psychoethology

What may have been and continue to be the consequences of a perceived dualism for the human species?

2005-01-11T20:05:00.000Z

I believe that the mind-body problem will always exist for the human species. We will continue to feel that we are not made of one, but of two types of substances: one material, the body, and the other immaterial, the mind. It is a phenomenological problem: we experience the mind as immaterial, hardly related to bodily functions. We don’t know what’s going on inside our bodies, the vaguely idea we can have is given to us through the mind: we construct an explanation about what we are feeling and we make an inference about what might be happening within our bodies.

So, trying to explain what the mind is, we have to deal with the fact that our first impression is that it is something of a different nature than our body or our brain. Traditionally, that dualistic kind of thinking was followed by most philosophers, like Rodrigo de Sá exposed in is post. And like Paulo tried to show us, we need to perceive this limitation, so as to be able to address the subject in a most profitable way.

I think that the mind and the body are not different entities.
For me, the great problem of a position that states that the mind is not just a result of the neuronal activity is that it will have to explain, how is after all a mind made up: what is there that is more than the activity of the brain.

You may call me a materialist, like Rodrigo de Sá has called himself. What I know is that without a brain and a body there is no mind. So, the mind must be a result of the functioning of the brain. It is part of the body, and not a separate entity.

For me, the important question is: what must a brain or a nervous system have to contain, so that a mind emerges as part of it’s activity? This is a question that has to be pursued by neuropsychology, and in this I agree with the position of Rodrigo.

At the phenomenological perspective, it really there is no escape: we will perceive the mind as immaterial, not a mere result of our brain activity. We are condemned to an eternal dualism.

What I am interested at the present is to understand what consequences this perceived dualism might have had, in the experience and conceptualization of the world of the human species. In particular, what part may this perception have played in the appearance of the notion of the immortality of the soul and also, in the creation of religious beliefs.

Following the work of Rodrigo de Sá, the “subject-object” scheme appears to be responsible for the human capacity to perceive the mind as separated of the body. So, the cognitive and neuronal changes that made this scheme part of the cognitive apparel of our species seems to be of crucial importance to the way in which, we humans, perceive and interact with the world around us.

It seems impossible to know precisely at which moment of our philogenetic history as a species, this scheme might have appeared, but, one thing I think we might be able to do: try to understand its effects, and what part it might have played in the creation of beliefs about the world, the self, and the other, including, one recurrent phenomenon across the human species: Religion.

I am doing some readings about this, and later, I will say something more about the subject. Until then, I encourage any reflections about this theme, that the other contributors and our readers may have.

Soul and body: two different aspects of experience

2004-12-23T06:08:00.000Z

Mind and Body: Does it really matter?

I am, in part, reacting to Paulo Almeida Paula’s post.

Let me state, at the very beginning, that I am a confirmed materialist. I don’t profess a materialistic faith, but I find nothing compelling about the necessity of immaterial instances.

However, the mind, as we experience it, feels immaterial. If we think of ourselves, even of our bodily sensations, we must admit that the feeling is mental and not material. Nowadays, materialism is widespread, and we think that it has to be material; however, if we just feel it, we must acknowledge that the feeling itself is mental.

Therefore, as Descartes and, before him, Petrus Hispanus, Saint Augustine and the Arab philosophers, we feel we have two quite different natures. A material one – we know we have a body, the table on which I write feels material. But, on closer inspection, one must agree with Descartes: all we know is that we feel; therefore, we cannot doubt the feeling (that is the real sense of the Cogito) but we can doubt – indeed we have to question – the existence of the thing felt, because all we know is that we feel it, and we think about it. That is to say, we only know that we think: Je pense, donc je suis. But I know nothing about the existence of the outside world.

Descartes had to introduce a Deus ex machine – in this case, a benevolent God – to make us believe that what we feel and experience really exists. But the truth is, as Hume perfectly realized, we have no way of knowing. Not that it really matters. Von Glazersfeldt claimed that the knowledge of the relativity of knowledge - that is to say, constructionism - completely alters our way of life.

