Operational Insight: (Consciousness X Volition)

 

The CHI-COG model is strongest where other cognitive models are weakest- in its analysis of the conscious-unconscious, and voluntary-involuntary dichotomies.

 

Far from being artificial constructs, mere conversational devices used to discuss vague, subjective and unscientific notions, these two ontological polarities form the orthogonal bases of the mind itself. In this section, we derive them physically, from first principles.

 

Science does not currently understand consciousness. What does this mean, exactly. Firstly, we need to know about the hallowed place that physicalism enjoys. It is both primary and primal. Quite simply, Big-S Science is synonymous with physicalism, and monism (the concept that there is only one universe, made of one kind of stuff, 'matter'). No 'ghost in the machine', no 'soul of the ape'. We are made of physical stuff, every bit as much as a rock, or a blade of grass, or an insect, or for that matter, a vacuum.

 

How can this be? The main problem is the sloppy way that we use language in everyday situations. When we do science, we each need to really 'crank up' our level of linguistic self-vigilance. Syntactically, we need to be on constant 'jargon watch'. Terminology has its place, and acronyms are unavoidable if one is to avoid the continuous repetition of polyword descriptors. The main thing to be aware of is that any concept or entity will be called 'X' by person 'A' and 'Y' by person 'B', depending on their scientific sub-discipline, their academic specialisation, and finally, their particular research interest within that domain of specialisation. Semantically, we must reject loaded questions like 'How can the mind be a mere mechanism?' for the same reason that we reject the grammatically correct utterance- 'this sentence is false'. Though they both obey the manifest rules of grammar, they flout the latent law of language- that it depict real things, or things that could be real. If you want to become a beat-poet, its easy- pitch-bend language, wear a beret, beat up on your floosy, vomit on talk show hosts. If you want to be a scientist, well that involves a clear decision too- don't be a poet,  you really need to talk like a scientist: factually, physically, with both symbolic feet planted firmly on the semantic ground.

 

Science has always attracted people for the same reason as did the Wild West - personal ambition, business opportunity and cheap real-estate. In Science, however, the real-estate is virtual, but then, almost everything is these days! If you work very hard at all three levels of education, you may find yourself coming out the other end of a very long tube, rubbing your eyes as you adjust to the sunlight of normal life. However, in your hand you hold a deed to property- your doctorate, invariably written about a very, very narrow topic. That topic is your own patch of dirt, a square of brand new unturned, and therefore fertile, soil. You have exclusive mining rights to the knowledge that is buried there, and by and large, those rights are respected, legally upheld.

 

Why does science not agree with consciousness? Partly, it is to do with incumbency, institutional inertia. If you don't rock the boat, you guarantee that no one's feet will get wet. Partly, it is like a diner with a fishbone- they just can't seem to swallow it, nor can they cough it up. Everyone in the restaurant is staring, but they feel helpless, and everyone knows it. Gradually, everyone looks away.

 

It wasn't always so. There was a time when the alternative voice found everyone's ears. In the 19th Century, people like William James [1] and Wilhelm Wundt in Europe were actively discussing both the internal contents of the brain and mind, and making very interesting theoretical noises around the topic of consciousness, and its absence. Hypnotism was explained as a mechanism under the name 'ideomotor theory', and morphed from a parlour game to a legitimate topic of study and began to hint at its later role as a useful clinical tool.

 

In the 1920's and 30's, in Estonia, Jacob von Uexkull began to wonder about what principles were used in animal minds, much as Niko Tinbergen did a few years later. Whereas Tinbergen was a rugged field scientist and an avowed experimentalist, Uexkull found himself adrift in more theoretical waters, as befits someone from his aristocratic background. His ideas would later be seen for what they are- cybernetics. He established the basic principles of feedback control well before Norbert Weiner. Both men's discoveries were independently achieved, because, while Weiner was doing Science, Uexkull's efforts were labelled by the European establishment as belonging to a sub-division of the 'Humanities' called 'semiotics', and 'hermeneutics'. Today, we just call it all 'systems biology', but you can still find many scientists who don't know it exists, and that it is very, very important.

 

While Weiner and Uexkull had many of the same ideas, Uexkull's main contribution was a unique idea called 'umwelt', a german word that means 'situation'. Umwelt[2] describes a subjective, not objective, concept- that of 'self-in-world'. Without understanding feedback regulation and control, there is simply no need of it. But when you allow feedback to be a part of science, then immediately you are faced with the problem of how feedback can be applied to compound, multi-state systems. Homeostats are loops which control the value of one scalar variable. How do we regulate a system with 1200 state-vectors? The answer is, with the 'umwelt', a compound, recursive, perceptual data structure. To the average hacker, who views everything in the world as computer-related, the 'umwelt' looks an awful lot like a hierarchical file system, with 'folders' and 'files'. The desktop image that is clicked into everyday with the computer mouse- that 'desktop' is in fact a graphic illusion (the tech term is 'interface metaphor') which hides a tree-shaped network of nested folders and linked files- that's a hierarchy. According to CHI-COG theory, so is your mind.

 

The first thing Uexkull did was to take out the epistemological trash. Uexkull found he had to soundly reject the global, objective, absolute Cartesian viewpoint, and instead adopt the viewpoint of the organism, which is subjective, relative, and exists in projective (perceptual, representational, relative) space, rather than the Euclidean space of the Cartesian world view.

At the same time, across the Atlantic, the logician C. S. Pierce also found that robust rejection of orthodoxy was needed- he replaced Saussure's bivalent view of semantics (reference<-->referent) with his own trivalent model (reference <--> representation <--> referent).

 

Later, these two acts of rebellion by Uexkull and Pierce would be recognised as being equivalent discoveries in a totally new science, systems biology (note: NOT the same as biological systems).