Lapham's Quarterly: States of Mind

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XI-1: States of Mind Psychology. The most common idea is that the Mind is somehow non-physical, separate and different from the brain and body in which it resides. As in the doctrine of the soul, which is embedded in Christian and other theologies. I find that odd, since the Creeds affirmed by most Christians refer explicitly to the resurrection of the body, not the survival of the immortal soul.
     But to get back to the book: Assuming that Lapham and his staff have assembled a representative collection of snippets, Mind and Self are often conflated, as are Consciousness and Self. This too strikes me as odd. Define “mind” as the ability to reason, to solve problems, to formulate goals and methods of achieving them. Then creatures (and machines) with brains clearly have some kind of mind, but not necessarily a sense of self, and most of them apparently not even consciousness.
     What this collection shows us more completely than the textbooks is that the notions of mind, self, and consciousness are inextricably bound up with each other. More, whatever mechanisms account for one will in part account for the others. These three concepts depend on each other. It’s a simple (but I think fallacious) step to infer that the phenomena labelled by these words must also depend on each other. “Soul” is an attempt to account for their apparent mutual dependence.
     Anyhow, “consciousness” is the “hard problem”. How can one and a half pounds or so of living matter the consistency of Jello give rise to the certainly that “I” exist? I think the answer begins with the observation that brains make sense of the data acquired by the sense organs. All living things interact with their environment in order to harvest the energy that sustains them and the substances that enable them to reproduce.
     Brains enable organisms to do so more effectively by solving a wider range of problems, by overcoming a wider range of obstacles to continued existence and reproduction. Brains create something like an image or map of the environment. At some level of complexity, the brain creates an image of the organism itself. More complexity, and the brain creates an image of the organism within the environment. The next level of complexity creates an image of the organism creating that image. (This may be why we use the metaphor of a mirror when we “reflect upon our experience”.)
     Or something like that. When it comes to understanding our minds, our conscious selves, there’s much handwaving in the explanations. All of them offer some insight. All of them help the reader (me) extend and clarify their own notions and insights.
     One of the essays recounts how Jung arrived at the concept of “psychological types”, and its consequence that we are fundamentally unable to understand people who are not the same type as we ourselves. It’s the same reason that we can’t imagine what it’s like to be a bat. ****