There’s little or no reason to believe there is any ‘mind-stuff’, material or supernatural, unless you simply wish to dogmatically assert that matter isn’t adequate as the foundation of our thoughts and feelings. Brain-scientists, geneticists, and evolutionary theorists are researching the workings of the human mind (and human nature more generally) and are producing remarkable descriptions of brain events underlying human thoughts. So far, all efforts to determine the nature of the most spiritual of experiences, such as after-death or out-of-body experiences, has tied those to specific brain events — those two cases seem to be caused by a disruption of the brain system which constructs our self-awareness. Self-awareness and the effects of a disruption of such are real, as are other soul-like or mind-like events. That they are real tells us that at least the potential for those aspects exists in a human being at conception but it doesn’t say the aspects are actually present at conception. To use a simple analogy from the animal kingdom, a black lab is born with certain playful traits that make him potentially a good water retriever but it takes a sustained and patient effort to actualize that potentiality.
The evidence is growing that mind is tied to the physical brain and not to any immaterial stuff, but the mind isn’t strictly the brain, not even strictly the brain and any electromagnetic fields it might generate. The mind is formed when the physical human being responds to his environments or any greater world he acknowledges, even if he only dimly suspects the existence of some parts of that greater world. The mind involves relationships and relationships are perhaps what we understand least about the physical universe which is our birthplace and our place of growth. This doesn’t point to some mystical view or any proposal that the embodied man has some sort of supernatural component. After all, the shape of our brains — taking ‘shape’ for now in a loose and intuitive sense — and the very operation of our brains is really the embodiment of our conditioned responses and the consequent relationships to what lies around us.
This is the point of Thomistic theories of the mind, which do a good job of providing the language and basic concepts for a narrative explanation of the mind and its development in the individual. Despite the confusion in some popularizations of so-called ‘theories of everything’ and perhaps even in some serious scientific discussions of such theories, human knowledge can’t penetrate to the very ground of what-is because that ground is a contingency brought into existence in a way that lies well beyond any sort of thinking we’re capable of. We can speak of the very basic idea of something coming into existence from nothing but there is no known way of imagining or even speaking ‘scientifically’ about such an event. We can speak of what-is, such as the mind-like aspects of a human being, but there is some elementary level, or perhaps an ever descending series of seemingly elementary levels, which we have to accept and use in our speech about and our understanding of what-is. The task before us is to gain the ability to speak intelligently about the mind, using a language which preserves the phenomena while also allowing more fundamental explanations. In practical terms, this might involve multiple but reconcilable languages, but that’s a complication of no immediate importance.
And so, I return to the Thomistic proposal that the mind forms in response to the environments of the human being. For the record, St. Thomas Aquinas actually split up what we would now call the mind into mostly embodied components with abstract reasoning located in an immaterial soul which wasn’t quite human. By abstract reasoning, I mean such mental acts as the construction of classes, species, etc. from particular examples. Aquinas considered our more concrete mental acts, such as those of moral reasoning, to be embodied and to mature and be shaped in an organic way. I take his understanding of the mental operations of moral reasoning as the understanding he would have had of the entire human mind if he’d known about the nature of matter. Aquinas thought of matter as being inert as did most ancient and Medieval thinkers. That understandable mistake threw St. Thomas off and led him to the false conclusion that the brain couldn’t be flexible enough to engage in truly abstract reasoning, such as drawing the concept of the species ‘dog’ from particular examples such as dachshunds and great danes.
In my way of thought, there is no clear separation between a valid thought and reality. This is not to say that we have minds which magically correspond to reality. We don’t carry a magical chain of keys which can open all locked doors. We make a key for a new locked door in a way that’s often as ad-hoc as a burglar with a plastic card and some crude lock-picks and sometimes as elegant as the finest work done by a locksmith with a traveling van filled with the latest of modern tools.
Our brains aren’t analogous to computer hardware nor are our minds analogous to software. If we use that sort of an analogy, our mind-brain complex is analogous to a computer network manned by various sorts of experts. The physical equipment for a given network is largely determined within the short-term, but the software can be adjusted even in the short-term and human expertise can be added or moved out, at least in the form of books or other materials for the staff to use. On the other hand, the system evolves over time, not only in its hardware and software but in a variety of ways in which it interacts with the outside world.
