Way many years ago, I spent most of a year thinking about what happens when we ask questions about people's actions. It was, after all, my trade, and I noticed some things that I hadn't seen talked about much in the shrink lit.
Before the behavioral debacles of the 70s and 80s, fledgling shrink types were instructed in how to get clients to talk without asking many questions -- or, preferably, any questions. Somewhere around 1975, the pendulum swung, and now we are encouraged to do nothing but ask questions, fill out inventories, and so on. But I digress....
Inherent in our earlier dicta was the recognition that asking questions was a way of NOT learning much. The general principle was to leave as much space for a client to talk as possible; the client would then talk about whatever was most important -- to the client, not the therapist.
I found out that the philosophers and anthropologists had a more sophisticated idea. Much of language, and other behavior, is devoted to communicating norms. Beyond the purely descriptive parts of language -- "The giant mastadon is 30 feet to your right" -- most of what we do is bounce back and forth the ways to be a good member of the tribe. And, if folks are asking a lot of questions about your reasons for doing something, you are certainly not being a good member of the tribe. Good members just don't have questions asked about them. Take a look around and see; when we say to somebody "Sheesh. Why did he do THAT?", we aren't exactly expressing approval.
For example, we don't wonder if straight folks had a particular physical event or trauma or family pattern to account for their hetero-ness, but gay folks constantly endure these questions, and theories, and correctly, I think, see all the speculation as nothing but repeated statements that they are deviant. And if I am found having sex with a Fluffy the German Shepherd, questions would damn well be asked!! Suspects, are, after all, brought in for.....questioning. A hanging curve, that one.
I don't mean to say that question-asking is a primary mechanism for enforcing compliance, but it is one of many. Like music, like dancing, like overt reward and punishment, language both relies on the integrity of the tribe, and provides a mechanism for extending custom, knowledge and states of consciousness.
Talking about "mind" is just another language-trick to make us behave. I know, I know...repetitive from the last two posts. A generous Alert Reader gives me:
"It's all in his mind".
Wow!!! I'm right!!! Perfectly equivalent to "Good tribe members don't act that way". And with a delicious snarky quality!!
I come at all this as a person with a brain that has been dinged in a specific way (not badly, BTW) and I see some signs of that damage in my transactions with the world. I don't think I would say that I have a damaged mind, though. Were I to take up with Fluffy the German Shepherd, or start robbing banks or babbling endlessly about arcane topics, then I would say that something has happened to my mind and other folks would agree -- his mind isn't what it was, they might say. Or, he's out of his mind. They would not refer to my brain. Perhaps in reflection, at later thought, and so on, the connection to a damaged brain might be made. Technical types - the OTs, the neuro docs, the psychometricists would immediately skip the whole mind thing and go straight to brain, which is good by me. I want them thinking about the brain, where they can maybe be helpful.
Incidentally, I have never heard that anyone had a "damaged mind". I'm sure it has been said, but I haven't heard that specific phrase. Odd. Well, maybe not so odd; maybe we recognize more about how "mind" is used than we let on.
Like so many damaged others, I am determined to show that my damaged brain does not put me outside the tribe, and into the realm of "mind" talk. A lot of very interesting thought about the nature of "mind" is in autism and Asperger groups. Smart folks, VERY highly motivated to understand why all this talk of "mind" is just so damn nasty.
So, I really am OK, right??? Oh, oh. A question. Well, I guess I know where that leaves me.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Zombies
A continuation of the exquisite solution of the mind/brain problem, begun in the preceeding entry. So far, no comments/arguments/rants yet. Come ON!!
At a friend's birthday recently, I became involved in an extended discussion of whether zombies walk with their hands held out in front of them, or at their sides, awkwardly. I forget which view prevailed. I remember that we all were aware that we were talking about zombies as if they were known entities, and that one of us might encounter a zombie some time in the next few days, and the issue would be settled.
It made me think of an observation common among hypnotists: If you ask young children what somebody who is hypnotized does, they immediately put their arms straight out in front (zombie style??) close their eyes and walk very slowly, but elegantly -- unlike zombies, who, we all know, are clumsy. This knowledge of how hypnotized people behave seems to be acquired mainly from cartoons; there are probably other sources, hard to identify.
The tricky thing is, when the kids are "doing" hypnotized, their minds are doing hypnotized, too -- their thoughts get concrete, they are compliant, they lost any sense of humor, and so on.
