociological) functionalism, and ego psychology, the American appropriation of Freud which became dominant and which emphasized adaptation and adjustment of the ego to “reality”, de-emphasizing the more radical, subversive, or tragic aspects of Freud’s thought.

Whatever the truth of such critiques, I think we should retrospectively give two cheers for behaviourism, at least in principle – they were trying to be scientific, and stick with observables.

Psychoanalysis                                                          Freud

The other major school of thought in the twentieth century, having an immense cultural influence, was that of Freud and his followers – Psychoanalysis and its progeny. Fascinating in its own right as Psychoanalysis is, here I can only afford it this passing mention.

The Cognitive Revolution – Cognitive Psychology

There were some who were discontented with behaviourism even in its heyday. Besides Psychoanalysis, Piaget plowed his own furrow in terms of child developmental psychology, and Gestalt Psychology, now often seen as a precursor to Cognitive Psychology, investigated perception. But major fissures in the monolith were opened as a result of a combination of attacks, two of the most important being that by Noam Chomsky, in the field of linguistics, and by George Miller, in the field of memory research.

Skinner had written a book on the subject of language called “Verbal Behavior”, and Chomsky responded with an extremely negative review. Basically, Chomsky held that Skinner’s idea of language acquisition as being based merely on general learning, underpinned by some form of association, was untenable: the stimulus was far too poor, usually too degraded, for a child to become competent in language. He held that language capacity must already be inbuilt into the child’s mind – a particular case of nature not nurture. He further held that language – not a particular language such as English, but rather a deep structure – must be universal, and possessed by all normal human beings. This is the idea of Universal Grammar. The structure innate in normal human beings was termed the Language Acquisition Device.

Chomsky presented these ideas not as mere philosophy, but as strongly based on empirical, theoretical, even mathematical considerations. The sheer rigour of his thought was widely recognized as unassailable, and behaviourism was dealt a body-blow.

[Miller and the Magic Number 7 +/- 2]

Cognitive Psychology resurrected some old ideas which had only lived underground through the days of the behaviourist hegemony, particularly modularity, which had earlier been known as faculty psychology – different “jobs” the mind might have to do might be done by different “parts” – language by Chomsky’s language acquisition device, memory by various systems, and so on. These were mainly considered in terms of fairly abstract information structures: at this stage, attempts to localize such structures within the meat-thing that is the brain could be regarded as gross. But the table was being set.

There are some additional streams of thought which fed into the Cognitive Revolution, and next, I shall say a little about each of these.

Cybernetics                                                                 Norbert Wiener

Many people these days could be forgiven for thinking that Cybernetics is just a term from science fiction, rather than real science. But cybernetics came out of the allied war effort in world war two, as part of the attempt to harness all sorts of intellectual workers in its service. Norbert Wiener, a remarkable and much-neglected figure in the history of thought, founded and named this proposed new science, and its key text is his “Cybernetics”, subtitled “or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”. Once we realize that this subtitle includes, under the animal, many elements of the human, its audacious all-embracing ambitions become clear. Even more so when we consider that many aspects of other systems, such as social systems, can be considered within its framework.

An important concept within Cybernetics is that of Feedback, and in particular Negative Feedback. Negative Feedback is an important part of the “control” with which Cybernetics is concerned.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence came to eclipse and largely replace Cybernetics as a respectable paradigm. Apparently one of the reasons for this was that the military, very much the holders of the purse-strings, misunderstood the sense of “intelligence” in its name and thought it meant, well, spying, and so liked the idea for that reason. So much for military intelligence.

In a relatively unambitious formulation, Artificial Intelligence is the attempt to get machines to do things which take intelligence when done by human beings, but there are bolder formulations. Of most interest to us here is not the technological aspect, but the light which such attempts, and the theories necessary to them, can shed on the mind as a material thing, or process, or set of processes.

Artificial Intelligence was very much based on theories of information processing and on modern logic, and tended to break problems down into their smallest parts in order to mechanize the solution. The information processing paradigm was common to both A.I. and Cognitive Psychology, and made for much interaction between the two fields, and a degree of convergence.

The earlier, classical phase of A.I. is sometimes referred to by the acronym GOFAI, for Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence, coined by John Haugeland.

Connectionism

Connectionism, Parallel Distributed Processing, Neural Networks, Perceptrons

[facial recognition and suchlike]

Connectivity

Complexity and Chaos Theory

Complex behaviour from simple units

Hard to analyse, think about, break down

Evolved, and so, messy.

Emergent

Neuroscience

The scientific study of the brain has a long history of its own, though since any organ of the body is studied with something of an eye to its functions, there was always an overlap with psychology. Behaviourism had retarded the recognition and development of this overlap towards a synthetic vision, but with the cognitive revolution, as well as the confluent streams of Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, brain science and cognitive psychology began to fuse into something variously called Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuropsychology, and so on. The addition of the brain perspective to Cognitive Psychology is the main idea to hold on to. In this section I give a very rough outline of the sorts of things this perspective enables, with a focus on modularity.

[Neurons]                                                                     Donald Hebb

Hebb – “Neurons that fire together, wire together”

Neurons are very flexible and “chancy”.

[Neurotransmitters] [Neuromodulators]

[Layers]

[The Neocortex is divided into six layers]

[Brainwaves, Neural Oscillations, Rhythms]

[Alpha, Beta and Gamma]

Modularity – Localization – Functions – Faculties

Structural

My main attempt to indicate modularity from the structural perspective, by which I mean anatomical and physiological, is given in outline form below, as Notes Towards a Brain Map. Here, I will only note –

Hemispheres, Lateralization, left-brain right-brain

Triune Brain

Lobes (of the Cerebral Cortex)

Functional

[We ought to list the main functions often presented as chapters or sections in the main textbooks of Cognitive Psychology]

Some functions we can at least partly localize –

Senses

Vision – For humans, the visual system has an entire lobe to itself, more or less – the Occipital Lobe, and vision is so integral to our being that some thinkers would include the eye as part of the brain. The occipital lobe is also very well studied, and much of its functioning has been broken down into various submodules. Indeed, Francis Crick, in “The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul”, ostensibly about the prospects for a scientific understanding of consciousness, explains early on that he will focus on vision, as it is here that we are most likely to make headway.

Hearing – the Auditory Cortex, part of the Temporal Lobe. Note its proximity to Wernicke’s Area, concerned with language comprehension.

Smell – the Olfactory Bulb, part of the Allocortex.

[Taste – ?]

Touch and related senses – the Somatosensory Cortex, part of the Parietal Lobe.

There are more, perhaps many more, senses than the traditional five, for example proprioception, and the vestibular system, but for the sake of simplicity I’ll keep with these.

Movement

– the Motor Cortex, part of the Frontal Lobe.

– the Cerebellum – responsible for the fine-tuning of movement.

Language

Syntax, speech, motor – Broca’s Area.

Semantics, comprehension – Wernicka’s Area.

Note for these two areas the related aphasias.

Ian Glynn, in “An Anatomy of Thought”, reports that “The most striking contribution of the cognitive neuropsychologists has been to show that the machinery handling language often behaves as if it consists of interacting modules – modules on a scale much finer than anyone had envisaged.” For example, “A patient studied by Elizabeth Warrington and Tim Shallice failed to understand camel, wasp or buttercup, but produced excellent definitions of torch, thermometer and helicopter.” This is modularity with a vengeance.

Memory

Cognitive Psychology, even without any input from Neuroscience, built on earlier ideas in establishing that memory is not merely one system, but rather composed of a number of systems, which break down in something like the following way –

Sensory Memory

Short-term Memory / Working Memory

Long-term Memory

Implicit Memory / Procedural Memory

Explicit Memory / Declarative Memory

Episodic Memory

Semantic Memory

[Recognition Memory?]

To some extent, these various submodules of memory lock on to different brain regions – for an indication, look at the functions indicated in Notes Towards a Brain Map, below.

Attention – the Prefrontal Cortex, part of the Frontal Lobe.

Grandmother Neuron – a.k.a. Bill Clinton, Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston, etc.[Originally under Language. Danger of “locating” –  e.g. car ignition key]

Jerry Fodor, in “The Modularity of Mind”, an excellent, short book on these matters, though now quite old, concludes that there is much modularity for input systems, by which he means sensory systems though interestingly he also includes language, but not much modularity for central systems.

Evolutionary Psychology

Quite recently a new school of thought has to an extent established itself – Evolutionary Psychology – and its main thinkers are Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and David Buss. Steven Pinker has popularized their ideas in some bestselling books.

They believe that evolutionary considerations mean that we should consider human psychology as having been established during the Pleistocene on the basis of solving certain problems which would have confronted us in that environment, as well as we can reconstruct conditions back then. Rejecting any ideas of the brain as being some sort of general-purpose problem solver, because there is no such thing as a general problem, they believe that the human mind displays massive modularity, and posit possibly hundreds of very specific modules, including for such things as cheater detection (sussing out when someone is trying to bamboozle you), and many other very specific solutions. They argue that experimental evidence shows better performance by human beings at solving problems when the problem situation falls within the purview of a posited module than when posed in a neutral way. Such evidence has been disputed.