Organisms are born with the genetic capacity to become different particular entities. Some amphibians have double sets of genes, one of which is activated in the embryonic stage of development when temperatures are relatively low and another when temperatures are relatively high.
I’m claiming that there is no pre-existing and pre-formed mind, just as there is no pre-existing and pre-formed human person. In old-fashioned language, we’re born as particular instantiations of human nature but that’s far from a well-formed human being and not a person in any but a nominalistic sense. A particular human being is formed, well or otherwise, as he responds to what lies around him and a particular mind is an aspect of that particular human being formed as that being begins to form abstractions from the reality around him or from books or other compendiums of knowledge. So we have a basic human potentiality which is the result of the evolution of the lines of his ancestral organisms since life began and we also have his development during his lifetime.
The evidence seems to be fairly solid that the human mind has evolved, at least the evidence is solid enough for a serious hypothesis. The ordinary assumption, implicit or explicit, in the writings of many scientists as well as nearly all historians and philosophers and theologians is that Euclid had a mind not so much different from that of Gauss while I’ve been implicitly claiming in my writings that Gauss had shaped his mind to a world described by human knowledge which is far, far, far richer than the knowledge of Euclid’s time. Gauss’ mind was not just stuffed with better and more information than that of Euclid. Gauss’ mind was shaped to a radically different body of knowledge from that of Euclid. Gauss’ mind was a radically different variant of the human mind. If Euclid’s mind was analogous to the figures of plane geometry, Gauss’ mind was analogous to the wider and more general ‘figures’ or algebraic formulations of differential geometry. Gauss’ mind was shaped to deal with more abstract levels or deeper layers of Creation.
Long after biological evolution of species had been accepted, long after Waddington and Wolpert and other embryologists had taught us about the constraints and freedom of embryological development, many have spoken and written as if the human mind at the species level had been some sort of magical special creation, as if the human mind of Luke will be the same whether he sinks into alcoholism and life on the street or goes through Harvard Medical School. The mind of a human creature of 100,000 years ago is assumed to be just 12 years of modern liberal education from possibly taking on the shape of Einstein’s mind as he graduated from ETH. The minds of Luke I and Luke II are typically assumed to differ only in the memories each contains including the second Luke’s brain-surgery skills which are merely humanly remembered versions of textbook instructions.
No.
Our inherent mental capabilities are more in the nature of mind-building traits and not in the nature of a pre-formed mind. Our minds reflect the state of the underlying organism, not even just the brain, but also the relationships with Creation defined narrowly or widely.
If the human mind has evolved at the species level in a manner somewhat independent of the evolution of the brain, then we should see some signs of such patterns of development in history, but we should recognize the physical constraint: the mind would have to evolve after the formation of brain-structures which make possible abstract thought including the ability to think of objects not present and the ability to make explicit plans for using those objects in gathering food or making shelters. Such brain-structures and the related abilities, in a rudimentary form, do occur in at least chimpanzees. Unless there was independent development of very complex structures, then the underlying brain-structures for abstract reasoning might well have first evolved more than five million years ago, though there is no evidence that chimpanzees have ever much used abstract reasoning unless cued to do so in specific ways. I believe there is now some evidence that creatures who were either ancestral to homo sapiens or offshoots of that ancestral line did use tools and maybe manufactured primitive tools perhaps more than a million years ago. Evidently, progress towards anti-personnel bombs and iPods was even slower than scientists once thought.
There are a variety of interesting problems to solve. If Western Civilization survives, there won’t be any lack of employment opportunities for anthropologists and other scientists. I’ll mention just one. We were taught by popular science writers that body structures which are expensive to maintain will tend to disappear if not used. If true, what in the world were those prefrontal regions of humanoid brains used for during those hundreds of thousands of years in which the mind was gestating, if I may speak with purpose-filled terseness?
I’m more interested in what seems to have been rapid development of abstract reasoning ability over the past 3,000 years or so. Perhaps this should be expanded back another few thousand years to the development of large-scale agricultural enterprises which logically would have required profound changes in the minds of those first settled farmers. It’s not clear how the transition would have been made from the lives of their ancestors, lives spent in small family groups living nomadic lives over various natural landscapes. The development of the human mind as we know it seems more plausible once men began gathering in larger communities which would reward specialized skills and knowledge and would even demand planning for simple sanitation or for ensuring food would be available. Moreover, complex but somewhat regular patterns of activity would make for easier patterns to discern when the skills of abstraction were first developing.
