2. Mind in Environment
Think of the model articulated above as a kind of base. These are claims about invariant features of mind; they tell us nothing about any specific aspect of individual or cultural psychology. You won’t get from this model to Oedipal complexes, bipolar disorders, anxiety or depression, childhood trauma, or any of the other structures people typically associate with psychology.
Those things are all the result of the mind interacting with an environment. The model of mind outlined so far is so minimal that the description does not even assume it is implemented in a brain; however, if we put that mind into the brain and body of a cat, or a human girl, or an 18th century French aristocrat, it now has an environment—not merely the environment that the body of the cat or the girl or the French aristocrat inhabits, but the body itself.
(One note— for now, in order to play with the idea of the mind described above interacting with the body, we are going to speak dualistically. Mind-body dualism is the belief that the mind and the body are separate phenomena, with mental phenomena being non-physical and the body and the material world being a separate sphere. I don’t actually believe mind-body dualism, but for the moment it will be cleaner to speak of the mind and body as though they were separate, in order to posit an order of conceptual operations that would be too hard to think about if we started out behaving as though there were no distinction.)
The body is in some sense the most fundamental part of the mind’s environment, in that it generates, or at least populates, the sensorium. The eyes take in visual sensations, the ears take in auditory sensations, the skin takes in touch sensations, etc. In addition to whatever information is being taken in by the perceptive organs, there is a ton of sensory information corresponding to internal states of the body—the feelings of blood flow, digestion, hormone release, muscular activation and coordination, immune response, etc.
Imagine the mind we described—the awareness-will with its creative conceptual apparatus—now flooded with the experience of all of these sensations, and ready to conceptualize them. How is it to do this?
Part of the answer is “pattern recognition.” When people talk about pattern recognition, they mean that something is recurring in nature, and it is possible to notice the recurrence. If we are imagining a newborn infant mind conceiving its environment (which, remember, includes its body) we might pick out the combination of the mother’s face plus some warm snuggly feelings as a stably recurring phenomenon.
Pattern recognition can’t be the whole story, because pattern recognition ex nihilo is impossible. Computer programs designed to recognize patterns in large data sets must start with some initial set of concepts, some initial dimension or set of dimensions along which it is possible to organize data. If nothing else, it must start with the concept of pattern, some idea of “same” or “match” and some concept like “dimension” (way of matching). Our pattern recognition machinery—the conceiver described in the first section—might have enough “built in” constraints or features of the type we discussed in the first section that conceptual possibility space is fairly determined: put two minds in the world and they will roughly conceptualize it into categories like air, water, trees, animals, parents, etc., absent any other constraints and regardless of whether they can communicate with each other.
However, with a conceptual apparatus as minimal as the one I posited earlier—time, space, and Purpose, plus this idea of similarity or recognition—that kind of over-determination seems pretty unlikely. The “Purpose” idea could load a lot of constraints into the parser, but I don’t believe it does—I believe the fundamental drive is so minimally (or broadly) defined that it doesn’t even have an idea as complex as biological survival. Any function or goal of the body that pertains specifically to the body must on this model be construed as a feature of the mind’s environment. Good as experienced and interpreted through the body is an order more complex than the Good that inheres “fundamentally” in the mind.
So it is not just the way that the body generates the sensorium that creates the mind’s environment, but also the body’s functions—things like digestion, reproduction, sleep. These provide constraints on the way that the Good can be pursued, and thus constraints on conceptual formation.
The interface between the body’s functions and the mind’s experience is the phenomenology. You experience things pleasure and pain, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, attached to physical experiences like hunger, tiredness, and arousal as the body goes through different states. The mind as described in section 1, minimal parser guided by goal, would not form the concept “food” absent a body; the mind parsing the landscape of sense data that includes simultaneously the smells and tastes and textures of edible substances and feelings of hunger and digestion, co-occurring in a regular way with the experiences of pleasure and pain—that is, tagged as salient—is much more constrained and will reliably construct “food” concepts.