Their approach is universal, treating all human beings as fundamentally the same, since we were all formed in essentials in a region of Africa: with the exception of distinctions related to sex and gender, where they emphasize differences, much like the school of thought which many regard as its predecessor, Sociobiology.

The jury’s still out on Evolutionary Psychology. Personally, I am unconvinced, and regard it as a backward step from cognitive science, which takes neuroscience seriously, and thus seems much better underpinned by and grounded in physical reality. I hasten to add that I am very much a Darwinian thinker, and disagree only with their particular take on such matters. My sympathies, at least in this area, are closer to those of Jerry Fodor.

I should also admit to what could be regarded as a bias – an almost aesthetic preference for the idea of the human mind as more like a general processor than the evolutionary psychologists believe: not some sort of ideal universal problem solver, but relatively more general than the evolutionary psychologists’ extreme modularity would have it. Kluges are just so inelegant.

Modularity and Connectivity

If you are anything like me, you will by now have an irritation with all this, or at least a niggling feeling that you are being hogwashed or somehow sold short, true enough though the views being presented may be – such sentiments will, alas, not be entirely relieved even if you read until the end of this essay. The modularity never seems to go down far enough, and even if it did, the interconnections between the modules are never made clear, or at least not clear enough for you to say – “Aha! Now I’ve got it! I understand at least in principle how the brain does the mind!”

Aside from any philosophical issues, to which we shall turn shortly, I believe that a lot of our problems are caused not by modularity, but by connectivity. Modularity and connectivity are two different aspects of brain function, pulling in two directions. Modularity, no matter how complex and multi-leveled, succumbs to our analytical modes of thought more easily than does a vastly connective, interconnected system, where any subsystem has got lots of inputs and outputs from other subsystems.

Subsystems all the way down (or at least to quite low levels), subsystems with few inputs and few outputs and which could be neatly lined up as beginning and end, and subsystems where the internal processing, the middle, is mainly done “in-house”, would be much more amenable to our understanding. But although the brain exhibits modularity, that modularity is interlaced with connectivity.

I think of this difficulty we have regarding connectivity with the analogy of the tangle of wires such as one gets behind one’s desk with the wires of one’s computer system and its various external devices, if one is not careful. We are not very good at untangling them, at least not in thought alone, and lose track if we try to “see” our way to untangle just by looking. Add to this that we are dealing with such tiny units, the neurons, especially in terms of being thin, and we hit a problem which is to do with the limits of our powers of comprehension. (We ought also to add the present-day limitations of imaging technologies.)

Modularity is localized, but Connectivity is global and holistic.

[Plasticity]

The Homunculus                                                               Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett, in his rather confidently titled book “Consciousness Explained”, goes to great pains to get us out from under the spell of certain persistent delusions. The homunculus delusion is the idea that there must be somewhere where the results of all the information processing done by the brain get presented to some central point. Even if we are not dualists who believe that the brain is simply a material thing which presents its results to something immaterial, nevertheless, the idea that it must all come together somewhere is a bug in our thought about such matters. We must realize and accept that the processing is distributed, and smudged not only over space but also over the timescales involved in processing. A related idea which Dennett is keen to challenge is that which he calls the cartesian theatre, the idea that there must be a “space” where things are finally presented to consciousness. The name shows that Dennett regards us as still implicitly accepting of, and trapped in, the legacy of Descartes and his dualism when we think like this, even when we believe ourselves not to be.

Feedback, Re-entrance, Circularity, Cyclicity                                    Gerald Edelman

An important aspect of how the brain can do the sorts of things it does, including being the mind, is to do with a feature I call Cyclicity, (though I quite like Loopiness too.) It is related to the cyberneticists’ emphasis on the importance of feedback, and Gerald Edelman’s concept of re-entrance. In terms of control systems and control hierarchies, it can be considered as an aspect of modularity, but it is mainly an aspect of some kinds of interconnected systems. I have written at greater length on these matters in Complexity  and The Mind Ouroborus]

Philosophy of Mind

Dualism                                                                        Descartes         Karl Popper

Descartes is the most important figure at the beginning of modern western philosophy, and no less so for philosophy of mind.  But regarding mind, his significance is mainly for bequeathing to us a question, a problem, rather than an answer; he divides the world into two substances – res cogitans, thinking substance, or mind, and res extensa, extended substance, or matter. The question naturally arises, how do these two radically different substances interact? Descartes had his own answers, which were felt to be unsatisfactory by many, but the position that there are indeed these two main radically different kinds of things in the world, notwithstanding any apparent problems, is known as dualism.

                  Parallelism. Parallelism is the position that the two substances, mind and matter, do not interact, but operate in parallel, and perhaps seem to interact because they do not contradict each other. Related to this is the idea of correlation, without causation.

[Epiphenomenalism]

Monism

If one finds dualism unacceptable, there is a choice of two obvious ways to go – Idealism, the belief that everything is mind, or mind-like stuff, including matter – or Materialism, the belief  that everything is matter, including mind. Idealism and Materialism, though very much opposed, are each forms of Monism.

Even from this brief outline, it is clear that there is a difference between the widespread, colloquial uses of the terms idealism and idealist, and materialism and materialist, and the more specialized, philosophical uses of the same. Idealism indicates some overlap in both senses – colloquially, an idealist is someone who believes in noble causes, the perfectibility of people, and so on. For materialism, there is less of an overlap – colloquially, it refers to someone who is only interested in material possessions, money, and so on. A philosophical materialist is, however, likely to be interested in philosophical matters, and can easily disdain money grubbing attitudes. Philosophical materialists have often been quite self-sacrificing, and, in the colloquial sense, idealistic.

That said, there is a political aspect to the contrast between Idealism and Materialism in the more specialized and philosophical sense. Historically, idealism tends to be of the political right, and materialism of the political left, marxism being the most notable case of an avowedly materialist orientation. This is, however, a generalization, a tendency, admitting of many exceptions.

Idealism                                                                         Plato                 Hegel

Materialism / Physicalism / Naturalism    

The idea that materialists believe that all that exists is matter is, though invited by the label, overly crude, since even fundamental physics includes other entities. Here, a rough equivalence of the three terms, materialism, physicalism and naturalism, is made – so, wrapping the three terms up into one, materialism (physicalism, naturalism) is the belief that the entities theorized by the pure sciences, the natural sciences, usually with pride of place given to physics – matter, but also energy (forces), etc. – are fundamental. Darwinian theory, mainly biological, can, since it does not need any other entities or forces than those supposed by the pure sciences, be included within this view.

Mind-Brain Identity theories

When Materialism comes to be applied to the Mind / Brain problem, it will tend to those positions which most strongly link, or even identify, the mind with the brain. The strength of the linkage or identification comes in a few different varieties.

Type Identity Theories

Type identity theories are the stronger form of identity theory. As Colin McGinn explains –

“The clearest and most uncompromising version of monism is the thesis that mental phenomena are literally identical with physical phenomena: if a person has a sensation or a thought and a neurophysiologist is examining the relevant portions of
his brain, then the mental state is nothing other than the physical state thus observed.
Moreover, whenever a mental state of that type occurs in a creature’s mind there is the same type of physical state in the brain, these being identical. This sort of monism is sometimes called the type-identity theory.”

This is my favoured position.

                              Token Identity Theories

Many thinkers find type identity problematic. As Stephen Priest presents the issue –

“if you and I are having the same type of thought – suppose, for example, you and I are both thinking this sentence – then it does not follow that our brains are in the same sort of physical state. This means that, if the mind-brain identity theory is true, the identities cannot always hold between the same types of mental event and the same types of physical event. It must be the case that qualitatively similar mental events are each identical with a physical event – but
sometimes those physical events are qualitatively dissimilar. For
this reason it is generally recognized that a thoroughgoing type-­
type version of the mind-brain identity theory is untenable –
even though room seems to remain for many cases of broad types
of mental events to be identified with broad types of brain event
in the case of human beings.
It is suggested instead that the mind-brain identity theory
should be construed as a token-token theory. This means that
any mental event is in fact identical with some physical event, so
that each particular mental event is the same as a particular
physical event. This allows the possibility that the mind-brain
identity theory is true, despite the fact that it is not always true
that similar types of mental events are correlated with similar
types of physical event.”

I think of matters thus – let’s suppose that both you and I believe the following statement – “Paris is the capital city of France.” Is it likely that each of our type identical beliefs is identical with two states, processes, or whatever within our respective brains which are of the same physical, material type? If so, we ought to be able, with a full knowledge of the brain, to check someone’s brain to see whether they believe that Paris is the capital city of France. So much easier than just asking them. Token identity theorists believe that such a “reading off” of thought, etc., from the brain is not feasible.

Thus, token identity theories are a weaker form of identity theory. They’re a bit like low-alcohol beer, and about as much use.