The exegetical work of the scholars of classic works of philosophy and literature, such as Bruno Snell (The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature) and R.B. Onians (The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate), have done some preliminary but serious work in understanding relatively early stages of the development of the abstract reasoning powers of the human mind at the group or species level. I’ll be trying to understand these more recent developments (from the time of the pre-Socratics or so) in terms of my updated version of St. Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the development of the human mind. For now, I’d just like to propose a general set of stages in this development. The following isn’t intended to be a piece of scholarship but rather a sketch for weaving scholarly information into a coherent narrative:
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The practical mind developed early, well before cities or even permanent agricultural villages had formed. Weapons and tools were manufactured, pigments were invented for cave-paintings, and all that. At some point during the age of the gestation of the human mind, a sense of narrative and some unknown sort of spirituality also developed.
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The speculative mind developed in a theological form among the Israelites and the founders of Hinduism circa 600BC.
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The speculative mind developed in a philosophical form amongst the pre-Socratic Greeks, perhaps a little after 600BC. The early philosophers seemed to be engaging in natural philosophy of the sort which is also the early stages of a theoretical physicist’s work if he’s taking on fundamental problems. I can then propose the scientific empirical mind made its early appearance in the work of philosophers who seemed to be empirically oriented without having the tools or habits of empirical investigation. Perhaps for that reason, that scientific empirical mind made a fairly quick vanishing act — though several centuries later, Archimedes would make his appearance out of time. Then the scientific mind continued to arise only in isolated cases for a thousand years or so.
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A more disciplined form of practical empirical knowledge appears with Roman political and military organization.
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The speculative mind develops further in the Christian West and shows a willingness to let empirical knowledge constrain and shape speculations. We see the emergence even in the letters of St. Paul (commentaries to follow at some point) of an end to a Platonic split between really real reality and concrete reality. This is a very complex process of development which shows funny results in such intellectual events as St. Augustine’s claim that animal species can transmute into other species except for man who was a special creation. Unfortunately, human thinkers including Christians have shown they’re ever tempted to move back to a thoroughly inappropriate idealism and dualism.
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St. Thomas Aquinas was very much an empirically oriented philosopher, though his Medieval writing style and his formal acceptance of the angel-infested chain-of-being teachings of Pseudo-Dionysius would lead naive readers to think otherwise. I was one of those. Under the guidance of Etienne Gilson and others, I came to realize (perhaps going further than they) that angels and demons were formal entities in the writings of Aquinas, filling slots in some chain-of-being without having much to do with the world of men or with salvation history. On the other hand, Aquinas seems to have been quite serious when he said that metaphysics uses the specific sciences. Having claimed that things are true, he seems to have also realized that the truths in things are more particular versions of abstract truths. It’s not generally so easy to go from particular truths to more general or abstract truths.
Aquinas was a member of the last generation of the High Middle Ages which was a period in which mathematics was being rediscovered by Europeans, optics was being developed, and many other sciences, theoretical and practical, were being explored. It was a good sign that it didn’t take a Newton or an Archimedes to develop the foundations of optics, but it should be considered odd that a founder of optics made an elementary mistake in measuring the angle of refraction for rainbows and no one caught the error. The first to publish became an authority and the need to check results from even the greatest of thinkers or experimenters wasn’t yet acknowledged. Along similar lines, Albert the Great was one of the first of those who practiced empirical investigation as a science and yet even he was seemingly unaware of the need for disciplined experiments or even second-opinions on speculations when he theorized wildly on possible causes for the creation of new species. I don’t remember all his exuberant proposals, but I do remember he thought a new species was created when a rose stalk was grafted onto the root-stock of another variety. The training-wheels were off and the apprentices were pedaling as fast as possible to compensate for lack of balance. I may well be in a similar situation. In any case, St. Albert seems not to have made the proper effort to understand such words as ‘species’ in empirical terms. Maybe that was the problem — he tried to subject his thought to empirical constraints but the ‘chunks’ of his thought were themselves a priori.
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With Galileo, we see the emergence of a more disciplined sort of scientific mind though one that doesn’t seem to appreciate the power of speculation in empirical investigations. Yet, he taught at least some European investigators a variety of lessons about designing experiments and building equipment and analyzing the results.