Alert Reader will quickly connect to my previous post. Hypnosis is an ongoing interaction between the subject and the ...well, hypnotizer. This conversation constitutes the "mind" of the subject. Again, a transaction that is normative to the construction of experience.
You get the point. Computational and narrative models of the mind are wrong-headed; mind is a kind of talk, a set of directions which structure how to be in the world. Hey, just like I said last time. Alva Noe is working on too small a scale, but Noe is a biological type, and I am an ordinary language type.
Complexity trumps reductionism, every time. The brain is more than the sum of it's cells. Mind, who knows? Mind is more than the sum of a person's interactions We do bring to the table other parts of us. Eyes, noses, emotions. Whoa, there ....emotions?? How about choices? What are we talking about, anyhow???
More to come. A work in progress.
At a friend's birthday recently, I became involved in an extended discussion of whether zombies walk with their hands held out in front of them, or at their sides, awkwardly. I forget which view prevailed. I remember that we all were aware that we were talking about zombies as if they were known entities, and that one of us might encounter a zombie some time in the next few days, and the issue would be settled.
It made me think of an observation common among hypnotists: If you ask young children what somebody who is hypnotized does, they immediately put their arms straight out in front (zombie style??) close their eyes and walk very slowly, but elegantly -- unlike zombies, who, we all know, are clumsy. This knowledge of how hypnotized people behave seems to be acquired mainly from cartoons; there are probably other sources, hard to identify.
The tricky thing is, when the kids are "doing" hypnotized, their minds are doing hypnotized, too -- their thoughts get concrete, they are compliant, they lost any sense of humor, and so on.
Alert Reader will quickly connect to my previous post. Hypnosis is an ongoing interaction between the subject and the ...well, hypnotizer. This conversation constitutes the "mind" of the subject. Again, a transaction that is normative to the construction of experience.
You get the point. Computational and narrative models of the mind are wrong-headed; mind is a kind of talk, a set of directions which structure how to be in the world. Hey, just like I said last time. Alva Noe is working on too small a scale, but Noe is a biological type, and I am an ordinary language type.
Complexity trumps reductionism, every time. The brain is more than the sum of it's cells. Mind, who knows? Mind is more than the sum of a person's interactions We do bring to the table other parts of us. Eyes, noses, emotions. Whoa, there ....emotions?? How about choices? What are we talking about, anyhow???
More to come. A work in progress.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Finally, a complete solution to Mind/Brain!!!!
Well, it took a while, but I think I've finally got it.
The classic mind/brain problem is this: How does mind, which is basically thoughts, connect to brain, which is basically cells? Descartes, who was chronically cold and liked to work in the large ovens in which bread was baked, thought that the mind -- which he called soul -- and brain touched at the pineal gland, which is a little bitty organ in the brain. At the time, no one had any other idea what the pineal gland actually did, so it was freely available to Descartes, and just sitting there waiting for him to give it a purpose.
But the problem won't just go away. In fact, it is worse now than ever, because the neurological bozos won't stop doing those damn PET scans. Want to know why you think Mozart wrote wonderful music? Just look at how bright the music area lights up!!! The silliness of all this makes me cringe. It is the worst of mind/brain reductionism, the sort of pretending that there is information where there is none.
So, now, a new book: Alva Noe's "Out of Our Heads". He is a cognitive science type, and has an interesting but absolutely wrong-headed theory of mind. He says mind is the name we give to the set of interactions between body and environment, and that without those interactions, there is no mind. I oversimplify, but that's the idea. The clearest example of his way to think has to do with perception. There is a machine which aids blind folks by translating a TV image of what is in front of them into a pattern of small rods which touch the stomach of the blind person. The blind very quickly learn to recognize objects; more interesting, though, (and, of course, contradicting my abuse of the brain-light-up folks) is that the visual areas of the brain become excited when the machine gives information to the stomach. The system itself works well, but the device remains huge and immobile.
Noe equates using this device to seeing, and a wonderful equation it is. Clearly it is not hearing the objects, or smelling them, or touching them -- the blind person, in all but using eyes, is seeing the objects. To Noe, seeing is a certain kind of interactions with the world, not a set of nerve impulses originating in the eye -- more a set of events perceived through a set of cells. But he still is thinking of mind as a set of transactions, or processes, or something like that. No, no, no.
