Читать книгу This Place of Prose and Poetry - Lucian Krukowski - Страница 13

Five words need attending to. They are: What, When, Where, Who, Why.

The first three refer to the world outside us—to that which occurs; to the time(s) of its occurrence; to the place(s) in which it occurs. The last two (who and why) refer to the ways we are in the world—so as to accommodate the recognizing of the “who” that writes about the world, and looks for reasons (if any can be found) that bring our particular “who” to a juncture with the “why” that has us write.

There are clear young folk as well as some older wooly ones—who have no difficulty in answering “where?” with a “there!” Such “there-thinking” affirms the value of the place where the thinker may contingently be. “There,” they say, is neutral between any and no-where—a good safe place to hang out. But this affirmation of a “somewhere” can move (the rest of) us from the ecstatic uncertainty of free spirits to the analytic doldrums practiced by the sober and mature. The object for these latter, is to precisely find the “where” of their “there.” But there are those others (myself included) who doubt there ever is a “there” that will stay put anywhere.

Consider, as an example, the current mind-brain controversy: Where is the location of thought? Why, in the mind! But the materialist view locates this “where” within the structure of the brain—the thinking mind just is (in) the physical brain. Such a thesis, dualists counter, is of only elliptical help in this inquiry, for it illuminates a consequence of brain-language infatuation—a neuronal “there”—a place where the more sceptical “who’s” do not cogently—or comfortably—find themselves.

Views that propose multiple locations for cognizing existence do not include doubts that the brain is the structural arbiter of these locations—there is no brain-free (brainless) cognition. What is in doubt is the presumption that all our experiences can be located and explained by physical analysis (manipulation) of the brain, and its relevant language: It is a stretch too far, e.g., to find loving, hating, reflecting, hoping, etc.—embedded within discrete neuronal correlates.

The notion of “mind,” my argument goes, offers more linguistic room for affective, lived-life, descriptions: We are “mindful of,” “have a mind to,” are “in” or “out” of our minds, we do not know our “loved-one’s mind”—or the “mind of God.” (It seems evident that God has no need for a brain—if so, brainists must all be atheists). The dead had minds that once were full but now are closed forever to our asking—but not to our remembering. It seems that fussing with nerve-endings in their lobal locations—alive or dead—gives us neither answers nor memories.

The answers preferred by “who’s” —

at whatever place their “where’s” may be—

suggest themselves before the morning pee.

They then come to rosy bloom

abetted by the wines of afternoon—

finding their evidence in the hand-holds

and foot-notes of an early-evening.

Later, they fade into the darker dreams

and tangled glades of memory.

There are also more extravagant views, held by some mind-speakers, that offer to “who’s” who have no interest in their “where’s,” the comforting belief that they are free to not need a where—certainly not one located in the brain, and not even in the mind. This is the path to an ecstasy which requires that one be out of (one’s) mind—a venture that also seeks a where-free location. Such “where-less who’s” are, however, most vulnerable in the early morning hours—when, sitting on the pot, they find they do not entirely exist as fiction or spirit. But in other more fanciful times and places, they can avoid sharing the same modalities as do their more concrete selves, and so need not much bother with the evidence that upholds their actual existence.

There is a middle ground that has more general appeal to doubters of mind-brain identity, for it does not enirely reject the evident relationship between “who’s” and “where’s.” Instead, it offers a view of their communal co-existence in time and place—the belief that for an event to be characterized as an occurrence, it must be within a physical framework at a certain time in a particular place. Thoughts in the mind and actions in the brain, on this account, are described as simultaneous events—and through formal equivalence, can be considered identical. On a different level of relationship, however, these may not be causally related—little can be assumed about mental function by evoking future findings in the brain: (Post-hoc non ergo propter-hoc). What can be said—is that prior brain findings (a tumor, say) will probably result in certain mental behavior. Taken more generally, however, “mind” (everything we can think) is not (yet) an entity subject to a causal explanation through reference to specific brain-events. The expansion of neurological research would need further reduction—and regimentation—of what we consider mind-events in order for an equivalence with brain-events to be reached. I hope that this will not (again) become the “true epistemic path”—as it was, say, with logical-positivism. Otherwise, imagination is in trouble.

One argument supporting the dualistic view holds that terms such as “events” and “occurrences” are merely codifications—and thus, abstractions—of times past or future. There is no denying that in every time and place, we face a programmatic uncertainty about the nature and location of times and places—even to the point where such locutions as “each” and “every,” and “before” and “after,” presume a totality that does not reflect a more co-responsive view of experience.