[Anomalous Monism]

                 Eliminative Materialism   

In terms of Materialism / Physicalism / Naturalism, the Eliminative Materialists would have to be deemed the hardest kids on the block. Their solution is like a cure where it doesn’t matter if you kill the patient – they deem that a lot of the problem is the way we talk about the mental, which we have inherited from the past, and is in general pre-scientific, a problem which has only been exacerbated by philosophers. It is “Folk Psychology”, just as ideas about gravity, mass, and weight were “Folk Physics” before Galileo. The power couple of Eliminative Materialism are Patricia and Paul Churchland. Patricia Churchland wrote the classic text on these matters, with the wonderful title “Neurophilosophy”.

Functionalism                                                              Hilary Putnam

[Functionalism is a very important school of thought within Philosophy of Mind, but I must, today, 30/04/2020, leave all these matters to lie in the long grass for a while. Functionalism deserves a much fuller treatment.]

Multiple Realization

Logical Behaviourism                                                Wittgenstein         Gilbert Ryle

Ryle and category mistakes

Anglo-american philosophy, in the early to mid- twentieth century, often called analytical philosophy, or, in one variety, ordinary language philosophy, was in something of an alliance with behaviourism, which we have considered above. This resulted in what was called Logical Behaviourism, which maintained that what was meant by our mentalistic vocabulary referred to behaviour. The key figures here are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle.

Emergence and Levels

Mysterians

The mysterians take the puzzle of how the mind could possibly be the brain, and declare it to be an ultimate and unsolvable mystery, at least for human minds. This can take various forms, the softest being that as yet we do not have the conceptual resources to solve it, and the toughest being that in principle we never could solve it.

Part of the mysterian appeal lies in the intuition that we might not be smart enough to understand ourselves: perhaps the brain is not smart enough to understand how the brain manages to be as smart as it is. There might be something about me which will always elude me. If correct, such an idea would be a kind of paradox.

One prominent mysterian puts matters thus –

“How could the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness? We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic.”

                                                                                                                                     Colin McGinn

Mary the colour-blind colour scientist                                Frank Jackson

What is it like to be a bat?                                                 Thomas Nagel]

______________________________________________________________________________

Some Additional Remarks

Quantum

Some thinkers believe that the reason we have not been able, so far, to solve the mind-brain problem is because the intellectual resources drawn on by modern philosophers are based on a pre-quantum, classical physics view. Roger Penrose is probably the most well-qualified representative of this position, having been a collaborator with the late Stephen Hawking, and an expert in physics. In “The Emperor’s New Mind”, he finds massive fault with cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and the whole information processing paradigm, but seems to regard the way forward as involving quantum science. I think it is because Quantum Theory indicates a sort of deep holism to things, with superposition, entanglement, and non-locality, that it seems suggestive of the unity of consciousness. His book is fascinating and wide-ranging, but as someone said, depends upon the idea that because both quantum mechanics and the mind / brain problem are weird, they must be connected.

Another aspect of Quantum Theory is that there are interpretations that seem to make reality mind-dependent – lots of pop science of a New Age leaning exploit this, but I don’t think it’s necessary. There’s a good book called “Where Does the Weirdness Go?” with the subtitle “Why Quantum Mechanics is Strange, but Not as Strange as You Think”, which brings down some of these woolly-minded interpretations, and similarly Coveney and Highfield in “Frontiers of Complexity” challenge some of the mystery around Schrodinger’s Cat. I think Hawking dismissed the significance of Schrodinger’s Cat. Nevertheless, Quantum Theory IS physics, so materialism in general cannot treat it as a side issue.

There are other quantum thinkers – Michael Lockwood and Danah Zohar might be worth looking at for those inclined to this sort of view.

Social psychology? Cognitive social psychology?

Because of the focus of this essay, there has been little mention of social psychology, apart from a few asides about the political implications of behaviourism and of the idealism – materialism opposition. Cognitive Psychology tends to be fairly asocial, and perhaps this lopsidedness, though defended as being for the sake of simplicity, will thwart any long-term aim of at some point integrating the social back into our models within this paradigm. Of course, there is social psychology, but regarding any help it might give the cognitivist view, though I know of the terms social cognition, and even social neuroscience, I know little of such fields. There are criticisms of cognitive psychology from perspectives with more of a social orientation: for example that cognitivism, with its approach to memory based on narrow tests and experiments, leaves out a more human and social approach which, for instance, would give a place to narrative.

Particularly regarding the importance of language to human cognition, the social should not be regarded as some sort of add-on to a primarily asocial cognitive machine. But one must start somewhere, and I believe that the cognitive approach is the best way of getting to grips with the most difficult and basic problems, with all due recognition of that which we are setting aside.

Ecological

Embodied Cognition

Extended Cognition

Context

brain, body, world    =    mind

[but the brain is the key / core component]

active, practice

Philosophy in the past has often emphasized the passive, contemplative side of our nature.

Panpsychism

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes Towards a Brain Map

Brain – Encephalon

Forebrain – Prosencephalon

Cerebrum – Telencephalon 

Cerebral Cortex

(Lateralization – two cerebral hemispheres joined by the

Corpus Callosum)

Neocortex

Frontal Lobe

Prefrontal Cortex

Functions – executive functions, attention, working memory, speech production

Premotor Cortex

Primary Motor Cortex

Functions – movement

Broca’s Area

Functions – language 

Septal Area

Functions – pleasure zone – reward and reinforcement

Parietal Lobe

Functions – integrates sensory information across modalities

Somatosensory Cortex

Functions – sense of touch

Occipital Lobe

Functions – visual processing

Temporal Lobe

Functions – declarative memory

Auditory Cortex

Functions – hearing

Wernicke’s Area

Functions – language

Amygdala

Functions – decision-making and emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression), memory

Allocortex

Hippocampus

Functions – episodic memory and recognition memory 

Olfactory Bulb

Functions – sense of smell

Basal Ganglia [?]

Diencephalon

Thalamus

Functions – relaying of sensory signals and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, regulation of sleep and wakefulness, alertness

Hypothalamus

Functions – links the nervous system to the endocrine system (hormonal system) via the pituitary gland

Epithalamus 

Subthalamus

Midbrain – Mesencephalon

Functions – vision, hearing, motor control, sleep and wakefulness, arousal (alertness), temperature regulation

Hindbrain – Rhombencephalon

 Metencephalon

Cerebellum

Functions – motor control, motor learning, procedural memory

Pons

Myelencephalon

Medulla Oblongata

Functions – respiration, increase or decrease of cardiac output, blood pressure, reflexes – coughing, sneezing, swallowing, vomiting, gagging, jaw jerk

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The following three diagrams give a sort of minimal map of the brain. [I need to add arrows to the labels in the second and third diagrams, but for now, they indicate things well enough] (The picture at the start of this article will, if clicked on, take you through to the amazing work of Greg Dunn, called “Self Reflected”.)

The first diagram is normally called a surface view, which is good for indicating the lobes.

The second diagram is often called the sagittal, more properly midsagittal view, or midline view, dividing the brain into equal left and right parts and showing what is in that dividing plane. It is good for showing the structures towards the middle of the brain, especially the Limbic System.

The third diagram, a sort of tilted, pseudo-3-dimensional view, is the best way of showing some other structures which the first two diagrams cannot.

I’m still working on these diagrams, so please don’t use them for any D-I-Y brain surgery just yet.

_______________________________________________________________________

Triune Brain – Paul D. MacLean

Paul MacLean’s idea of the triune brain has been enormously influential, but is at some variance with modern science. It has to be mentioned, as it is the origin of a lot of popular, and to some extent correct, ideas of the brain as having evolved in three major steps, often overly humanized as, in sequence – reptile brain, mammal brain, human brain. His major contribution is held to be the identification of the limbic system, sometimes called the limbic lobe, which would add a fifth lobe to our four.

Neomammalian Complex – Neocortex

Functions – language, abstraction, planning, and perception

Paleomammalian Complex – Limbic System (lobe?)

Functions – emotion, motivation, behaviour, long-term memory, olfaction

 Septum, Amygdala, Hypothalamus, Hippocampus, Cingulate Cortex

Reptilian Complex – Basal Ganglia

Functions – aggression, dominance, territoriality and ritual display

_______________________________________________________________________

The Figures and the Ground

[Under Construction]

Here I will indicate how the three core terms of my Aesthetics, namely Maximization, Defamiliarization and Bisociation, lock on to the various figures of speech. The relationships of the three core terms “upwards”, that is, to more abstract levels of understanding, as features of mind, that is, in a psychologistic way, and indeed further, up to complexity and evolution, and the “sideways” interrelation and mutuality of the three with each other, have been explored elsewhere on this site, but the relations of the three core terms to the “downwards” lower level of the classification of a lot of the figures must be explored, and that is what I endeavour to do here.

I must make clear that I do not regard the figures as the be all and end all of literary art; I do not think of the literary work as merely the sum of its devices, as an early Russian Formalist text maintains. Rather, the figures are a good initial testing ground, since many have already been very clearly defined, in contrast to other rather vague literary terms. Relatedly, if I think a figure can do something not covered by my triumvirate of core concepts, I will take note. Any build-up of such “anomalies” can force an alteration of higher-level categories.