Hume knew better: it doesn’t; it does not matter that things exist or that we hallucinate them: if we hallucinate that a tiger is planning to kill us, we will run, whether we think reality doesn’t exist or if we think the contrary. I’d really like to see a constructionist seeing his wife cheating on him and consoling himself by the thought that it is all really a construction.

But let us return to the question of mind and body. We fell we have both. That is not, I believe, as Paulo said, a historical problem. It is a fundamental consequence of our psychological build up.

To cut a long story short, we have a priori by which we know the world. I have claimed, in some published work, that one of these a priori is the subject-object a priori or scheme. Usually, to understand something, we must transform it into a bounded entity: something that has the properties of an object, with beginning and end, the possibility of transformation, modification, splitting, connection to other objects and such properties.

These ‘objects’ - they may be just concepts - are ‘outside’ the brain. The mind is just the subject, a representational space devoid of any substantial self-conscience (as Petrus Hispanus said: the soul has a desire of knowledge, but the last thing to be known is itself; before the soul thinks of the outside world).

But when we find out that we (that is, the Cogito, our very selves) are not our body - for instance when we (subject) think who we (object) would be if our parents never met, or we (subject) wish we (object) were never born, we face a very strange thing: the subject contemplates the possibility of the object not to exist. As the object is naturally our body, our social persona and the like, what remains is the feeling of ‘beingness’ - the inner self, the subject, the Cartesian Cogito.

This is the ‘mind’.

Must it be immaterial? Following Plato, we think so. But Plato was just idealizing (and perhaps founding idealism) what other people consider just to be an invisible part of matter. The invisible part of matter usually is the substance of the sacred. Therefore, the soul (even if it is conceived as material, as it is by most primitive [don’t expect me to be politically correct] people believe) belongs to the numinous.

So, after all this, what about the mind-body problem? As far as I can tell it is just a problem for neuropsychologists and physiologists. They have to find the structures of matter that make up the experience of existence - that is, conscience. I don’t think an answer will be found very soon.

But, from the psychological, ethological or anthropological standpoint - I would even venture to say, from the materialistic philosophical standpoint, it really is not a problem.

The answer lies in an improbable combination of Hume and Kant. Hume: it does not really matter; Kant: all we have to know is the way the a priori manages to produce want we experience.

In a nutshell: we must just know the a priori. I will elaborate further if requested to do so.