One solution—of a religious kind—to such uncertainty, is to suppose that all variables and possibles come together in a mind—not yours or mine—but in an ideal mind which contains all the possible variations in existence—past and future. This thesis, among its other virtues, provides defense against anxieties about the threat of nothing—the fear that when the physical brain stops, the mind just ends. It is a comforting faith to believe that one’s individual demise is not a chance occurrence, but instead, a proper part of cosmic necessity—a necessity given its law (and reality) by the mind (not brain) of a necessary Deity.

Given this, we can look forward, when we die, to our small ripple rejoining the larger waves off shore—and so we continue to “exist.” But this remains a considerable “given.” Remember Kant’s assertion that “existence is not a predicate.”

The thesis of an ideal mind can also be found in a secular context—when it is considered to be—at least—co-extensive with a brain. Such a mind-brain reveals itself in the expansion of our (computational) efforts to encompass and encode the material processes of mental function. One aspect of such a program (the speculative aspect) would be to give us a this-worldly version of the transcendental mind: If we could get it all together—if we could put all the variables, past and future, that are implicit in experience, into one grand self-correcting scheme—we could then (progressively) grasp what knowing, and what knowing that we know (and so on)—finally comes to. In such a finality, there will be nothing left behind—or yet to come—that we do not, or cannot, know.

But we draw back from such improbability by saying that mind, like brain, is in a place—perhaps the same place. But the difficulties in locating “place” (more so—“same-place”) bring to mind the old academic verities where acceptance of an existential thesis was gained through mutual accord in a true belief about what there is. But this attempt to fix “place” and circumscribe “existence” founders on the problems of delimitation and modality: “When is the place referred to?” “Is its existence actual (a there and then), possible (contingent-on-being experienced), necessary (but unknowable in its immeasurable completeness)?”

One solution would be to avoid such epistemic complexity and join (however reluctantly) with the forces that categorically champion places as being the concrete locations we desire: All spaces are places. It can then be said: There are no spaces in (that occur to) the mind (however absent-minded or far-fetched)—that are not places in the body, most notably, in the brain.

But where does this get us? Of course, adherents of the opposing view—that mind is not reducible to location—can be dismissed as a grab-bag of myopic Hegelians, retired relativists, nostalgic flower-children, and other skeptics and visionaries whose interests are variously directed to undermining reductionist theories—and by so doing, to give credence to their preferences for wandering from concrete place to open space.

Such skeptics typically don’t believe that translations between languages (mind-talk and brain-talk) can be definitive (salve-veritate)—because truth is not always the goal. They also don’t believe that explanatory theories are cumulative (contra Hegel). What they believe, instead, is that theories are only richer or more meager—depending on how they explain what we use, flee from, or marvel at. Simply put: the analytic, pragmatic, aesthetic, when extended beyond academic civility, speak different languages. At stake, here, is not the notion that mind is “located in” or “the same as” the brain. It is, rather, the poverty of brain-theory’s explanatory function as well as the weakness of its predictive power—when it comes to issues that are mind-specific—emotion, volition, appreciation, meaning, morality, imagination— to dredge up an embattled term—“subjective.” These are issues that have different explanatory parameters than do “objective” ones.

The inter-translateability between quality and quantity remains a question. In cosmological theory, the hyphen in space-time is as uneasy as it is in mind-body or in inside-outside; “unobservable” and “immeasurable” are offered as attributes of real entities—as in “dark matter.” In political theory, “freedom” and “equality” vacillate between support and antagonism, as do “progress” and “justice.” Language, in such cases, stretches to accommodate them.

Advocates of separate theories of “mind” and “brain” are heartened in their beliefs when they peer across the fence and see how the advocates of “mind-as-brain” fare in trying to map the “soft” problems of ethics, aesthetics, private consciousness—as well, indeed, as the ”hard” ones of incessant wars and observational indeterminacy—onto a neuronal matrix. The (soft) question: “What makes people act this way?” can be answered by the (hard) rejoinder: “We’ll soon have an organic handle on all those differences in belief, and we’ll be able to offer explanations (as well as cures) for every brain-place that is their origin. Unfortunately, we have so far been hindered by atavars (like you) of mind-speak—those poetic-psychologic-sociologic-spiritualistic-babblers—who refuse to come around to accepting the one place that (soon—soon) offers a full account.”

In contrast, the mind—as the mind-ists insist—is not simply a location. Rather, it has places which it shares (physically but indeterminately) with the brain—but it can also be located (metaphorically) in spaces that are not (in) the brain—and it responds to questions that are not answerable by (perusal of) the brain.

The task of mind-defenders is to fend off the regimentists and reductionists who offer the dictum that we can locate all this flotsam of thinking, willing, feeling, creating, wanting, loving, hating, despairing—time past and time future—within the brain-scans etc., offered by neurologists in the laboratories.

