A pragmatic approach on mental identity

[Johnathanrs]

[AI-genertated content removed]

[Jay]

@Johnathanrs

Any questions?

Is this Part 1 of something longer?

[WeSee]

@Johnathanrs

Unless you again possess supernatural origins, you are born into life as a clean slate and gradually emerge as an individualized node within a shared social matrix, inherently absorbing information, concepts, and meaning from the world around you.

This seems a misstep. You don’t seem to have taken into account the primitive mind which governed the behavior prior to the development of the conscious mind and continues to influence it. In some much more heavily than others. It’s a continuum. Similarly for the “mentalscape”.

[Johnathanrs]

@Jay

Is this Part 1 of something longer?

Depends. We’ll see how things go. I prefer not to get ahead of myself if possible.

[Jay]

@Johnathanrs

• The mentalscape is the only place where true selfhood, agency, and conscious life actually occurs.

Good. But if it isn’t physical and it isn’t spiritual, what is it? It sounds remarkably like a haunted house for the ghost in the machine! The software analogy is misleading, I think. If I asked, “But what is software?” the description you’d give wouldn’t have any room for items like selfhood, agency, and conscious life. So how is the mentalscape analogous?

[Ciceronianus]

Seems to me this merely reiterates the old mind-body dualism, or a vaiant of it. Not something classical pragmatism would accept, I think.

[Johnathanrs]

@Jay

Good. But if it isn’t physical and it isn’t spiritual, what is it? It sounds remarkably like a haunted house for the ghost in the machine! The software analogy is misleading, I think. If I asked, “But what is software?” the description you’d give wouldn’t have any room for items like selfhood, agency, and conscious life. So how is the mentalscape analogous?

What is it?

To see how the mentalscape works in practice, consider a concept we all take for granted: the concept of a country.

A nation is inherently a construct of the mentalscape. Think of how many wars have been fought, how many lives have been forsaken, all in defense of something that any primitive mind would recognize as completely abstract. There is no physical wall etched into the Earth separating one nation from another, yet millions have died to honor that invisible boundary. That is crazy.

And yet,purely physically speaking, that line does not exist in a form you can measure as solid matter–you can dig into the soil, but you will only ever find dirt, not a border. Purely universally speaking, no foundational natural order divided the Earth into political sects; the land was simply given to life as a whole.

Why, then, do we honor it? Because we are socialized within the mentalscape. It is through these shared informational constructs–abstract as they may be–that we define our boundaries, shape our collective identity, and establish the subjective frameworks of purpose and worth by which we live.

[Wayfarer]

@Johnathanrs

There is a quiet peace in knowing that this same fate awaits all life over billions of years as the universe swallows the last ounce of light, until everything finally becomes whole again.

It’s the ‘quiet peace’ of nihilism. Nothing to fear, no harm can become you, once you no longer exist.

@Johnathanrs

Western culture compounds this illusion by telling us we are a “ghost in the machine”-a tiny spiritual driver sitting behind our eyes, steering a physical robot.

Descartes in particular bequeathed this image to us. Mind and body, spirit and matter—the ‘great division’ of René Descartes’ dualism. And Descartes is hugely influential in culture, even for those who don’t know his name. He is regularly taught at University as ‘the first modern philosopher’ — that’s how he was presented to me—and one of the triumvarate of modernity, the other two being Newton and Galileo.

@Johnathanrs

Unless you again possess supernatural origins, you are born into life as a clean slate and gradually emerge as an individualized node within a shared social matrix, inherently absorbing information, concepts, and meaning from the world around you.

The points about children being born in a comparatively unformed cognitive state are well-founded. In fact human infants are uniquely dependent on their mothers and other family members, until well into adolescence. That is the period of extra-somatic learning, in which they acquire language (as you say) and also many other social and survival skills. (Unlike deers or horses who must be able to run with their herds from the moment of birth, lest they fall victim to predation, which many do.)