A glance at An Outline of the Rhetoric Database in Rhetoric will establish that regarding the core and most systematizable aspects, for at least a sizeable chunk of it, we can discern different operations falling under two main categories – deviation ( including deletion, addition, distortion), and extra patterning (including repetition and parallelism), being brought to bear upon different levels – syllables, words, etc.

Regarding the division of the figures into schemes and tropes, schemes in Leech’s sense (extra patterning) seem to fall more easily under consideration as maximization, being to do with repetition and parallelism, and hence patterns and regularities: basically, effective complexity.

However, schemes in the more traditional sense, as rearrangement of normal word order, fall more easily under permutation [distortion], a form of deviation, and thus under defamiliarization.

Tropes fall more easily under consideration as defamiliarization, being to do with deviation and distortion.

Metaphor and related figures, as well as falling under defamiliarization, seem also to be of bisociation.

The grouping around ambiguity and puns clearly falls in the main under bisociation.

[Regarding variation and bisociation]

A puzzle here is whether we can have mere variation, deviation, or interplay, or whether there is always a push and pull between two orders, as in bisociation. Here, we need to be aware of the mind as questing after order, without necessarily realizing it. The mere hint of another order may be enough to activate a deep search, which might be experienced as pleasurable [hedonic].

The unconscious is significant in this, for the search for the identification of regularities, which must begin as what, from the view of consciousness, we would call conjecture, is activated by interplay, variation, and deviation.

Bisociation of levels – chiming, etc.

[Economy] [Opposition]

distortion and substitution

deviation and extra patterning as foregrounding

neat for linguistics. but the pleasure of deviation and the pleasure of pattern are different

figures of speech and figures of thought

Notes on Synthesis

We aim at maximization – it is the telos, the star that guides, but the necessary flexibility to arrive at the best maximization available to limited creatures like ourselves means that we are in some ways set to pay attention to anomalies (though there is a countervailing tendency not to notice faults, etc. – this matter is more complex than I can deal with here). Maximization, the guiding star, is one we never reach. Hints of a pattern give a pleasurable, or hedonic, “stretch”. Variation around a general abstract pattern similarly keeps the actual pattern slightly beyond our grasp.  Bisociation as creative tension is like a stretch – the mind takes pleasure in the effort to achieve resolution.

The sheer random can give a pleasurable jolt. But do we really encounter the sheer random as such? Rather, an apparently unmotivated defamiliarization draws attention to itself, and calls for a making sense, calls for being rendered intelligible. In terms of frame-system theory, the mind searches for a frame to do this. This relates to Culler’s idea of expectation of a warrant, of meaning, and of significance.

I have here mentioned the random in association with defamiliarization, and this seems like a good place to draw in a duality I have mentioned elsewhere which is relevant to both creativity and evolutionary theory – the duality of random mutation and natural selection. An unmotivated defamiliarization corresponds to random mutation, and the telos of maximization as the selectional criterion, though here not directly natural, corresponds to natural selection.

John Lennon remarked once that he appreciated the work of James Joyce – Joyce had written somewhere “He warped across the room”, and Lennon said that he liked that, because it said something. But what?

Pure defamiliarization presages a bisociation.

Bisociation presages an integration, a maximization.

We have evolved to take pleasure in the looking for, and not merely in the finding of.

These ideas of search and of the hedonic, or pleasurable, indicate that the pleasure is in many ways of the unconscious. The pleasure of the sort of unconscious search we are here considering is not like the conscious and unpleasurable search for one’s misplaced door-keys – the unconscious works quite differently from the conscious, being massively parallel and extremely fast, so the pleasure of search can be, for consciousness, near instantaneous and all too brief.

So, a defamiliarization sets the mind, or calls the mind, to look for an interpretation – something that will give the defamiliarization significance, meaning in a wider sense, warrant.

Even in the case of a mere mistake, a truly random variation, or slip of the speech, we are likely to find comedy in it (or poetry, or insight) by relating it to another order of meaning. So, even in the case of pure deviation there is a tendency to search for meaning.

The random is unmotivated, and selection is warrant. Random is only such within a context (?) With clash of contexts, we have defamiliarization.

My general approach here is cognitivist, but I am at variance with the relatively separable school of thought called Evolutionary Psychology, at least in its mainstream: I believe we are more like general or generalized pattern spotters than their massive modularity approach would allow for. However, I believe we are to some extent modularized, and are certainly not simply perfect generalized abstract pattern spotters. We may be adept for some evolutionary reason at spotting certain patterns in sound, for example those within what we call music, and within humanly conceived language, but hopeless at others. The same applies to all sensory modalities.

 

Bridges

“Perhaps it would not satisfy completely, and that is what the esteemed author would have for all the diligence employed, whereas with a promise he could easily benefit himself and others even more than if he had written a prodigy of a system.”

“When the word “mediation” is merely mentioned, everything becomes so magnificent and grandiose that I do not feel well but am oppressed and chafed. Have compassion on me in only this one respect; exempt me from mediation …”

Kierkegaard – Prefaces

Here, I wish to make certain connections between the various articles on this site. For these connections, I take the metaphor of bridges, and subsidiary metaphors of islands, large and small land-masses, highlands and lowlands. Some of the bridges should be straight freeways, undergirded with iron, but many will seem for now like ricketty precarious swinging walkways, with shaky handrails of bamboo and old rope. Above, I quote Kierkegaard satirizing systematic philosophers who, in the wake of Hegel, give promissory notes to the effect that they will soon deliver “The System” – for him, the note is, for its merciful brevity, preferable to the full-blown system. Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, distrusted such systematizers, feeling that their systematization is inevitably also a falsification, forcing reality onto the mythical procrustean bed.
My “bridges” could be the equivalent of Kierkegaard’s promissory notes of, or perhaps more in lieu of, “The System” – I have the system-builder’s ambition, but alas, maybe not the stamina. So rather than here unveiling a pristine, crystalline architectonic, I will attempt to indicate some sort of unity by way of noting linkages between concepts across all the different articles. Without at least a glance at the other articles, what I say here will seem at best gnomic; this is not intended as an introduction, so do not start here.

NOTE: I have considered the use of hyperlinks, but for now don’t want to insert them for stylistic reasons.

Highlands and Lowlands

Most of my thought is underpinned by a generally “materialist” outlook, with which I was once preoccupied for a long while. “Mind and Brain” is the closest I’ve come to addressing issues around materialism, and there are also some remarks in “The Mind Ouroboros”, but in general I assume materialism rather than directly argue for it in a polemical manner. However, I hope that a materialist / naturalist / physicalist / realist sensibility is easily detected in general.

Materialism is usually taken as a position within metaphysics, or ontology, and realism as a position within epistemology. Materialism, to put it in the simplest way possible, is the belief that matter is more fundamental than mind – that mind is a form of, an arrangement of, matter, which sometimes arises. Realism, again to put it in the simplest way possible, is the belief that there is a real world, which exists independently of our thoughts, and that we can and do know something of it.

The materialist orientation is hardly unusual or remarkable in philosophy, but at some point my materialism took a novel inflection into an awareness and recognition of the importance of relations, patterns, and regularities, and this metaphysical notion is for the moment best expressed in the post “Relationalism”.

Parallel to this inflection of materialism into relationalism is an inflection of my realism by an acknowlegement of the importance of schemata – a Kantian element. This is elucidated at the start of “The Mind Ouroboros” in the first section, “Frames”.

Relationalism is a very speculative and rudimentary attempt to expound a metaphysics based primarily on relations, using graph-theoretical notions, and this misty highland connects with the lower lands of pattern and regularity, both very much relationalist concepts, and maximization. One need not commit to the extreme version of relationalism of the article, but merely be prepared to give relationships their ontological due. Certainly, Patterns does not oblige one to my idea of Relationalism, since patterns can be across objects, properties, and other ontological categories.

With pattern and regularity, we must group maximization. Maximization is a core concept within my aesthetics, but transcends this – in its subjective aspect, it is a vital task of mind to identify patterns. In its objective aspect, it is a feature of complexity, indeed in algorithmic information theory a definition of complexity.

Relationalism, pattern, regularity and maximization, and schemata and frames, all fit very well with the generally formalist tendency at the core of the article Aesthetics.

Complexity deals with cyclicity, a general feature of life and metabolism, and The Mind Ouroboros with Edelman’s concept of re-entrance, the psychological form of the same. A unity of life and mind is discernible.

Between Ontology and Schemata, it is difficult to decide which constitutes the highland and which the lowland. In a sense, the two are roughly equivalent. For Kant, the Categories (the top-level ontology) are more basic than the schemata, which are something like a temporalisation of the Categories in their grasping of sense-data.

A top-level ontology is an attempt to specify the way frames or schemata usually fall in terms of their most abstract categories, which would make top-level ontology the highlands of ontology and schemata. However, top-level ontology is a species of ontology, and thus at a lower level: a species of ontology in general!