You might have noticed a messy implication of this ghost-in-the-shell kind of model: the idea is that the mind has its own goal, and the body has its own goals (or at least functions), and these hook up somehow, such that the embodied mind knows that the body’s functions are relevant to or necessary for its goal. Where and how does this hook-up occur? I have no idea as to the details, but the analogy of a car seems apt to me: a car has a set of basic functions and is occupied by a driver. Some learning is necessary on the part of the driver, different cars are all slightly different, and if a driver has the skill to do so can customize the car’s internal workings (I’m sure you’ve heard of people like Wim Hof). However, to avoid responding with the unsatisfying shrug that generally accompanies the mind-body problem, we would have to leave our dualist working simplification, and that is a different topic.
Let’s go back to our infant learning to conceive of his mother and the warm snuggly feelings that accompany her presence. We’ll call this concept Mom + Warm Snuggliness. This is actually a terrible articulation of the idea, because linguistically it preserves mom and warm and snuggliness as separate ideas. This is not what’s happening. Instead try to imagine that the infant is forming a concept that tags the entire swath of sensations that accompany his mother’s presence: the visual sensations that correspond to the mother’s face, the temperature sensations that correspond to being held, the proprioceptive and textural and affective sensations that correspond to the release of oxytocin (contentedness, sleepiness), the olfactory sensations that correspond to her body, and more. This concept isn’t nearly as clear as the abstraction indicated by the word “mother”—it’s a single conceptual mashup of a person (though perhaps without the concept of person), the feeling of love and connection, a set of physical states and feelings and actions, etc.
I believe this is how early concept formation works. Further distinctions get drawn later, as the different elements of the experience occur and are noticed separately from each other. However, the basic concepts that underpin our more intricate and abstract conceptual structures are deep conflations of the external and the internal. There is no particular reason to start out with the idea of “external” and “internal;” one simply starts with the sensory field, and must parse the sensations in whatever groupings they seem to occur. By the time we are using concepts with verbal correspondents like “mother,” we are working layers of abstraction and distinction beyond our earliest conceptual foundations. Not only is the normal idea of “mother” a far more specific and distinct occurrence in the sensorium than entirety of the set of sensations that correspond to her presence, the set of sensations that are in fact specific to “mother” are not in the sensorium at all times—that is, her continued existence when she is not sensorily present is an inference. “Mother” as a distinct entity is therefore an abstraction from experience—far more abstract than the earlier concept we tagged Mom + Warm Snuggliness.
If this is how concepts are formed, then our most basic and visceral understandings of the world are very different from our verbally communicated concepts, containing what we would consider many strange conflations and disjunctions. If, for example, one of the concepts that later comes to correspond to the word “love” is in part an abstracted descendent of a concept like Mom + Warm Snuggliness, then really, some semblance of an Oedipal complex might be nigh unavoidable—not because of perversion but merely because of the conditions of the concept’s construction. It’s very unlikely that the natural progression of abstractions that led from Mom + Warm Snuggliness to love cleanly and clearly distinguished the sensory landscape to the degree that love doesn’t have some amount of mom baked in.
On the other hand, not all concepts are built in direct reference to clusters of sensory phenomena; some concepts are constructed in reference to something that other people appear to be referring to. When a toddler is told by his mother to be polite, “polite” doesn’t refer to a concrete set of sensations the way that Mom + Warm Snuggliness does; “polite” refers to something mysterious that his mother seems to want. Politeness may well come to be associated with a physical state—whatever physical state garners or coincides with positive feedback from his mother—but the initial referent of the concept was not a naturally arising correspondence between the physical state and/or affect and the world, but rather the apparent desire of another entity. That is, the concept formation was not directly guided by the evaluative apparatus of the child (the child’s comparison of state to Goal), but was indirectly guided by the evaluative apparatus of someone else. This would not occur if the child’s evaluative apparatus did not value the other person’s evaluation—or perhaps their happiness or approval—but nevertheless it is a very different order of operations.
Thus, as far as we are concerned with how the mind structures itself in response to its environment, we must consider other people and their evaluative frameworks to be critical features of the environment, potentially vastly more weighty than the physical features of the environment in terms of the mind’s architecture. What is likely to be more salient to a child’s evaluative apparatus—the color and texture of the carpet, or his mother’s pleasure and displeasure? In mosts cases, certainly the latter. The parents’ attention directs the child’s attention, and later the child’s friends and teachers direct the child’s attention—which means that whatever is directing their attention is directing his attention.
