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Living In The Cosmos: Vignette (3): Mind and Soul

-QUESTION OF MIND-

To use the garden motif, might we wonder if all these labels we apply regarding the activities of our mind are really about how we construct tools for digging around or even planting in this seed-bed we call our mind, our inner world.

Depth psychologists and professional theologians have long taken note of the mythological and religious imagery that has been culturally overlaid onto the construct(s) of our mind. Some have harkened back to Forms, to *a priori,* to archetypes as a way of explaining this our mind. Indeed, even some respected scientists have pondered these mythical motifs!

For example, Carl Sagan notes what most of us know--that our dreamworld (our inner world) is full of magic, ritual, passion, and aggression. For him, the dreamworld is still the realm of our Limbic and Reptilian brains--and especially of the Reptilian Complex. Sagan puts it poetically: "the dragons can be heard, hissing and rasping, and the dinosaurs thunder still." [Carl Sagan, THE DRAGONS OF EDEN: SPECULATIONS ON THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Ballantine Books, 1977, p. 157.]

Now to harken to cognitive science. My only connection to this field has been when I did some work on the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here's a short synopsis of what I discovered:

It was imperative that early AI scientists, if they were to build thinking machines, had to maneuver into the quagmire of cognitive theoretics. There were existing, different camps of cognitive theory posited for consideration: such as Plato's theory of pure concepts (the Forms); Kant's *a priori* principle; and Wittgenstein's ideas about logical processes, which focused upon language as the embodiment of what can be said, known, and thought. Formative, classical AI ultimately sunk its roots into the logical positivism movement based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work.

At the very outset there were two opposing theoretical camps. Those who conceived the human brain and mind as a machine were affiliated with the logical positivists; whereas, in reaction to this position, the existentialists stressed the spiritual and emotive life of the mind. In due course, the theorists stressing man as a machine seemed to have won the day. Marvin Minsky, a premier AI theorist, is a major proponent of the machine approach.

According to Minsky, human beings are "meat machines." He speaks of the mind as simply the processes of brain states. Minsky, along with his colleague Seymour Papert, see the brain as a "network of networks." They assume that the brain has only a murky access to its many sub-networks, which were formed by different stages of the brain's evolution. They believe that communication between the different networks of the brain is shallow and superficial--in that we seem to be in the dark about ourselves most of the time. Because of this, they can explain (or explain away) such ideas as the "unconscious" and insight. Also, the sense of continuity we experience in our lives comes from our "marvelous insensitivity" to the many changes going on in our brain networks, rather than any real genuine perception.

Following this line of thought, that the relationship between the brain's various networks is thin, Minsky also declares that a ruling "Self inside the mind" is a *myth.* He points out that our self-images are vague beliefs, self-ideals. He stresses that we are often of two minds about ourselves. Sometimes we think of our self as a single entity, and at other times we are dispersed--made of "many different parts with different tendencies." Minsky suspects that perhaps there are no persons in our head, perhaps no self.

I find it fascinating that Marvin Minsky employs that curious word: "myth." Interesting, because actually myth implies something reflective of an eternal truth, whereas Minsky considers its misnomer--as a self-deception.

But let's harken back to AI and related kindred. There are some who consider that it may be that man is not the *only* thinking machine! According to cellular automata and computer-information specialist, Edward Fredkin, the universe may be an information processing intelligence. He believes that the elemental components of the universe, such as atoms, electrons, and quarks, consist ultimately of binary bits of information. The entire universe, according to Fredkin, may be "governed by a single programming rule!"

And besides John Searle's "rediscovering" our mind, there's Daniel Dennett who can explain (all about) consciousness. Indeed, he can explain away consciousness! And, of course, we would be remiss if we didn't mention Sir Francis Crick. His not so "astonishing hypothesis" leaves no room for soul--rather our puny brain has developed mainly due to survival and propagation needs.

It gets better, however! I especially enjoy Todd Siler's approach which he calls the "Artscience of Neurocosmology." Siler, a visual artist, at M.I.T.'s Computer-Aided Design Laboratory has worked with medical folk, cognitive and neuroscience folk, and artists who hide away in places ranging from Harvard, Stanford, and IBM. It would seem--if I understand it right--that Siler's "metaphorming" is about a Brain Universe that is duplicated in ever smaller forms, microcosmically, right down to our own little minds. Whew!

And now that the mathematicians and physicists are into this business of mind, gads--it's becoming almost incomprehensible! There's Oxford's Roger Penrose and his "quantum coherence within microtubules." Even more complex (and almost unreadable) are the opinions of mind by quantum theorist Henry Stapp of the Lawrence Berkley Laboratory of the University of California. Stapp holds to a "quantum ontology" that discusses thought and feeling and neural activity as an essential unity (I think?).

Anyway--most of these above-mentioned theorists of the mind, as well as others like Patricia and Paul Churchland, David Chalmers, have been attending meetings with professionals from other quarters, as represented by Andrew Weil (alternative health) and Charles Tart and Stanley Krippner (both parapsychologists), at annual "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conferences hosted by the University of Arizona.

These Tucson conferences have been open to virtually all the disciplines, approaching Mind from not only from the angle of physics, cognitive psychology and the neurosciences, but from the perspective of philosophy, the humanities, depth psychology, and the paranormal--discreetly called "Experiential and Anomalous Approaches."

Well after this small trek through our efforts to understand mind, I should think that at least we could follow the course of our world's academicians--and at least be *open* to all the theoretics of mind, realizing that not one theory has, of yet, dominated over another. And beyond the materialist approach to mind, there are other realms of "knowing" we have barely begun to understand.

-QUESTION OF SOUL-

In a previous vignette I discussed the question of mind, of consciousness, mostly from the perspective of mainly scientific materialists. Not surprising, but these scholars are far from any consensus as to what it is with which we are dealing when we talk of mind.

We humans are immersed not only in an outer, physical universe--but we are also immersed in a deeper, inner world. We have always had a profound *intuition* that, somehow, we are more than the hardware of our brain, that we are more than our body. We have always felt that we possess a special inner essence that all cultures call the "soul."

Wherever you go, with whomever you meet, everyone will have an opinion about soul. Beyond the pro and con of soul, there are all the varied interpretations of soul. Whatever is soul? We can go to almost any major library and find tons of information about the soul, but yet it seems such a muddle. There's no single, clear outline of what the soul might mean. Each culture--and it's respective religion or spiritual outlook--has determined what soul might mean to it. And the many cultures of this world do not necessarily reflect a total commonality about such.

Today, I suspect, most of us move around holding our individual opinions about soul. Still, I think it might be of interest to present some small cameo posts that discuss the idea of soul held by the following cultures: Hinduism, Buddhism, Ancient Greece, Celtic, Indigenous Peoples, Judaism, and Christianity.

Following this, it might be fun to peek into more modern-day revelations, such as the "soul-entity" of Edgar Cayce's Readings or ideas of a vast "soul-system" that suggests a hierarchy of SOUL, Soul, soul.

I guess what I have in mind is a small "soul education." Why not? It might give us a handle on our own soul.

 

 

 
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