Another consideration is that Ontology is often regarded as a fundamental division of philosophy, and so a highland. Really, here, I regard the two concepts (Ontology and Schemata) as intimately related, and it is a matter of the specific enquiry which is the higher. However, some more observations might help to clarify their relationship.

Looking through the literature on frames / schemata, it seems to me that ontology has a much better articulation of terms, with a much more precise “grammar” – accounts of frame-system theory and schemata theory tend to have “has a”, “is a”, and so on in quite an ad hoc manner. Frames have a sort of micro-ontology, but display no attempt to integrate all their entities and relations in the global way that ontologies do. So, following the restaurant script, we encounter the menu as if it is some sort of unproblematic basic object. Frames, schemas and scripts represent the typicalities or stereotypicalities of certain recurring kinds of situation, whereas ontologies attempt to represent ultimate generalities.

A related question might be why the relation of Ontology to Metaphysics is not more clearly elucidated. My main excuse is that my Kantian tack leads me to consider Ontology primarily under the umbrella of Epistemology. In another sense of the use of the term Ontology, it is, like my metaphysics, materialist – in objective terms, if we are considering “matter” and “mind” as ontological categories, I, like all materialists worthy of the name, regard the former as primary.

Similarly, Complexity should be taken as falling under Materialism, perhaps with “emergence” and “levels” as stops on the bridge, and then up to the highlands, perhaps by way of Relationalism.

Bridges of Duality – The Importance of Trade

“Duality” is in many ways the acceptable face of dualism: it is a mastered opposition, often, once grasped, expressed with the metaphor “two sides of the same coin”. To continue in an economic mode of metaphor, a duality is two islands linked by the bridge of commerce – each side of a duality needs the other.

The most significant duality is that between patterns and schemata. Without some purchase on the identification of patterns or regularities, schemata and ontology would be merely an unmotivated classification exercise or procedure. The whole raison d’etre for a schema or an ontology is as an aid to identifying patterns, primarily at and for our level and manner of existence.

Complexity

Could “Complexity Theory” be an oxymoron? Melanie Mitchell in her book “Complexity: A Guided Tour” talks of “the sciences of complexity”, and this might indicate a lack of integration to the field. Indeed, John Bragin in a review of the book for the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation notes the lack of broad agreement on necessary and sufficient fundamentals within the field, shown by great variability in the course materials for its study at different educational institutions, and the absence of widely accepted and recognised textbooks. Perhaps complexity is just complicatedness, and general theories will forever elude us – complexity might inhabit the interstices of various theories, shot through so completely with contingency and local uniqueness as to evade generalization into any sort of global paradigm. This reminds us of the saying that the Devil (or God, depending on one’s theology) is in the details.

An interesting turning-around of complexity is made by Cohen and Stewart in their book “The Collapse of Chaos” – they indicate that one of the tasks of complexity theory is to explain high-level simplicities, which make the world to some extent navigable for creatures like ourselves; in many ways we do not experience an overwhelming explosion of complexity; they coin the term “simplexity” to indicate this aspect of reality.

Darwinian evolution, the theory of natural selection, seems to be a well-established and relatively simple, at least in its basic outlines, kind of complexity theory, and is often considered in the literature of complexity theory. (For now, here and elsewhere, I take Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, and its concomitants as given and assumed, rather than something I need argue for or about as such.)

[bridging laws]

Why isn’t there just fundamental physics? As Per Bak asks in his ground-breaking book “How Nature Works” –

“How can the universe start with a few types of elementary particles at the big
bang, and end up with life, history, economics, and literature? The question is
screaming out to be answered but it is seldom even asked. Why did the big
bang not form a simple gas of particles, or condense into one big crystal?”

I’ve already used the term “level”. The idea of levels is often invoked to explain higher orders of complexity, and here the related concepts of emergence and hierarchy are relevant. Levels are a fascinating aspect of reality, but should not be taken to dispel all mystery. Rather, I think levels are part of what is to be explained, and not a thorough explanation. We must always bear in mind that levels is very much a metaphor. Often, levels seem bound up with grain and resolution, micro- and macro-, fundamental physics often dealing with the very small, chemistry with full atoms and molecules, biology with biochemistry and larger entities, and so on. However, this is not always the case, for example, the astrophysics of gravity deals with some vast objects.

We often think of there as being a kind of hierarchy of sciences, which would be something like – physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, to put it in a rudimentary form. I’ve appropriated this diagram from the web to illustrate the idea, but it’s probably familiar –

Each higher science is more limited in its applicability to reality, for example, physics would apply across the universe, but biology only to restricted situations. This interpretation of the narrowing towards the pinnacle of the triangle may be more proper than its suggestiveness for our inclinations to think of superiority and “the higher the fewer”. Personally, I would not count Mathematics as a science, nor put Arts at the pinnacle (the understanding of the arts, aesthetics, maybe).

This article will consider what we might call “Actually Existing Complexity”, complexity as it arises in the physical world. My article Maximization pays more attention to complexity in its mathematical, informational, algorithmic form, as something measurable.

The field of complexity could clearly be quite vast. It is difficult to follow my own path whilst still accurately showing the field, especially as the field is not settled, so I will try to indicate, as I go along, that wider field. My own path here will be to explore some fundamental ideas rooted in the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems as pioneered by Ilya Prigogine, and then attempt to unify these ideas with a consideration of complexity as involving some sort of circularity, utilizing ideas from Wiener, Kauffman, Edelman, and Maturana and Varela. The two movements are thus –

1 Thermodynamics – Prigogine

2 Cybernetics – Wiener

I’m hoping to move from Prigogine’s ideas of the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium open systems, via the idea of imbalance, to the idea of something separating off and forming a boundary. I’m then going to try to drive forward the idea of boundary, and circular processes within the boundary, in tandem, and I hope they can be seen as two sides of the same coin.

_____________BELOW HERE UNDER CONSTRUCTION______________

The Prehistory of Complexity Theory

1. General System Theory                      founded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy
2. Cybernetics                                            founded by Norbert Wiener

Complexity Theory could be regarded as the modern equivalent of the search for the philosopher’s stone, and has its precursors in systems theory and cybernetics (we might also add here dialectics, which I deal with in an independent article, and holism, gestalt, …, perhaps even going back to the hermetic and alchemical traditions …)

Both General System Theory and Cybernetics took as imperative the desirability of identifying similar patterns (Bertalanffy talks of “isomorphic laws”) which occur within different specialized sciences. It is here that we encounter an idea which vertically cuts downwards through our idea of levels: similar laws may be identified at different levels within our hierarchy. This indicates a deep integrity to the levels, a similarity between them, with “systems” as the potentially unifying concept.

On Russian Formalism

“We do not see the walls of our rooms”  Victor Shklovsky

Russian Formalism began in the immediately pre-revolutionary period in Russia, developed through the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods, receiving some negative criticisms from within the new communist regime, most notably from Leon Trotsky, and was suppressed as Russia descended into the Stalinist night. It is in many ways at the inception of modern literary theory, fathering early Structuralism by way of Prague, though in the west its influence was largely posthumous and belated, as if it was time-warped from 1920’s Russia to 1960’s Western Europe.

Russian Formalism was not very tightly unified as a school, but its general orientation was to overcome the sort of criticism and reflection on literature which preceded it, and which is in other places and at all times, even now, a pole of attraction – a muddling of specifically literary concerns with biographical, even gossipy, details of an author’s life, psychological conjectures, over-emphasis on contemporary social events and currents, philosophical musings, assorted tittle-tattle, and so on. All this, the Formalists felt, condemned literary theory to an unscientific, cosy dilettantism, and, though the sorts of concerns just indicated may have their place as subsidiary enquiries, these were obscuring our view of the specifically literary. In contrast to this, many of the Formalists saw their project as being to put literary studies on a scientific footing.

One can detect even from this rudimentary outline a tendency to emphasize the autonomy, whether relative or absolute, of literature, and to split it off from its embeddedness in wider society; as one might expect, the communist regime did not look too kindly on it, being guided by a philosophy which is in many ways quite the opposite.

“Formalist” was, at least initially, not a term of their own choosing, but more a term of disparagement from their opponents, such as we find in the phrase “merely formal” – their own view of themselves is, perhaps, better indicated by the term “specifiers”: they were trying to analyse what was specific to literature that made it literature. As they developed their views, they started to define their object not as literature but as literariness – literary texts may have a multiplicity of features, but it was the literary features which were of central concern to literary theory.

The Formalists had two main geographical centres – St. Petersburg was home to the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, (acronymed in Russian as Opojaz), and Moscow to the Moscow Linguistic Circle. The key figure in the St. Petersburg society was Victor Shklovsky, and the leader of the Moscow circle Roman Jakobson.

Shklovsky maintained that “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony”, and that this was accomplished by a certain technique – “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

The central notion here is usually named Defamiliarization, or Estrangement (“making strange”), from the Russian Ostranenie.  Closely related terms are Alienation (taken up by Bertolt Brecht), De-automatization, Deformation, Distortion, and Deviation.

