The exploration of the mind is a huge field in itself, with entire disciplines and sub-disciplines – psychology, philosophy of mind, etc. – dedicated to its study.
For our discussion, mind can be defined as:
an individual’s capacity to think and reason linearly, that is, it understands and explains how the world works through causality (e.g. 1 + 1 = 2; climate change is the result of human activity).
With the above in mind, 3 aspects of mind are important for our discussion:
1. Mind reduces the information it receives
Reality is much bigger (infinite?) than mind itself, so it must reduce the information it receives to have useable data.
This data is inherently ‘less than’ the reality perceived; reality is thus reduced to abstractions that are useful to mind’s information-processing capacities.
2. Mind represents phenomena happening (1)
This data is used to create representations of its interior and exterior reality.
Representations of an individual’s exterior world are based on information acquired through the senses.
These representations are neither completely accurate – we are often mistaken about the world – nor complete – we can’t see x-rays or hear radio waves.
Representations of an individual’s interior world are created based on information acquired from emotions and feelings.
These representations are neither accurate – we are often mistaken about ourselves – nor complete – we can’t feel our lungs fill with air or the electric impulses of our brains.
3. Mind creates its reality
Mind then creates models of very complex systems – including reality itself – using these abstractions, not the world itself.
Abstractions that bear some relationship to the outside world (how it does that is a huge topic, no room for that here) are deemed to be true; abstractions that don’t are disregarded.
However, because mind’s representations are neither completely accurate nor complete, representations are also neither completely accurate and/nor complete.
Thus, for mind, true and false become dependant not on their relationship to the outside world, but on the representations of the outside world that mind had already deemed to be true and correct.
If these are active or passive qualities of the mind is outside the scope of this discussion; what is important is that mind reduces, represents and creates its reality.
These 3 characteristics are not exhaustive of what mind does – I am confident mind is infinitely more complex than we can imagine and it is very hard to put all it does in words – but they are sufficient for this post.
Argument
As we can see in/through our own minds and their creations, the human mind is amazing at what it does.
But here is my question:
Within perceivable reality (S), can the human mind (p1) understand this reality (S) by analysing the models (c) of reality (S) it creates?
In other words,
Within a given system (S), can a part of this system (p1) understand the (bigger) system of which it is part of (S) by analysing the reduced representations (c) of the given system (S) it creates?
It seems that from an evolutionary point of view, our minds are not supposed to do such a thing. They are more like tools that help us create and manipulatable complex representations of the ‘outside world’ so the hominins with huge brains that carry them around can then manipulate the world for real, the ‘outside world’ (2).
And the human mind does that really well.
But the idea that the mind can understand the reality it is part of doesn’t seem to be achievable. For the smaller part of a given system to understand the bigger system it is part of it would have to encompass the system it is trying to understand to accommodate it inside itself; for that to happen, it would have to become larger than the system.
This insight came to me before I tried to (poorly) put it logically.
Having had the privilege to ‘step out’ of my own mind numerous times through what industrialised societies have named altered states of consciousness (3), I believe I have experienced the limits of what the human mind – as defined above – can understand.
As a result, I am (strongly) inclined to argue that the human mind cannot, via its fantastic powers of representation, reduction and manipulation, understand the bigger system it is part of.
Think about it: in this very short post, my mind had to reduce the poorly understood phenomenon of ‘the human mind’ to an idea of itself, one that represents a very small portion of what it actually is and does so it could manipulate this representation.
Or, to put it in another way:
Can thinking (p1) understand mind (S) by analysing the models (c) of mind (S) it creates?
Or, going further:
Can thinking (p1) understand reality (S∞) by analysing the models (c) of reality (S∞) it creates?
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1) ‘Representation is the mark of the mental’. See Brentano’s Thesis for more on this.
2) Read The Mechanical Mind by Tim Crane for a general introduction to minds as mechanical (capable of affecting the material world) for more on this:
‘ … I am calling the ‘mechanical’ view of the mind, or ‘the mechanical mind’ for short. This is the view that the mind is a causal mechanism, a natural part of natural organisms which functions in a systematic, regular way.’
Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind, p.1
3) Through exploring these states, I have noticed that there is a point where my mind ceases to be. Consequentially, there is no more representing and reducing happening. Many other people who are cleverer than me also share this point of view. Of course, many others, also much cleverer than myself, don’t. This is, of course, ok and necessary, but I wonder if more widespread experimentation with ASCs (altered states of consciousness) would change this. Perhaps, had the best minds of industrialised societies had access to ASC practices, this wouldn’t be the case…