But I question the ‘blank slate’ (you call it ‘clean slate’) idea. Even if humans are not born with language, they’re born with the capacity to acquire language, unique amongst all species. Furthermore as children grow, they clearly demonstrate proclivities and talents which differentiate them from others. Some children show precocity in language acquisition – John Stuart Mill started learning ancient Greek by age three. Wolfgang Mozart had his first compositions played in public, in which he also performed, while still a child. I myself have always felt that naturalistic accounts of such prodigies are clearly deficient—what Darwinian logic could account for such innate genius?

@Johnathanrs

​The mentalscape is where true life happens-a dynamic, self-organizing informational process shaped by the culture and connections that surround you. It isn’t spiritual, nor is it physical.

I notice the meticulous avoidance of any suggestion of ‘the supernatural’ or ‘the spiritual’ in your account. Indeed, putting it in terms of ‘information processing’ is only, well, natural in our computer-dominated age. But think about the origin of the term ‘soul’. It was originally used to translate the Greek psuchē, which of course becomes psyche, to this day an alternative to ‘mind’ (and the root of ‘psychology’). Psuche was originally derived from ‘breathe’ (because all living beings breathe—even plants, as we now know.) Over the centuries it gained many layers of meaning, but the use of ‘soul’ in philosophy right up to the modern period essentially meant ‘mind’ (you read the term in translations of Kant and Locke.) Today we speak of the ‘hard problem’ — but it’s still basically exploring the same turf.

And a fly in the ointment for the naturalistic, informational account of mind, is that cultural inheritances — Mozarts’ prodigious talent being but one example—seem to beggar our comprehension in terms of physical causes such as genetics. People will say nowadays that it’s ‘in the genes’ as if this might explain it, but human culture is far richer and more diverse than, I think, such genetic accounts can provide.

[Johnathanrs]

@Ciceronianus

to me this merely reiterates the old mind-body dualism, or a vaiant of it. Not something classical pragmatism would accept, I think.

The mentalscape is one conceptualization. It does not require duality in any way.

[Johnathanrs]

@Wayfarer

I question the ‘blank slate’ (you call it ‘clean slate’) idea. Even if humans are not born with language, they’re born with the capacity to acquire language, unique amongst all species. Furthermore as children grow, they clearly demonstrate proclivities and talents which differentiate them from others. Some children show precocity in language acquisition – John Stuart Mill started learning ancient Greek by age three. Wolfgang Mozart had his first compositions played in public, in which he also performed, while still a child. I myself have always felt that naturalistic accounts of such prodigies are clearly deficient—what Darwinian logic could account for such innate genius?

You raise a fair point: the human mind is certainly not a blank slate. We aren’t born as empty vessels; we are born with an innate capacity for language and abstract thought that sets our species apart. Beyond that baseline, individuals clearly inherit distinct physical and cognitive proclivities–some children possess atypical processing speed, working memory, or musical sensitivity right out of the gate. However, we must separate innate talent from the concept of “genius.”

Talent is a biological variance; genius is a value assigned through society. Take 19th-century chess prodigy Paul Morphy. In his era, Morphy was heralded as an unmatched, almost supernatural genius. Yet by modern standards-where teenagers train alongside chess engines-his game winning strategies look entirely ordinary. Society crowned Morphy a genius because his mind represented the absolute peak of what his culture needed and understood at that historical moment. When the collective baseline shifted, the designation faded. A child can be born with extraordinary biological gifts, but whether those gifts are recognized as “genius” depends entirely on whether the surrounding mentalscape has built the stage to value them.

@Wayfarer

I notice the meticulous avoidance of any suggestion of ‘the supernatural’ or ‘the spiritual’ in your account

On purpose and apart of the abstract.

[Ciceronianus]

If you say so. But I think your statements that Mother Nature “owns” our bodies, and we’re merely “temporary stewards” of them, or “rent” them, necessarily draws a distinction between “us” and “our bodies.”

[j_j]

@Johnathanrs

You don’t own your body. Mother Nature owns it. Unless you are supernatural, your physical self is on temporary loan from the planet.

I am generally on the same page with you, so any critique is offered in a friendly spirit.