Shklovsky believed that in ordinary life we tend to fall prey to a tendency to “recognize” rather than really “see” things – our perceptions become routine, habitual, and automatized – “We no more feel the world in which we live than we feel the clothes we wear.” and “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it – hence, we cannot say anything significant about it.” However, “Art removes objects from the automatism of perception …”

The main way this is done is through the peculiar form language takes in literary works – “The language of poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, impeded language.” “The poet brings about a semantic dislocation, he snatches the concept out of the sequence in which it is usually found and transfers it with the aid of the word (the trope) to another meaning-sequence. And now we have a sense of novelty at finding the object in a fresh sequence.”

In some ways, Shklovsky seems to be flying in the face of a lot of our intuitions about art – for instance, that poetic language is the most direct and immediate form of language. Yet, if we pick up on his use of the word “trope” here, we can begin to make some sort of sense of what he is getting at. “Trope” is originally Greek, meaning a turn, an alteration, or a change, and is roughly equivalent to “figure of speech” or “rhetorical device”. The key idea is that in using language in altered ways, our perception of the world is changed and freshened.

I mentioned earlier that in attempting to found literary theory as an autonomous discipline, the Formalists frowned upon psychological conjectures – they had as their targets those who had too great a concern with the mindset or attitudes of a writer, and those who regarded literature as being in some special way about the mind, as telling us about the mind. However, Shklovsky’s thought clearly has a psychological dimension in a different sense – we are dealing with perception, caught within the polarity of its automatization and its defamiliarization.

In developing the concept of defamiliarization, the early Russian Formalist analysis bifurcated – some saw defamiliarization as related to general perception and not exclusively linguistic (Shklovsky tends in this direction) whilst others saw defamiliarization as essentially linguistic. That which is defamiliarized could thus either be out in the big wide world, or be constructions within language itself.

_____________BELOW HERE UNDER CONSTRUCTION______________

The Formalists who were more inclined to generalize features of literature outside literature itself noted the similarity between literature and other arts, and, whilst this seems to pull poetics away from the purely linguistic, the concept of semiotics, a science of signs which would include linguistics as a subsector, would afford some room for manouevre even for specifiers: literature would be a species within two genera – language, and art – both of which could be understood within semiotics. Whether the understanding of pure music or pure abstract art can be largely assimilated within a semiotic paradigm, orientated as it is to the concept of the sign, remains a puzzle.

Shklovsky pays great attention to Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse” where the observation of human behaviour and values from the perspective of a horse serves to defamiliarize and subvert our habitual outlook. Though the story depends on language in the most obvious way, its main impact is not achieved by unusual use of language, but rather at the semantic level. Although this example is one from prose fiction, it is not too difficult to find similar examples within poetry.

Structuralist Poetics and the New Criticism

Re-reading Jonathan Culler’s seminal Structuralist Poetics last summer, I was pleasantly surprised to note that in the chapter on Poetics of the Lyric, (the chapter most at the focus of my own concerns), Culler seemed to indicate that after the Structuralist groundwork, our theories could make some use of New Critical ideas of the content of literary works.

My surprise was a result of a conditioning which dates way back – when first studying literary theory in the mid-1980’s at Leeds, the New Critics were the recently-overthrown consensus – the status quo ante – and the still somewhat new-fangled approaches of Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Marxism, then in ascendancy, were often set in contrast to the old school. New Criticism was old hat, and often portrayed as intrinsically reactionary and conservative, particularly for its idea of the literary text as showing integration and reconciliation.

My surprise was pleasant, since I’ve felt for a while that this “revolutionary” rejection of the New Critics threw some precious babies out with the bathwater. This is ironic, in that the Young Turks of Structuralism and Marxism in many ways had a philosophical view of the world, or at least the human world, as oppositional, in contradiction, in tension, and dialectical. To me, irony, paradox, ambiguity and other terms of the New Critics are not a million miles away from the framework of their erstwhile opponents.

My own inclinations as a theorist are towards the formalist pole, but clearly sheer form, without what I provisionally call “human concern”, would, if scrupulously adhered to, give us fairly arid works of art, such as would only delight a thoroughgoing technician. Only within music, I think, do we find entirely successful and purely formal artworks.

Yet a complete separation of form and humanly-interesting content, as if they were two different dimensions, seems to fall short of what we would expect of an adequate aesthetics. It is here that I find the direction of Culler’s thought suggestive in indicating a bridge between the two.

Culler begins the chapter “Poetics of the Lyric” by arguing, with apt examples, that to read a poem as a poem is at least partly a matter of conventions and expectations which are in many ways external to any intrinsic features of the “poem”. Neither linguistic deviation nor formal patterns, both often considered as the two generic forms of such intrinsic features, will suffice to clarify this matter. I make much, elsewhere, of just these two forms, but here, we are stepping back to a point which analytically precedes that formalist stage.

(Note – Because I capitalize “New Criticism” and “New Critics” throughout (to identify it as a school), I usually capitalize “Structuralism” and “Structuralist”, for consistency.)

Distance and Deixis

[indexical, demonstrative, anaphora]

We read a poem with a kind of distance, taking it out of any usual circuit of communication, and taking it impersonally. Again, this is an expectation brought to the poem. This expectation alters the effects of deictics or shifters:

“for our purposes the most interesting are first and second person pronouns (whose meaning in ordinary discourse is ‘the speaker’ and ‘the person addressed’), anaphoric articles and demonstratives which refer to an external context rather than to
other elements in the discourse, adverbials of place and time whose reference depends on the situation of utterance (here, there, now, yesterday) and verb tenses, especially the non-timeless present.”

“we recognize from the outset that such deictics are not determined by an actual situation of utterance but operate at a certain distance from it.” p. 193

Culler regards these conventions of reading as operating to fulfil the demands of coherence and of thematic function.

Totality / Unity / Coherence

With his consideration of the second fundamental convention of the lyric, the expectation of totality or coherence, Culler moves closer to concerns which were also those of the New Critics. Near synonyms are unity, (organic) wholeness, harmony, and symmetry. Again, Culler emphasizes that this is a convention of reading, as much as a property of the poem.

“even if we deny the need for a poem to be a harmonious totality we make use of the notion in reading. Understanding is necessarily a teleological process and a sense of totality is the end which governs its progress.” p. 200

Culler concludes his consideration of totality by noting that its literary manifestation is a version of ideas explored in gestalt psychology, and lists six models of unity –

binary opposition

dialectical resolution of a binary opposition

displacement of an opposition by a third term

four-term homology

series united by a common denominator

series with a transcendent or summarizing final term

Provisionally, I note that the first three form a group based on opposition, and the last two are based on difference (and similarity) rather than opposition.

“Four-term homology” is explored by Culler more thoroughly elsewhere in Structuralist Poetics. It is the pattern that a is to b as c is to d. This is generally regarded as a parallelism indicated or sought between two pairs of oppositions. It is not clear to me that a and b need be opposites, but again, we encounter the pervasiveness of opposition within human thought. Four-term homology seems to be very closely related to analogy and metaphor, though perhaps of the type whereby the network of some of the concepts in the poem indicates an anatomization of each of the source and target terms. I would regard it as somewhere between opposition and similarity / difference, perhaps a fusion of the two.

Significance

Regarding significance, once again Culler treats this as a matter of the conventions we bring to a poem as much as a feature of the poem.

Maximization

__________________________________________________________

“A poetic text is ‘semantically saturated’, condensing more ‘information’ than any other discourse; but whereas for modern communication theory in general an increase in ‘information’ leads to a decrease in ‘communication’ (since I cannot ‘take in’ all that you so intensively tell me), this is not so in poetry because of its unique kind of internal organisation. Poetry has a minimum of ‘redundancy’ – of those signs which are present in a discourse to facilitate communication rather than convey information – but still manages to produce a richer set of messages than any other form of language.”

___________________           Terry Eagleton on Yuri Lotman, in “Literary Theory”.

I have indicated elsewhere that one of the principal tasks of the mind is the identification of patterns, or regularities.  I felt that it was necessary to explore this area from a scientific viewpoint, and took recourse to a book by Murray Gell-Mann, “The Quark and the Jaguar”. Gell-Mann is one of the foremost theoretical physicists of the last century, the key figure in the development of quantum chromodynamics, and the man who named the quark. His book is a popular exposition of his ideas on how the fundamental laws of physics give rise to the complexity we see around us, and is extremely wide-ranging, from sections on quantum mechanics to considerations on the degradation of the environment. However, my focus here is on one aspect of the book: in dealing with complexity, he gives a good overview of ideas of regularity as developed within information theory. He acknowledges a debt to the work of Charles H. Bennett, physicist and information theorist, for the concepts underpinning these sections.

I have two particular concerns here:

Firstly, with the relevance or adequacy of these ideas to our understanding of the mind as some sort of pattern identifier.

