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In this post, I am continuing the discussion of the anatomy of the mind we can deduce logically from the nature of the cultural (i.e., symbolic) environment to which the human brain must necessarily adjust. In addition to identity, or relationally-constituted self, and the will, or the acting self, discussed in the previous two posts, there is the tremendously important structure, the structure of consciousness turned upon itself, to which Descartes referred in his great statement “I think, therefore I am.” This “I of self-consciousness” is the thinking part of us. In distinction to all other processes and “structures” of the mind, the existence of the “I” of Descartes is not a hypothesis. It is, rather, the only certain knowledge available to us. We are all aware of it. We all know directly by experience that it exists. This knowledge is absolute; it is impossible to doubt it.
It is very good that this is so, because the logical reasons for the existence of this mental structure are less obvious than those that help us to account for identity and will. Given the character of human environment, both these structures are necessary for the adaptation to this environment, and therefore, for the survival of every individual one of us. But one does not need the thinking self to adapt to life within culture. Dogs, for example, seem to adapt to the symbolic environment without necessarily developing the ability to think. And, if they can do it, we, presumably, can do it too. One can argue, of course, that a fully human existence would be impossible without it, but such quantitative judgment is quite likely to lead us eventually to the unacceptable conclusion that only a genius (a very rare, thus abnormal human condition which indeed depends on the thinking self) can be fully human.
The logical necessity for the thinking self is of a different kind. While human beings can well do without it, human existence without it would be impossible. It is a necessary condition for the culture process on the collective level: what makes possible self-consciousness for any one of us is precisely that which makes possible indirect learning and thus the transmission of human ways of life across generations and distances.
Most of the circumstantial evidence regarding the mind comes from comparative history and comparative zoology -- comparisons between different cultural environments (the simple fact of their variety suggests the structure of identity, for instance) and between humans and wild animals (the self-sufficiency of human consciousness and its largely inexplicit and emotional character, symbolic imagination, and will or agency are deduced from comparisons between our environment and its demands, on the one hand, and the environment of organic life and the animals’ responses to it, on the other). Similarly, it is from comparative zoology we deduce that to transmit human ways of life we need the thinking self.
Based both on the circumstantial and on the empirical (direct, introspective) evidence, there are a few things we can say about the thinking self. Among all the symbolic mental processes, it is the one which is explicitly symbolic; it is not just a process informed and directed by our symbolic environment, but it is as essentially symbolic process as is the development of language, or of a musical tradition, or an elaboration of a theorem – or as is the transmitted culture, in general -- in the sense that it actually operates with formal symbols, the formal media of symbolic expression. This is the reason for the dependence of thought on language, which has been so frequently noted. Thinking is only possible if such formal media are available, as they are in music, mathematics, visual art, and in language, above all. Our thought extends only as far as the possibilities of the formal symbolic medium in which it operates.
This presents an enormous problem for neuroscience: how to account conceptually for the perception, storage in memory, and recall of purely symbolic stimuli which may only acquire sensual components in use, after they are conceived in the mind, and these components are necessarily minimal (e.g. these words I am typing and you are reading acquire a visual component only after I have thought them and you perceive them at once visually and in their meaning which touches only your mind, but none of your bodily senses)? What is a perception of an idea? What is perceived and which organ perceives it? The translation of such stimuli into the organic processes of the brain, which must occur, because everything that happens in the mind happens by means of the brain, is beyond the current ability of neuroscience to imagine. However, we have all the reasons to hope for a development in the science of the mind similar to that which happened in the biological sub-discipline of genetics which, called into being by Darwin’s evolutionary theory, started to reveal the specific mechanisms of evolution through natural selection some forty years after Darwin had postulated it. (See my previous posts here and here),
Similarly to the process of breaking organic processes into its physico-chemical elements that happens in the translation of organic stimuli, including the process of perception itself, into physical and chemical reactions in the brain, a process of breaking (from top down) of symbolic stimuli into its organic elements (reconstructing symbols as signs that are sensorily perceived, for instance) must be responsible for such translation, which would differ from the bio-physical translation only in degree of its complexity, i.e., quantitatively. We are capable of perceiving, storing in memory, and recalling at will various aspects of our environment. It makes sense that we would intuit – but intuition would break into perception – and thus perceive and recall a string of information couched in formal symbols in the formal symbols in which it was couched, that is, perceive and recall a word not sensually, but by its imaginary sound, a geometric shape by its imaginary sight, and a melody by the imaginary sound and/or the sight of the corresponding notation. Do we actually hear the words and melodies in our head? They are there, but the great majority of words in our vocabulary we know from reading only, some of them we have invented, and a composer hears the music before putting it on paper or trying it on an instrument, and can do so, as the astounding example of Beethoven proves, even while being physically deaf. This means that we are actually processing -- and experiencing -- unembodied sounds, sounds that do not have any material and, therefore, sensual reality (though they can acquire both these realities, when outwardly expressed or objectified in the course of the cultural process). The experience is possible because the symbolic (meanings) naturally breaks into the sensory (signs).
Our conscious recall of such non-sensual information would necessarily be an explicit recall. The act of will, under different circumstances implicit and, as a result, unobserved, in cases of recalling explicit symbolic information (human semantic memory) will be self-observed and become a subject of self-consciousness. The opportunities for observing one’s consciousness are numerous: we might recall stored explicit information for comparison with any new learning experience with explicit symbolic systems in the environment, that is, with music, mathematics, visual art, but, above all, anything at all in language, and then we might wish to recall and manipulate and re-manipulate it again and again. Then not only the process of consciousness and symbolic imagination, in general, which is largely unconscious (in the sense of unselfconscious and inexplicit), but the process of thinking -- of talking to oneself in language, mathematics, music, and explicit visual images -- becomes self-sustaining and self-sufficient. I suppose this is what we mean when we talk about “life of the mind.” The thinking self, which does not have to be involved in regular mental processes on the individual level (such as symbolic imagination which is for the most part unselfconscious) in such cases is perfectly integrated with and involved in them. It becomes an integral part of the mind as individualized culture and of the person. But it is important to remember that this is not the essential function of this mental structure, its essential function is to assure the symbolic process on the collective level. It is enough that some humans develop an active thinking self for this process to continue and for culture to be maintained.
Liah Greenfeld is the author of Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
