New Forms of Human Mind and New Forms of Human Civilization

Recently, I had reason to refer to Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, a book which had a good deal of influence upon my thoughts, upon my views of how human beings are embodied creatures and not body-soul chimeras and also upon my views of the way that human beings are embedded in Creation. Polanyi saw with great clarity the way in which tools become parts of our bodies when we use them often and with attention. A surgeon reaches the point where the scalpel is an extension of his arm and hand rather than a fully external tool. I would go even beyond what I remember of Polanyi’s ideas in proposing that this is a necessary result if the human mind is shaped by responses to its environment.

When I say the mind is shaped by responses to its environment, I mean that it takes knowledge and skills which are manifest in Creation into itself and reshapes itself as a manifestation of that knowledge and those skills. When a mathematician acquires the knowledge and skills of a field of study, such as group theory, that becomes an actual part of his mind in a way even more intimate that the scalpel becomes a part of the surgeon’s hand.

This implies a radically different view of what mind is, what thought is, what knowledge is, than the view that mind is some sort of software residing in wetware. I don’t intend to survey theories of the mind, and haven’t enough historical knowledge to do so, but I’ll mention that the ‘software-view’ and other views see mind as some sort of agent which exists independently of the knowledge and skills which it ‘processes’. Moreover, though modern thinkers tend to be realistic about mind being embodied, they still escape to certain forms of dualism which are forced by the desire to see truths as transcendental to the stuff of this universe or to all of Creation if they deign to admit the existence a greater reality. Truths are not part of reality in any way that might leave them as ‘mere’ manifestations. Even God can’t create truths nor even select truths appropriate to a specific Creation.

So where does truth reside? I claim:

Things are true and truths are thing-like.

Dualism is to be destroyed, and unity restored to Creation, not by reducing all to matter nor by idealizing all to spirit but rather by seeing the stuff of Creation in different terms. I don’t know exactly what those terms are, though I’ve spoken of matter as ‘frozen soul’ — as one example — to reorient the poets who might invent new words and concepts which could then be defined more rigorously by the metaphysicians. But the basic concepts to be communicated come from mathematics and physics and the exact form of that concept will be determined by a more exact understanding of physical reality and also the truths from which it is shaped.

We need new wine in new wineskins. We don’t need to be spending all our time criticizing old wine or old wineskins nor should we be trying to transmute the old into the new as if grandpa can become his own descendant.

A certain amount of criticism of old ways of thought is necessary and there’s much good to be found in the thoughts of the thinkers of earlier centuries. I’ve learned much from Aquinas as one example, but the greatest of his teachings about efforts to understand Creation — including man — is:

Let your mind be shaped by actively responding to reality.

There are problems with such a simple statement but most of them can be resolved by an understanding of the slow and painful processes of the evolution of the human race to a state where the brain had properties allowing the development of a mind which could be shaped by responses which go beyond our immediate environment and by an understanding of the roughly analogous processes by which a human mind can be shaped by responses to its environments or by responses to much more if that mind is educated in a tradition which includes the likes of Homer, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Moses Maimonides, St. Thomas Aquinas, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Blake, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and so forth. And I’ve forgotten to mention a single musician or dancer or visual artist or athlete or statesman.

Rich cultures make for rich opportunities for human minds to be shaped to encompass far more than the furniture and the trees, not that I despise solid and comfortable furniture or grand old trees.

But there’s a non-linear complexity involved in this business of cultures and minds. At any one slice of time, it seems to me that minds shape culture and culture tells minds how to move, to paraphrase the physicist John Wheeler. But, over time, culture has shaped minds and cultures formed by early men who left no evidence of mind as we think of it, with abstract reasoning skills, eventually gave rise to the likes of the pre-Socratic philosophers and Archimedes, as well as Isaiah and the anonymous geniuses who wrote the early, foundational works of Hinduism. Men who could see the possibilities of tools after noticing the occasional sharp edge on a rock, men who could learn how to build magnificent pyramids by trial-and-error processes, produced an evolving culture that eventually produced mind-ed men who could design tools from fabricated materials and could build a Brooklyn Bridge after a complex planning process involving community leaders and local businessmen as well as engineers and contractors.

There’s much talk now about the incoherence in our culture, talk which preceded a general awareness of the economic fragility of modern societies. I’ll throw in a personal note at this point:

One reason I was willing to take the chances which led to a long and ongoing period of little or no income is that I was an actuary and understood the problems caused by our making extravagant promises to ourselves at the expense of future generations, but few would listen to me or to those who knew more than me about the various problems in our ways of organizing our personal and communal lives.

Yet, there’s something far bigger going on, bigger than even our financial meltdown, bigger than the more important meltdown of a manufacturing economy that seems to assume that consumers need 10,000 square foot houses to hold ever more television sets and clothes and shoes and refrigerators, bigger even than the moral decay caused by the Gresham’s law analogue which tells us cheap and mindless entertainment will drive out community orchestras and children’s dance recitals and quiet nights reading middle-brow historical novels or even demanding books of literature or science or history.