Secondly, with their possible relevance to, and clarification of, notions within poetics and literary theory of the poetic or literary work, at least the “great” or worthwhile ones, as being particularly complex, “rich”, or saturated with meaning. Indeed, such ideas are not restricted to academic theory, but are part of many people’s intuitions about the more highly-valued works. The quote at the head of this section indicates these views, but also represents an attempt to make precise such intuitions about this complexity and richness, and perhaps validate them, by putting them under the magnifying glass of complexity theory and information theory, to find out whether literary works have some sort of particular or peculiar informational richness. It is very much in the same spirit that this enquiry will be conducted.

But before I deal with these two concerns, I will give a brief synopsis of Gell-Mann’s presentation.

[Crude] Complexity – Algorithmic Information Content

The first measure of complexity which Gell-Mann considers is Algorithmic Information Content. I will represent strings of information here in binary, as that is the basic level to which all strings or streams of information are assumed by information theory to be reducible. An example of a binary bit string would be –

10010111010100010101111.

If we have a bit string such as –

1010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010

this has low algorithmic information content, since its description can be shortened to something like –

PRINT “10” x 50.

(A purist might at this point cry “foul!”, since my shortened description is not itself in binary, but I must crack on.) The bit string has low algorithmic content, since it follows one simple pattern.

By contrast, imagine a bit string of a hundred 1’s or 0’s which has very few, perhaps no regularities – such a string as might be generated by a hundred coin tosses recorded in sequence. Such a bit string would, in all likelihood, have high algorithmic information content, since it would be difficult to compress into a shorter description; some aspects might be compressible, but to nothing like the level of our very regular string.

There are subtleties to the concept of randomness, which Gell-Mann discusses, but which need not detain us here. I refer readers to the actual book should they be interested.

How does Algorithmic Information Content fare as a candidate measure of the sorts of complexity in which we might be interested?

Not very well – “randomness” isn’t quite what we mean by “complexity”; as Gell-Mann points out, a longish string generated by outputs from the proverbial monkey on a typewriter would have higher algorithmic information content than a string of the same length from the works of Shakespeare, but we would surely think of the Shakespearean string as more complex. For such reasons, algorithmic information content has been dubbed a measure of “crude” complexity.

Effective Complexity

Is there a better measure of complexity than crude complexity / algorithmic information content, one which might more fruitfully capture and clarify our intuitions? It seems that there is: “effective complexity”. Effective complexity is the length of a concise description of a string’s regularities. The diagram at the start of this article, taken from Gell-Mann, indicates how effective complexity varies with crude complexity.

The concept of effective complexity is important, as it means we can be a little clearer about whether we are talking about maximization of information, or maximization of patterning. The latter is more central to our concerns with psychology and aesthetics, and is captured at least provisionally in this concept.

For the sake of completeness, I’ll mention here two other concepts – [Logical] Depth, and Crypticity, but make little of them; again, curious readers are referred to Gell-Mann’s book.

Logical Depth is the time it takes to compute from a program or schema to a full description of the system, or at least of the system’s regularities.

Crypticity is something like the reciprocal of this – the time it takes to compute from a full description to a program or schema.

Complex Adaptive Systems

Gell-Mann also considers what we could regard as the subjective pole to these ideas of complexity, the sorts of beings which have evolved to identify and exploit regularities within information. He terms such beings Complex Adaptive Systems, of which the most familiar are biological creatures, including ourselves, but the category also includes certain forms of computerized system which evolved systems such as ourselves have designed.

The identification of regularities involves their condensation into a “schema” or model, and such schemata can then be used as the basis for action. Gell-Mann also talks of compression of regularities.

Schemata are for purposes of description, prediction, and prescription. Gell-Mann is clearly an evolutionary thinker, and regards complex adaptive systems as things which are results of a honing by natural selection; in this regard, I find his triple of purposes pleasing; logically, description comes first, the use of such regularities in prediction second, and the use of such prediction for the prescription of actions to be executed in the world third.

But in evolutionary terms, the order can be reversed – it is the usefulness for survival in the “smart” actions prescribed by the identification of regularities which drives the increasing sophistication of the complex adaptive systems as pattern identifiers.

Limitations

However, unless I’m missing something, there seems to be a gap between the idea of compression of effective complexity and what we would more humanly think of as schemata; a merely mathematical notion of compression may be in danger of elision into an already-interpreted idea of condensation of sensory flux into concepts. There is not really any sort of bridge here between a pure and rather abstract notion of a pattern spotter, and what we might regard as an Actually Existing Pattern Spotter – a mammal, intelligent bird, or whatnot – within the general concept of “pattern spotter”, outside of computerized systems, born mathematicians, and other specialists.

The concept of “schema” runs the danger of getting blurred into something like “shortest mathematical description” in a way which obscures the role of conceptual thought, whilst seeming to have covered it. This is partly because “schema” is in use within other areas of philosophy, with a broader and more psychologistic meaning.

Related to this, there is little indication in this material of any decent general heuristics for deriving effective complexity. Gell-Mann considers pattern identification in a fairly abstract and mathematical way, which I think is fine, and should indeed be part of our understanding of what is meant by “pattern” and “regularity”. But Gell-Mann only gives us an abstract description of what a pattern identifier does.

None of this is to find fault with Gell-Mann, but only to indicate a possible way forward, in that this use of “schema” might not fully capture “concept”, though concepts surely are a way of condensing regularities.

As an aside, an interesting insight afforded by such an abstract and mathematical treatment is that it involves us in what I call “Godelisation”; it is quite likely, perhaps provable, that we can never arrive at a general “best pattern identifier” – one that would spot and condense all regularities in what we would know to be the neatest way; effective complexity seems to fall prey to problems here in the same way that algorithmic complexity has been proven to. Readers may be aware of such issues from acquaintance with the work of Kurt Godel and Alan Turing.

Effective Complexity and Literary Theory

Within literary theory, there is a school of thought which privileges foregrounding as the distinctive feature of literary texts. Foregrounding is regarded as achievable by two means – deviation, and extra patterning. I am sympathetic with the identification of these two aspects of literary and poetic works as fundamental. (I am, however, at present uneasy with their subsumption under the function of foregrounding, but my unease must await proper consideration, exploration, and justification elsewhere on this site.)

Deviation and extra patterning are in a sense opposites – deviation being a loss of regularity, and extra patterning an apparently superfluous regularity.

The considerations here give some precising of, and constraint on, the notion of extra patterning, extra regularities, or, as Geoffrey M. Leech puts it, “parallelism in the widest sense of that word.” In conclusion, I’d like to refer back to the Eagleton quote at the head of this article – the distinction between maximization of information (crude complexity) and maximization of patterning (effective complexity) explored in our enquiry could help clarify and further develop Eagleton’s (and Lotman’s) intuitions, rescuing them from surface mystification and paradox, and helping to shed further light on at least one aspect of the “unique kind of internal organisation” of poetry.

Finally, I must point out that this article has only cut a certain path through Gell-Mann’s “The Quark and the Jaguar” for my own purposes – my comments should not be taken as a review of the book as a whole. My focus has been narrow, but the book itself is panoramic, and at times the view is breathtaking.

_____________BELOW HERE UNDER CONSTRUCTION______________

One of the main ways in which maximization of patterning can occur within literature is through the exploitation of the various linguistic levels – at the phonic level: rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, etc., add regularities; at the syntactic level, parallels can be established, and so on.

[Complex patterning across linguistic levels – e.g. the use of more purely linguistic patterns to establish a semantic pattern]

[Problems with the foregrounding model]

[Bennett and Gell-Mann’s other two articles.]

The Mind Ouroboros

Frames

The concept of frames can be traced back, at least, to Kant, who believed that the mind necessarily utilizes Schemas or Schemata. His basic insight was that we understand the world through an internal framework; incoming sensory data, “raw data” as it’s sometimes put, is processed through a system of categories. For Kant, these divide into two types – the a priori “forms” – space and time, which for Kant were respectively Euclidean and Newtonian, and the categories proper, in his terminology – such things as causality and the having of properties. All of the foregoing are what we generally think of as falling under the study of ontology, and are essential to Kant’s understanding of “synthetic” reasoning. Schemata are the link between the forms and categories, and sensory experience; the Schemata render experience intelligible.

For Kant, such schemata were trans-historical – part of the nature of human reasoning itself, and unchangeable – we cannot get outside them to see the world “as it really is”. I am not, here, particularly interested in expounding the ideas of Kant, but rather in the usefulness of this concept of frames. It seems to me that there may be such basic, unchangeable categories (though perhaps they can be altered within scientific disciplines, as has happened to Euclidean and Newtonian frameworks), but also, more changeable frameworks, of a cultural or individual psychological nature, which can alter, develop, or sometimes go awry. These more alterable frameworks might be based on the more fundamental frameworks: a sort of malleable superstructure on an adamantine foundation, the more specific grounded in the more general.