You use “loan” metaphorically here. I don’t think you take the mother metaphor seriously either. But a certain ethical framework is still suggested. I’m not for or against this framework. It’s just that it all still feels very “mammal normative.” Perhaps it distracts from your point ?

@Johnathanrs

There is a quiet peace in knowing that this same fate awaits all life over billions of years as the universe swallows the last ounce of light, until everything finally becomes whole again.

I am an atheist who doesn’t expect an afterlife. That said, I’m also a phenomenalist (but not a dualist). So darkness is non-being.

Wholeness reminds of the object of Freud’s postulated “death drive,” which he mentions e.g. in his late Outline.

I’m a philosophical pessimist, so my objection is not from an investment in optimism. I’m just saying that “return to wholeness” reminds me of this death drive.

@Johnathanrs

Researchers studying animal and human cognition have found that the human mind only fully emerges around two years of age. Before that point, human infants perform at comparable levels to other mammals on physical tasks like spatial memory and causality. The single area where human children dramatically diverge is cultural interaction, shared communication, and the explosion of symbolic language. Language is the code that boots up self-awareness. Unless you again possess supernatural origins, you are born into life as a clean slate and gradually emerge as an individualized node within a shared social matrix, inherently absorbing information, concepts, and meaning from the world around you.

Here we basically agree. Responsible selfhood is a “meme.” It is “culture tech.” I read Heidegger as one of the great thinkers on this issue. Proximally and for the most part, we are bots. But I’d add that we, even if bots, are also weirdly “disclosure of world.”
I don’t personally think that dry ( AI ) rather than moist robots ( Dawkins ) are sites of world disclosure.

@Johnathanrs

The mentalscape is where true life happens-a dynamic, self-organizing informational process shaped by the culture and connections that surround you. It isn’t spiritual, nor is it physical. It is the information, the relational feedback, and the shared human narrative that ultimately define who and what you are. You are not an isolated owner of a life; you are a temporary steward of a body and a custodian of a shared human story.

Also with you here. The “mental/physical” distinction is itself a fragile, fuzzy piece in this environmentally immersed social process you point toward.

I might push back a little on one point tho. In normative terms — especially in atomistic societies — I am the relatively isolated owner of this meat. Or this meat has been trained to speak the sign “I” as a label for its temporal unity, which is socially enacted. Joe is blue and jerky at the end of the noose for what Joe did yesterday, not for what Sally did yesterday. Ideally, anyway.

If I am a steward for someone or something else, then “they/it” “owns” what I steward ? Does lady Nature “give a damn” ? As far as I can make out, it’s organisms that care, that invent the memes of selfhood and property.

@Johnathanrs

• The mentalscape operates like software running on hardware: it is an informational pattern. It isn’t made of meat, and it isn’t made of magic-it exists through structure, relationships, and processing.

“Softwhere running on the crowd.” Or “aloftware” dancing meat in time, contagiously and cumulatively. Gene meat dancing as meme meat. A layer of meme on a layer of gene. "Out of the blue into the black. "

[Johnathanrs]

@Ciceronianus

If you say so. But I think your statements that Mother Nature “owns” our bodies, and we’re merely “temporary stewards” of them, or “rent” them, necessarily draws a distinction between “us” and “our bodies.”

You need two distinct things for this to be considered dualism. Software isn’t a ghost sitting inside the circuit board; it is the configuration and movement of the physical hardware itself. The relationship between the mind and the brain is no exception to this.

I’m claiming, from a pragmatic perspective, that we, the mind, emerge from childhood. Theology states we magically arrive and control our meat robots.

[Wayfarer]

@Johnathanrs

Take 19th-century chess prodigy Paul Morphy…

Point taken, but his games are still highly regarded and often showcased. He had an uncanny ability to win from what seemed hopeless positions. And I don’t believe genius is always subject to the whims of cultural relativism. Certainly the word is bandied about nowadays but the genius of a Shakespeare or a Plato or a Buddha will still be recognised through the ages.

[j_j]

@Johnathanrs

Software isn’t a ghost sitting inside the circuit board; it is the configuration and movement of the physical hardware itself. The relationship between the mind and the brain is no exception to this.