We’ve lost our old relationship to Creation and haven’t yet succeeded in forming a new relationship. We’re at the cusp of a civilization change — or a possible disastrous failure to move into a new phase of Western civilization.

And we may fail. Creative minds profound enough to shape new phases of a civilizations or even a more radically new civilization don’t form that often, not for lack of ‘raw’ human material but rather for lack of the courage and faith to respond to God’s Creation. We seek to hold onto what was good even when it shows itself to be inadequate for understanding new opportunities or problems, inadequate for proposing creative responses to those opportunities or problems.

Our traditions would form our minds in inappropriate ways if we let them. For those who have some knowledge of differential geometry — and mine is currently light-weight — there is a possible metaphor:

The world is a complex manifold, a very convoluted geometrical structure of many dimensions.

The human mind is formed by response to that manifold but indirectly as the minds of all but the greatest creators respond to some version of a chart to which that manifold is mapped. Even those greatest creators respond mostly to some pre-existing chart.

For those who know still less than me about this field of mathematics which is very important in modern understandings of physical reality: an example of a manifold might be the surface of the earth and a chart would be the result of one of several major ways of mapping the sphere of a surface to a flat surface which might be more useful for navigation or other purposes. An atlas, or collection of such maps or charts, can help much in understanding the peoples or physical features of the earth as a whole or of the northern Atlantic. But most such charts will be distorted in greater or lesser ways as any one knows from looking at the disproportionately large size of Greenland on a map produced by a Mercator projection.

We in the West currently have various charts which don’t correspond well to our current knowledge of the world. We make our plans and try to organize our lives using charts with vast empty or mislabeled regions though some of those regions have been explored to some or great extent by historians or biologists or physicists. This is not just a matter of inadequate or wrong knowledge. Our minds are misshaped.

Though the human mind shapes itself by responding to our environments or even the entire world, it’s shaped first by responses to our mothers and to the culture into which we’re born. Our minds are shaped by our teachers and they teach specific formulations of established knowledge. Moreover, few minds are flexible enough to actually shape themselves to new knowledge, especially when it’s not only so voluminous but also so often in conflict with much established knowledge as is modern empirical knowledge.

Much of this seems familiar if we try to see it in light of standard analyses of our moral and cultural crises. By doing this, we think about the human mind in non-Thomistic terms, that is, we think as if the human mind is something given and it will work correctly in any given circumstances (at least on earth) so long as it’s given good data and has learned proper rules of reasoning. Thus, most modern critics of our crises will talk as if we can think more clearly and act more appropriately if we simply stuff more accurate knowledge into our preformed minds. I’m saying our minds are plain and simply shaped wrong, though there are undoubtedly some which are shaped in a somewhat more appropriate way.

To be fair, Alasdair MacIntyre’s analyses of our modern moral problems seem perfectly consistent with my analysis, perhaps because he has also been strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas on human nature and moral nature in particular. There is deeper meaning than some realize in MacIntyre’s claim that we can’t resolve some of our moral conflicts, such as abortion, because the opponents hold words and concepts which don’t allow deeper communication of the opposing views.

There have also been plenty of men with sensitive souls united to powerful minds who’ve lived during times of breakdown or during interludes between phases of a civilization and those, such as St. Augustine, have left us words which tell us they knew that something was happening which was beyond the reach of even their powerful minds. It was beyond the reach of those minds because of the opaqueness with which future possibilities present themselves but also because their minds were shaped by chosen responses to their world, which responses were selected based upon a specific understanding of that world and that understanding was no longer rich enough. The manifold which was the reality of that world had proven itself to be shaped in such a way that the existing charts for mapping that world were clearly inadequate. So to speak.

This will be one characteristic of the new civilization:

The gods will die to be replaced by different metaphors and analogies, drawn from differential geometry or the theory of random numbers or morally well-ordered narratives of human history or poems about pretty young women understood in the context of human evolution.

In an address to philosophers given on June 7, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of modernity as demanding a “more exact understanding of the nature of man”, but that will be only a part of a more exact understanding of all of those regions of Creation which are subject to our exploration and analysis. If Western Civilization survives in an offspring or a new phase, that more exact understanding will lead to the development of that characteristic I described above. We won’t see the end of faith nor of literature nor of philosophy but we will see them re-founded as we are forced to view Creation as it is and not as our ancestors were forced to view it as thinkers and doers who hadn’t yet built up the capabilities of investigating physical reality or the abstract realities given to us through mathematics and metaphysics.

The truths that will remain unaltered are those which the transcendent God revealed about Himself, but even our relationship to that God might change as we are part of Creation and our understanding of Creation will be changing. We may be willing to see this world as a story God is telling for His own purposes and we may be able to work for God and for our fellow-men while accepting the pittance or the great wealth which God bestows upon us.