Such an empirical fix can be seen as a laudable ambition, but its realization would create a brave new world that I, for one, would not want to live in. Theoretical advances can diminish as well as enhance the “quality of life”—in the sense that the “explained” subject is often smaller —definitionally impoverished—than the earlier one to be explained. In this case, the subject is conscious life. So (in the non-linear way of mind-ists) I look at the conflict from the vantage of a different place.

The study of physics (as I limitedly understand it) has gone far beyond location-in-place in its search for reality. Quarks, in experimental situations, appear in time-spans that occur only in our recordings— the accelerators, i.e., that produce ever-smaller, more basic variants of known particles, are increasingly subject to (or independent of) observational parsimony. One question is: How miniscule can these variants be before it can only be said that they are fictionally observed—although they perhaps are not really fictional—for they really exist as they are used—sometimes satisfying theorems, sometimes inspiring art—even when not observable.

Then we have string theory—a celestial conceit if ever there was one—which is offered as (finally) underlying the whole of material nature—no more problems reconciling the forces of celestial mechanics with the forces inside the atom. Although strings can be figured and reconfigured in theory—as being the most inclusive and explanatory ur-phenomena we yet have, they, by their very formulation, are not subject, being ur-dimensional, to perceptual verification in plain old time and space. They cannot, alas, be so strummed (by us) as to (adequately) sound the music of the spheres. They cannot even, so I’m told, account for the workings of our world’s particular place in the new inclusiveness.

The notion of consciousness is analogously difficult. Consciousness, too, is a phenomenon in and of the world—but it is not reducible to the empiricism of place and time—even (especially) when it is purportedly explained via a tangle of firing neurons. Someday we may sort out each and every tangle—who knows? The ideal of adequacy lurks behind every scientific theory. But for now, the philosophically ambitious mind risks becoming a captive of the medically innocent brain. Acknowledging the value of historical error, we might call the brain the new pineal gland—the doorway (transfer station) through which we will bring body and mind together. Parenthetically, in a religious context, where we would accept another entity—soul—into our schema, we might then say that mind is the pineal gland between body and soul—a transfer between existence and belief.

Descartes’ hope for a seamless transition between the ineffable soul and the matter-of-fact mind foundered, among other things, on bad physiology. But there is no doubt these days (do you still have some?) that everything the mind conceives has correlation with actions in the brain.

Where else? Well then, let’s ask the metaphoricians:

Correlations can be found between cold toes and a runny nose —

or maybe also in a field of ancient thistles

that prick your quick, but bloom at end of winter.

Or even in the hallowed courts that decide

(with diagrams) the proper pathways

between the what’s when’s and how’s of lovers—

(recent courts have trouble with the why’s).

There are correlations everywhere—look not here but there.

“Where else?”—that arrogant question—implies that someday we can cap it all: We will finally find the ultimate physical particle, match technologically advanced observation to the increasing expansion of the universe—and, at the same time, we will stuff mind and its misbehaving surrogate, consciousness, so completely into the brain that there will be no distinction left to pester us.

But some things, you know, are always left outside—those peripheral irritants that test the boundaries of every explanation. Think about the defunct certainties (just recently) that girded the attempts to reduce language to sense-data and then, through logical construction, into objects: “Erlebs” join “Qualia” (Carnap and Goodman) in the salon of benighted visions of transparent reference. But there still may be good conversation in way-stations with the older advocates of ether and phlogiston—not to mention the four humours—and think about the over-soul. Those folks knew how to party!

This overflow of certainty, these failures—if you will—I accept as travails of the soul. But here I give the term ‘soul’ a special usage—as a name for programmatic uncertainty about what is left over from all our attempts to squeeze mind into brain.

Soul, in this usage, need not retain a religious sense—although it may. I offer it as a way of marking the distance between what bedevils our present aspirations to become complete in our theories, and the conundrums that in time diffuse our every success.

Can we still be optimistic Hegelians without accepting Hegel’s final stages for the achievement of spirit? There were terrible wars fought over that issue. Theories that pretend to such powers of explanation, have a way of insisting that you heed and do what they say they are right about. Everything that does not fit is irrelevant, unknowable, or unaskable—good grounds for dismissing criticism or denying citizenship.

But contrasting theories—those that attack the desire for certainty have had their own shot at being duly considered, and were also found wanting. To resolve this impasse is not a matter of theoretic equalization—but of contextual autonomy—agreement that accepting a theory requires understanding the language through which it is expressed. Realizing such latitude in present theorizing is a chimera, to be sure—but even chimeras have power.

To exercise this power, they need to probe the different logics of square and crooked dancing, and demonstrate the competing correspondences between the still of painted images and the rhythms of the moving world; they must empower the architecture of music heard from out a neighbors’s window, and appreciate the scribblings on bathroom walls and subway cars that celebrate repressed or repressive longings. And, with non-sequential gloom or glee (depending on the place they’re at) must undertake the task of writing both prose and poetry about all that.