Echoing my influences, I think the crucial move is an emphasis on the temporal.

The dance and the dancer aren’t different “things” except that we evaluate two different dancers to be “equivalent” in terms of which dance they are dancing. We live or enact these distinctions within our own, individual “meat dances.”

Plato’s unwritten doctrine can be read as a sophisticated quasi-hylomorphism. The world is “just there” as “articulated.” But “what” is articulated is hard to point at. We might say “sensory-affective pre-stuff,” but this is already a categorization that almost stifles the pointing.

[j_j]

@Johnathanrs

I’m claiming, from a pragmatic perspective, that we, the mind, emerge from childhood. Theology states we magically arrive and control our meat robots.

Right ! Basically the “ideal” is a kind of “perfect self-control.” So we have the vague fantasy of a “spark of free will.”

I see pragmatism largely as a reaction to and overcoming of a tacitly monotheistic dualism. The dualism is a source of confusion on many issues. The ghost in the machine is like God before the creation. The “immaterial meaning stuff” in the material signifier just echos the ghost in the machine.

Basically Western philosophy is still mostly caught in a ghost story. Thinkers like Heidegger and others got beyond this ghost story, more or less, but they are only barely assimilated.

[Wayfarer]

Inadvertently replied to the wrong poster, see next.

[Wayfarer]

@Johnathanrs

Software isn’t a ghost sitting inside the circuit board; it is the configuration and movement of the physical hardware itself. The relationship between the mind and the brain is no exception to this.

That seems to collapse several quite distinct levels.

Consider the same software application running on Windows and macOS. At the level of machine code and underlying hardware, the implementations can be radically different — yet at the functional level they are recognisably the same application, performing essentially the same operations. And what the application produces — say, a document — can then be completely independent of the particular hardware and operating system on which it was produced. They are physically distinct but share the same functional organisation.

So software isn’t a “ghost” sitting inside the machine, certainly. But neither is it simply identical with the physical configuration of the machine. It is a formal and, ultimately, semiotic organisation realised in a physical substrate.

And the analogy with brain and mind has another problem. A computer is an allopoietic artefact: its hardware, architecture, software and purposes are externally specified and maintained by designers. An organism is an autopoietic system whose organisation is continuously produced and maintained by its own activity (ref). The brain isn’t “hardware” awaiting a program to run on it; in organisms of all kinds, the integration is at a far more subtle level than that.

So the fact that software is physically instantiated doesn’t establish that mind is related to brain in the same way. The analogy assumes the computer model of cognition that it is being used to defend.

In other words — it begs the question.

[Johnathanrs]

@j_j

If I am a steward for someone or something else, then “they/it” “owns” what I steward ? Does lady Nature “give a damn” ? As far as I can make out, it’s organisms that care, that invent the memes of selfhood and property

From a pragmatic perspective, considering whether nature gives a damn has zero practical value. If death is the end either way, weighing it is pointless. Unless someone produces a genie that has real actual existence, the things opinion is irrelevant.

[j_j]

@Wayfarer

And what the application produces — say, a document — can then be completely independent of the particular hardware and operating system on which it was produced. They are physically distinct but share the same functional organisation.

This is THE structure perhaps that philosophers should ponder. It is all “already right there” in Saussure’s “acoustic image.”

Forget semantics for a moment. The acoustic image is a sensory form.

The sensory form ( the “abstract sound” of a word ) is independent from any particular vocalization. But it is not independent from vocalization altogether.

Switching to a visual analogue, the numeral 3 is not “independent of shape altogether.” That is absurd, because the numeral is an abstract or “second-level” shape that is not reducible to any particular pencil scribble.

Likewise an algorithm is not reducible to any particular “materialization.” But it is nothing at all apart from its “materializations.”

@Wayfarer

They are physically distinct but share the same functional organisation.

Basically I agree. So it’s a matter of getting a grip on this “functional organization.” We “enact” the equivalence of events in the world. We “enact” numerals by treating this scribble more or less as we treat that one.