THE EPISTEMIC NECESSITY OF THE OBJECTIVATION OF THE SUBJECT

2004-12-14T16:18:00.000Z

When we try to reflect about the mind/body problem we immediately come upon two types of discourse that are working in a dissonant tendency. On one hand, we face the discourse referring to the body-machine, to the objective body, to matter, to the immediate, to sensibility; on the other hand, we encounter the discourse that makes its reference the space of the psychic, of the experience, of shape, of understanding, of the subjective conscience, of the ideal.
The objective that I here propose, constituting the fundamental of my interest of research under this issue, is this: I will try to reunite the elements that are contributive, in my point of view, to a third kind of discourse on the mind/body problematic: a discourse that fixes its objective in an unifying intend. In this sense, how can we unify the discourses of the psychic and of the body? Or, in the same way, I will try to know if the body and the mind are one or two substances[1], and try to answer to what is the ontological relation, if there is any, between them. It is my intention to leave unclear the possibility of a unification of the two types of discourses and also question the assumption that we are facing a question of an ontological kind.
Every posts that I will present under this space, and specifically over this problematic, will be in the way of work in progress, for that reason the argumentative procedure of the whole future posts it is not previously planned. Every stage here presented of this work in progress works as a process of discursive stabilization over a point of view on this problematic facing the issues that I consider to be more pertinent.
The first issue that I present here corresponds to an aspect that I consider to be fundamental on the formation of every project that has its objective fixed by the project of reflexivity: it is the participant objectivation[2]. Participant objectivation is defined by Pierre Bourdieu (2000) «as the objectivation of the subject and operations of objectivation, and of the latter’s conditions of possibility, [it] produces real cognitive effects as it enables the social analyst [or any other kind of analyst with a purpose of reflexivity] to grasp and master the pre-reflexive social and academic experiences of the social world that he tends to project unconsciously onto ordinary social agents» (Bourdieu 2000).
The importance of this perspective to the procedure of reflection over the problem that I proposed extends itself, for example, to the considerations on the association between cerebral structures and ways of behavior and experience. The conclusion of Descartes relatively to the relation between body and subjective conscience it is product of «an out bodied and inattention reflection»[3] (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991: 55). The dissociation between mind and body – based on such questions: «what is the mind?»; «what is the body?» – is a consideration produced by a subject that limits itself to be a project of the world as he does not includes itself, as an object, in the reflexive project in course; results of this aspect a biased reflection producing an out bodied sense of this reflexive act in course.
A reflection that includes the subject in the object, or that objectifies the subject, must have present that every reflexive act – in this concrete concern over the relation between the cerebral structure and experience and behavior – does not emerge from nowhere, it is not a view from nowhere, is always a point of view: the reflection must be perceived as a product of a specific structure of a cognitive system, reflection that is executed from a determined environment[4] of beliefs and biological, social and cultural practices; and we must have also in mind that we are producing specific considerations about our own hypothesized environment (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). However, we can not manage to escape this representation. Has the Prentententoonstelling of M. C. Escher (1956) this reflexive circularity can not complete itself totally (figure nº 1): in the center is represented the uncompleted characteristic of the representation process, Escher’s signature. «The world has a representation of itself, but this representation can not be completed because the painter should represent itself representing the world…» (Dupuy 1992: 315). The continuing process of addition of layers of abstraction to our reflexive circularity must be interrupted with a return to the initial standpoint: to the concrete and to the particularity of our phenomenological experience.
The objectivation of the subject creates a possibility of a reflexive work that comprehends that the dualistic discursive proposal – about the mind/body problematic – is in first place product of a phenomenological experience point of view sensed in an out bodied way. On the other hand, all this epistemic necessity allows us to perceive that any discourse over this problematic (or over any other problematic) emerges itself from a specific field that is historically constituted by one simplification of two parallel discourses: spiritualistic dualism and materialistic monism. What I defend here is that this dualism is a semantic dualism that historically glided itself (by the reason of historic transformations in the academic, scientific and/or philosophical field(s)) to a substance dualism, a glide that is based in discursive dualism conducted by a separation, in the same order, between what it is commonly perceived as the world of the science – in this particular case the theoretical constructions about the structures that sustain experience and behavior – and the world of the experience – where the why about the out bodied phenomenological experience is occult. It is necessary to have in consideration the theoretical constructions about the structure without forgetting the immediacy sense of our experience, it is also necessary to have in consideration the out bodied sense of our experience as we produce theoretical considerations about the structure.

Notes:

[1] As a way of complement it is also possible to question if we are in front of two substances? Substances in the sense «if each one is that of which the other things are predicated, and not that which is predicated of a subject» (Aristotle, Metaphysics: VIII.III.3); substance as something that exists itself and by itself.

[2] Technical term presented by Pierre Bourdieu (2000) in the lecture Participant Objectivation delivered at the Royal Anthropological Institute on December 6th, 2000.

[3] Every quotation of a Portuguese edition is translated into the English language. The responsibility of the translation it is entirely of the author of this text.

[4] Every understanding is always the expression of a point of view. This point of view is anchored in the environment and it is constringed by a system of dispositions (attunements or moods, levels of a priori conditions), or as, by a principle that generates and organizes the practices and representations that can be adapted to an objective as, for example, understanding. This system of dispositions works as a fundamental element in the construction of meaning and sense; understanding that works as an attribution of meaning to reality. However, the system of dispositions that structure this understanding never contributes to a vision from nowhere, but always to a point of view: «all explanation is thus rooted in Dasein’s primary understanding» (Heidegger, Being and Time: II.IV.68.385).

Praeludium

2004-12-08T03:49:00.000Z

Welcome to Psychoethology.

What we hope to achieve is a broad discussion on topics pertaining to behavioural sciences. We would like the main focus to be on evolutionary issues on human and primate behaviour. However, there is also place for other approaches - psychological, ethological, ethnological, sociological and philosophical ones.

The first issue wich will concern us will be a very general but rather involved one: the mind-body problem.

The administrators will post their general views on the matter. We heartily expect your comments.

The languages used will be English, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Italian.