This idea of frames was picked up again, or perhaps reinvented, with the development of Artificial Intelligence in the post-war period. One of the problems which the attempt to build intelligent machines started to encounter was that though computers were good at using abstract logical rules, they had no way of classifying or understanding information about the real world, of “recognizing” or having familiarity with certain situations. A possible solution to this was proposed by Marvin Minsky, one of the leading lights in the field, with his “Frame System Theory”:

“A frame is a sort of skeleton, somewhat like an application form with many blanks or slots to be filled. We’ll call these blanks its terminals; we use them as connection points to which we can attach other kinds of information. For example, a frame that represents a “chair” might have some terminals to represent a seat, a back, and legs, while a frame to represent a “person” would have some terminals for a body and head and arms and legs. To represent a particular chair or person, we simply fill in the terminals of the corresponding frame with structures that represent, in more detail, particular features of the back, seat, and legs of that particular person or chair.” Minsky, The Society of Mind. p.245

Particularly important is the idea of “default assignments” – we assume some typical assignments. Thus we deal with things as, in a sense, stereotypes. As Minsky notes, “Much of the phenomenological power of the theory hinges on the inclusion of expectations and other kinds of presumptions.” Minsky, A Framework for Representing Knowledge.

Minsky also talks of super-frames and sub-frames, more general frames which would perhaps embrace more specific frames.

A similar idea, perhaps more temporally orientated, is the idea of a “script” – a kind of template of typical things we might expect, and typical actions or responses, within a delineated field (for example, a restaurant). Schank and Abelson developed this approach. These ideas, though useful, hardly solved all the problems in the field of A.I., but that need not concern us here. Similar ideas to those of frame, framework, schema and script are Koestler’s idea of matrix and Kuhn’s much used (and abused) idea of paradigms.

We have, so far, a sort of duality – of Frame and of what I will call Data.

I’ve indicated that the sort of frames in which I am interested would be the more flexible ones, the ones which are subject to alteration. (It seems that it was the flexibility of human frames which posed one of the difficulties which A.I. then encountered). Such alteration could be refinement, modification, collapse, synthesis or tension with another frame, extension, over-extension or increasing rigidity (as in some forms of obsessive behaviour), and perhaps could take many other forms.

Now, the question is, what causes the alteration, or perhaps, what determines the alteration? Possibly, other frames. Or perhaps the incoming data alters the frames? I’m going to leave that question hanging for a while, but return to it later.

Neurons and Brains

I’ve been exploring the idea of frames because it seems that it gives us insight into how the human mind can do the sort of things that it does – thinking, understanding, being conscious, and so on. I’d like now to take a step back, and consider some aspects of what we generally accept to be the material basis for the mind, which is the brain.

The mind has long puzzled philosophers. One modern school of thought, the “mysterians”, believe that an understanding of consciousness within a materialist framework will always elude us, and as part of this belief, think that advances in the understanding of the brain will be of little use for understanding consciousness. Colin McGinn, a philosopher of this tendency, says –

“How could the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness? We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic.”

A philosopher of the opposed school, [the source, alas, eludes me for now] says that such aggregations of neurons are exactly the sort of thing which could underpin the mind. This opposed school of thought insists that understanding of the brain will go a long way, perhaps all the way, to helping our understanding of the mind. My own sympathies are with this latter school, though I don’t think, as yet, we have anything like an adequate understanding.

What is it about all these squiggly wiggly neurons that makes them good candidates? First, a fairly basic observation – the brain is the destination for the incoming neuronal bundles, from the senses, and the source of the outgoing bundles, motor neurons, which cause our actions and behaviour. Damage to incoming or outgoing bundles can affect our capabilities, and damage to the brain can too. Crudely, the brain is “in the middle”, so may well be the core component. Even dualists, those who believe the mind is separate from the brain, tend to put the mind/body interface in the region of the brain.

But there are deeper reasons. In the quote above, the word “aggregate” seems to me to be significantly wrong; the neurons are interconnected in vastly complex ways – they are parts within a whole, the whole having a structure. Now, I’ve used here the two words “interconnected” and “complex”, but the development of Complexity Theory indicated that these two concepts are not merely related externally – there’s something about interconnection which is part of the nature of complexity.

I’ve talked about interconnection, but interconnection is a fairly static concept – if we want a picture of this, we imagine the neurons as vastly entangled. The dynamism comes from what the neurons do; they fire when incoming signals from other neurons reach a threshold, transferring an impulse down the cell body, possibly firing other neurons. This signal, to my knowledge, always goes one way. Another important feature is that the more one neuron fires up another, the more it is likely to; the insight from Donald Hebb’s research in this area is – “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” (I’m making a massive generalization and simplification here, which doesn’t always hold, but nevertheless the simplification gives us a way forward). We have, with this finding, a potential source of flexibility.  Neurons are themselves quite complex, and their behaviour includes all sorts of subtleties, but the important point for me is the idea of direction, because at the level of complexes of neurons, we find that neurons don’t merely feed from the senses to the motor neurons in a simple “handing on the baton” kind of way, but can loop back, so that neuron A. might connect to neuron B., neuron B. to neuron C., and neuron C. back to neuron A. Add in to this image that other neurons are also feeding into and out of neurons A., B., and C., that we have billions of neurons, and also think of the way that the extent of the firing can alter the strength of the connection between one neuron and another, thus meaning that process can modify structure, and we seem to have a few ideas in play which give us a glimpse of a very complex and malleable system.

Reentrance and Feedback

The foregoing sketch will probably remind many people of the idea of “feedback”. Feedback is a very important concept within Cybernetics, the study of control and communication within the animal and machinic worlds, and studies of systems: General System Theory, Operational Research, and Management Theory. It is key to understanding how complex systems maintain a steady or optimal state within a changing environment. It deals with the sort of circular causation outlined above, but might perhaps best be regarded as a special case of a wider phenomenon. A thinker who has influenced my ideas here, Gerald Edelman, talks of “reentrance” with reference to neural assemblies, which he is at pains to distinguish from “feedback”. Unfortunately, Edelman is not the clearest of writers, and the point is moot regarding whether he is dealing with a form of feedback.

Most important for me is that feedback alone doesn’t seem fully to account for a system that can alter its actual structure – not its fundamental structure, certainly not its biochemical nature, nor many levels up – but its mid-level structures, in a way that isn’t captured by the idea of a mere change of state – whether of a thermostat or of a much more complex and multi-leveled feedback device.

Squaring the Circle: Framing the Cycles

In the earlier sections of this chapter, I wrote of the duality of frame and data, and left a question hanging – What causes the alteration of frames? In the later sections, I wrote about neurons and such stuff. I would now like to try to pull these different ideas together and attempt an answer to the question.

In a sense, the only thing that can alter a frame is data – we can imagine this as some kind of lack of fit between the data and the frame provoking an adjustment. Yet this seems too much to require data to speak for itself, to interpret itself – as if it can protest at the imposition of an ill-fitting frame, and this seems wrong.

It certainly seems that it is the incoming data which can be the only real source of change in the neural networks; left to themselves, we would expect the patterns of activation of the network to settle into a stable state or an endlessly repeating cycle, the physical equivalent of a solipsistic, self-contained and unchanging world-view (this is to treat the matter abstractly – I don’t know what the physiological results of such a nightmare situation are).

I think the best way of understanding how change comes about is to think of the input, the downstream-back-to-upstream circularity, and synapse strengthening all at once; these things in combination are responsible for the mutability of frames. They are core to an understanding of human creativity.

Aporia

“the river–bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the
movement of the waters on the river–bed and the shift of the bed
itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the
other.”      Ludwig Wittgenstein – On Certainty

But even at this abstract level, the idea of a frame is sitting uneasily with the idea of a circular network; there is a fundamental difference between the hypothesized frames and the hypothesized networks: frames seem like a phenomenological conjecture, whereas networks are purely physical in nature; frames seem already semiotically interpreted – slots for properties, and so on, whereas networks seem pre-semiotic. In a way, that is okay, as we can see the frames as emergent from the more physicalistic networks, but we still feel the need for some middle steps to make things clearer.

I don’t have an answer to this, a way of bridging the gap between the two models, even though I think the two models both stand a reasonable chance of being valuable to our understanding of the mind/brain. The most I can hope for is that my way of presenting the problem might be useful to its solution. I will conclude with a hopefully suggestive observation on another difference between the models:

The “frame” model seems mainly to be in a dimension “head on” to incoming data – we imagine it as a record, a form, with each of its fields getting populated as the mind shifts attention.

The model of circular neural networks is orthogonal to that – we represent it with inputs to the left, spiralling forms of transformation in the middle, and outputs to the right.

There are possible link-ups though – wider and more all-embracing spirals might be the set frame, and narrower inputs the data. Physiologically, there is no absolute division between structure and state changes at the levels which interest us.

NOTE – I have recently (25/04/2015), since writing this article, come across a passage in John H. Holland’s “Complexity: A Very Short Introduction”, which, if I’m interpreting it correctly, gives some back-up to my points above –

“Loops
The combination of high fanout and hierarchical organization results in complex networks that include large numbers of sequences that form loops. Loops recirculate signals and resources … Loops also offer control through positive and negative feedback (as in a thermostat). Equally important, loops make possible program-like ‘subroutines’ that are partially autonomous in the sense that their activity is only modulated by surrounding activity rather than being completely controlled by it.”