So, if he is so wrong-headed, and I am so smart, what is my solution to mind/brain? As usual, I think Wittgenstein had the best approach. Brain is a descriptive name of an object, with physical boundaries, and so on -- a thing. So far pretty easy. But mind is not. What are we doing when we talk about "mind"? When do we actually talk about "mind" in ordinary language?
Not very often. "He changed his mind". "Make up your mind". "You must be out of your mind". "What's on your mind?" And so on.
All have to do with the normative....elaboration of a framework of behavior. When we say "mind", we are attempting to enforce a (usually) unstated set of social regulations on internal process.
OK, so I don't have it fully worked out. But it is a beginning, and now, Alert Reader, is the time for both examples and counter-examples. Noe thinks "mind" is the name we give to process; I think that "mind" is an expression we use when we want to give voice to how we think choices should be made. Like beauty, and good, mind is in the eye of the beholder. Heh. But the cliche underlines my contention -- when we talk about the eye of the beholder, we are really are describing a set of norms, and sadly bemoaning the frequency of departure from them.
Let's go. Gimme something to work with here.
Now, having solved the mind/brain problem, I will move on to....oh, how about world peace? Or a cure for the common cold?
And, by now, Alert Reader will have discovered that Mr. Reasonable has made a second appearance.
The classic mind/brain problem is this: How does mind, which is basically thoughts, connect to brain, which is basically cells? Descartes, who was chronically cold and liked to work in the large ovens in which bread was baked, thought that the mind -- which he called soul -- and brain touched at the pineal gland, which is a little bitty organ in the brain. At the time, no one had any other idea what the pineal gland actually did, so it was freely available to Descartes, and just sitting there waiting for him to give it a purpose.
But the problem won't just go away. In fact, it is worse now than ever, because the neurological bozos won't stop doing those damn PET scans. Want to know why you think Mozart wrote wonderful music? Just look at how bright the music area lights up!!! The silliness of all this makes me cringe. It is the worst of mind/brain reductionism, the sort of pretending that there is information where there is none.
So, now, a new book: Alva Noe's "Out of Our Heads". He is a cognitive science type, and has an interesting but absolutely wrong-headed theory of mind. He says mind is the name we give to the set of interactions between body and environment, and that without those interactions, there is no mind. I oversimplify, but that's the idea. The clearest example of his way to think has to do with perception. There is a machine which aids blind folks by translating a TV image of what is in front of them into a pattern of small rods which touch the stomach of the blind person. The blind very quickly learn to recognize objects; more interesting, though, (and, of course, contradicting my abuse of the brain-light-up folks) is that the visual areas of the brain become excited when the machine gives information to the stomach. The system itself works well, but the device remains huge and immobile.
Noe equates using this device to seeing, and a wonderful equation it is. Clearly it is not hearing the objects, or smelling them, or touching them -- the blind person, in all but using eyes, is seeing the objects. To Noe, seeing is a certain kind of interactions with the world, not a set of nerve impulses originating in the eye -- more a set of events perceived through a set of cells. But he still is thinking of mind as a set of transactions, or processes, or something like that. No, no, no.
So, if he is so wrong-headed, and I am so smart, what is my solution to mind/brain? As usual, I think Wittgenstein had the best approach. Brain is a descriptive name of an object, with physical boundaries, and so on -- a thing. So far pretty easy. But mind is not. What are we doing when we talk about "mind"? When do we actually talk about "mind" in ordinary language?
Not very often. "He changed his mind". "Make up your mind". "You must be out of your mind". "What's on your mind?" And so on.
All have to do with the normative....elaboration of a framework of behavior. When we say "mind", we are attempting to enforce a (usually) unstated set of social regulations on internal process.
OK, so I don't have it fully worked out. But it is a beginning, and now, Alert Reader, is the time for both examples and counter-examples. Noe thinks "mind" is the name we give to process; I think that "mind" is an expression we use when we want to give voice to how we think choices should be made. Like beauty, and good, mind is in the eye of the beholder. Heh. But the cliche underlines my contention -- when we talk about the eye of the beholder, we are really are describing a set of norms, and sadly bemoaning the frequency of departure from them.
Let's go. Gimme something to work with here.
Now, having solved the mind/brain problem, I will move on to....oh, how about world peace? Or a cure for the common cold?
And, by now, Alert Reader will have discovered that Mr. Reasonable has made a second appearance.
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