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With Newton, we see the emergence of a mind which is truly multi-faceted though a bit fragmented. Newton practiced theology at apparently a high level, and bible studies which at least tried to make allowance for quality of manuscripts and history of the texts and histories of the peoples involved. I might disagree with his unitarianism but not with his understanding that human beings know even God through His effects on Creation. Newton showed his brilliance in practical empirical matters with his alchemical experiments (which overlapped true science) and his ability to manufacture and use instruments for his optical and other experiments. He showed his mental powers as a philosopher in the speculations that preceded his more formal work in gravity and dynamics. And he showed his powers in scientific empirical work by his mathematical explorations beginning in his teen years as well as that later physics work in gravity and dynamics. Newton’s importance in the history of human thought probably is underestimated, as strange as that statement may seem, just because of the strangeness of his theology from mainstream Christian viewpoints and also because few seem to appreciate that much of his scientific work (but not his development in his youth of the calculus and the theory of infinite series) began with philosophical speculation into the nature of space and time. In the end, his thought ran in several largely disconnected streams and, thus, he didn’t accomplish as much as Augustine and Aquinas in unifying seemingly disparate fields of thought.
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In the Renaissance, we also see the beginning of a more disciplined approach to history and to texts, both historical and literary. This is a little amusing since the textual analyses of the Renaissance humanists began in hero-worship of the ancients and ended in footnotes describing the uncertainties in the texts and the errors in the underlying thought.
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In the 1800s, we see some unique men, Keble and Newman and a handful of others, who were able to engage in still more scientific historical and textual analyses than the Renaissance humanists and yet keep their orthodox Christian faith.
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With the great mathematicians and physicists of the 19th century and early 20th century, we see the emergence of more versatile minds in bulk, in a manner of speaking, though not even Einstein had a mind quite as versatile as that of Newton. We’ve perhaps seen the emergence of that general sort of mind in modern neuroscience.
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The modern empirically based understanding of the universe points towards a Thomistic existentialism rather than a Platonic essentialism. I’ve explored this claim in a variety of entries on this blog and also, in a more preliminary form, in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. The sheer power of mathematics in understanding concrete being and the way that concrete forms of being melt away as we, so to speak, go back in time to the beginning of the expansion of this universe point to the likelihood that being is unified rather than some sort of form, or abstraction, impressed upon inert substance. Abstraction is to be found and investigated by moving more deeply into concrete being, in a manner of speaking. Now we also know that space-time is itself contingent and part of the concrete being of this universe, opening up all sorts of investigations the meanings of which are probably beyond our current understanding.
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Modern brain-science is moving towards the confirmation of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas that the mind is shaped by the responses of the organism to its environments. Strictly speaking, Aquinas treated the abstract reasoning abilities of a human being as located in a soul-like object which wasn’t really human but was more of an immaterial prosthetic device. I take his teaching that concrete reasoning (such as moral reasoning) is embodied in the organism and, like the organism as a whole, develops in response to its environments as what he would have taught about all forms of human reasoning if he’d been able to believe the brain is as highly plastic as we now know it to be. Perhaps the most important aspect of Aquinas’ thought about human beings is his default assumption that we’re organisms and develop in the way of organisms. An organism is a unity, however defectively so.
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The general thrust of modern science, its methodology as well as its gathered knowledge, indicates that there is a deep relationship between Creation and a well-formed human mind. This relationship, almost a synchronization, occurs not because we are conceived with minds that operate according to some body of higher truths but rather because a well-formed mind is shaped to the surrounding reality, a reality which is the manifestation of the truths God chose for our world, manifestations which point back towards the more ‘raw’ or abstract foundations of those truths.
While I’m emphasizing human progress as seen in the minds of philosophers and theologians and scientists, we should remember that there is a somewhat amazing general movement towards something that could be called progress in most general realms of human activity in most civilizations. While some major civilizations have been lacking in major aspects of human accomplishment, such as Rome lacking in intellectual achievements, science and art and politics and economics and practical arts seem to largely develop and then decay roughly in sync.
I’ll leave matters here and try to post an entry before long that considers some of the implications of this sort of a viewpoint about the relationship between the evolution of minds and the evolution of human civilizations.