Since we are talking about the ways that psychological structure is determined by the body and the ways it is determined by the social environment—essentially questions of nature or nurture—we should briefly touch on the question of genetic determination of the psychology. Let’s just explore a couple different ideas of how this might work. You could imagine several different mechanisms, and the fact that a whole host of personal tendencies is extremely likely to be “inherited” from the parents via the attentional direction just described above makes it difficult to tell whether, when we observe what appear to be familial features of a person’s psychology, we’re working with information directly encoded in the body or information transmitted at high fidelity in early life (where early life includes the prenatal environment). On this model, remember, information encoded in the body is still classed as a feature of the mind’s environment, so we’re essentially asking what are the different parts of a mind’s environment that information can come from. If, for example, certain conceptual structures are encouraged or inhibited by chemical tendencies of the body (e.g., testosterone or serotonin production), then what we have is a mind parsing an environment in which phenomenological warmth or relaxation or excitement or whatever else is produced by the chemical tendency co-occurs more or less frequently than average with externally generated sense data, and must be simultaneously explained. That is, the mind’s experience of the external world is always being correlated with its experience of the body, and the experience of the body can be genetically influenced, though obviously not fully genetically determined. This is one possible mechanism of genetic influence to the psychology, and I think it is the one most commonly assumed—a rather coarse-grained but potentially very pervasive chemical influence on the interpretive possibility space.
Some people believe in much more constraining and specific genetic influences on psychology. I have worked with people who appear to access genetic or ancestral memory in the course of introspection—I have seen, for example, one woman appear to recover a memory of what she believed was her grandmother’s village getting bombed in a war that happened before she was born. I myself have found what appear to be highly specific and fairly ancient cultural models of deportment influencing my behavior. I believe it’s possible to genetically encode fairly complex situationally contingent “plans”—things like, for example, ketosis—and one could imagine an aggressive ketosis contingency encoded into genetic plans as a result of an ancestor experiencing famine. However, I think that for a modern person’s ketosis contingency to be psychologically associated with specifically the potato famine of 1845, there have to be some non-physiologically encoded attentional things going on. In any case, I have never encountered particularly strong evidence of this kind of thing drastically shaping someone’s psychological structure independent of familial enculturation.
One final complicating factor in the nature versus nurture question is that, in addition to the kind of attentional direction we saw in the politeness example, I believe children also learn physiological regulation from their parents, especially their mothers, especially pre- and post-natally. So a physiological tendency that strongly influences the child’s interpretive landscape might be genetically encoded, but might also be learned from physical contact with the parent.
For many psychological “family traits,” I think that a wide variety of positions in this nature-and-nurture space are equally plausible causal candidates. I have no ideological attachment to one over the other. Many people who prefer nature-type explanations do so because they are concerned about responsibility being unfairly allocated to those who can’t help their genetic inheritance, or because they want to prove that some group is terminally better or worse than some other group. Conversely, many people who prefer nurture-type explanations prefer them because they want to believe in the power of good parenting or education or therapy to equalize or uplift everyone. To me, nurture does not indicate ease of change—trauma can be insidious in its structuring of the psychology, and those who cling to their fears may as well have been born with them written into their bones. On the other hand, I have no real reason to believe that genetic inheritance is indelibly fixed. Encoding is encoding, even at the physiological level, and if it can be accessed, it can be informed. To me, tractability is less a question of nature versus nurture, and more a question of how early a structure was built or implemented (since this determines how much has subsequently been built on top of it, dependent upon it or patterned on it), how much a person wants to and believes they can change, and how much of the environment around them can be brought to incentivize change by making it evidently the “fit” thing to do.
To wrap this section, a quick summary of where we’ve gotten thus far: we have an abstract model of the mind independent of any particular environment, and have explored the general mechanisms by which an environment produces conceptual structure. The phenomenology is the interface between the sensations and goal that guides the functional conceptualization of the sense data; the body’s functions and the social direction of attention both constrain the space of what gets modeled and how.