Science Forums 2

[Pyrotex]

Piece I: Explaining the Human Mind as a Linguistic Structure

First, many folks have a problem with making linguistic structures the “end all” of human thought. They suspect that linguistics entails merely the ability to communicate, and especially communicate “concepts.” They argue that “concepts” are not the only thing we can communicate and therefore there must be non-linguistic ways of communicating. Other forms of communication would involve expression of instincts, and secondary to that, expression of emotions. These expressions may involve sounds, body language, movement, or a combination of all three.

I agree that these take place. But humans assign meanings to these non-verbal expressions -- animals do not. We give these non-verbal expressions names, such as “contempt” or “smile” or “dancing”. We alter their meanings whenever we want to. Body language and gestures have no inherent meaning apart from the meanings we give them. This is “linguistic”.

Descartes felt he had to accept the concept of “mind-stuff”, as distinct from ordinary matter. It just didn't seem to him that mind could be constructed out of sub-units made of matter. Of course, he didn't know that flesh was made of individual cells, or that matter was made of individual atoms. Cells do not have the attributes of flesh on the scale of our senses. Individual atoms do not have the attributes of visible substance. The macro-objects we see and touch have “emergent” attributes not apparent in the constructive sub-units. So, there's nothing implicitly unreal about considering mind as made up of a myriad of “linguistic” sub-units.

A good question to ask here would be: “When an animal, say a zebra, senses danger, a lion, does it ‘think’ linguistically about the lion? Does it form ‘concepts’ of all lions it has ever known and from that create a generalized ‘Lion’?

My answer is not quite. The zebra’s brain is hard-wired to “recognize” the danger of being approached at high speed by any animal not of its own species. It reacts. Concepts would require words or equivalent symbols and their linguistic manipulation.

To understand the distinction between hard-wired reaction and linguistic thinking, we need to understand what processes are occurring in a brain/mind, and how it is communicating information to others of its species. For example, how does the zebra communicate a danger about the external world to the other zebras?

Brain scientists (the ones with the *really* thick glasses!) speak of three 'brains' in our skulls: the lizard brain, the mammalian brain, and the hominid brain. These correspond physically to actual sections of our brains from the topmost end of our spinal cord up to our frontal lobes. “Life-processing” goes on in all three, but at different levels of complexity.

The lizard brain can react quickly to motion and to shape engrams. For example, I have a problem in my own lizard brain, where any black, eight-fold shape having vaguely arachnid form, will trigger an immediate panic/flight reaction. And I mean *fast*. I often experience the panic of arachniphobia before I am aware that there is a spider near me (or just a wad of black thread!). *This* is what a lizard “thinks” with. Its world is one of engrams (patterns or pattern rules), pattern matching, reflex release of brain chemicals (we know these as “emotions”) and reflex reactions. There are no “words” or “meanings” in a lizard brain, therefore no linguistic structures.

However, the flight-or-flight reflex can be very complex; and there are other reflexes that operate in reaction to other stimuli. For example, we know that many pack/herd animals have complicated social structures: orders of hierarchy, rights of paternity, right of maternity, subservience, deferment, performance of services, etc.. They establish this social “structure” with each other via sounds, postures, body movement, attacks (mock or otherwise) and touch.

But these communications are more of a reactive expression, that the others react to in turn. A chain of reactions. At no point in the chain does “meaning” or “interpretation” or other linguistic operation take place.

Next, we come to the mammalian brain, with its cerebrum, which lizards do not have. It's here that the beginnings of the first proto-linguistic structures might form. Whereas the lizard is merely matching patterns that can trigger reactions, the mammal appears to actually “construct” a simulacrum of the external world. (It still has its lizard brain, with panic/flight reflexes.) But now it has a real “world” to “live” in. It actually “sees” the grass and the tigers -- seeing takes place within the simulacrum. At the center of the simulacrum is a not-quite-featureless void. Sometimes pain occurs there, but otherwise it is like the unnoticed blind spot we have in our visual field; i.e., there is no “self”. The mammal recognizes far more complex patterns than the lizard, including patterns spread over time, patterns of “behavior” of different species, including its own.

And its reactions are more complex. See “mating rituals”. And it can *learn*. The simulacrum of reality within which it “lives” is complex enough to learn new patterns over time out of its experiences, say, of the other members of the herd, or an encounter with its first jackal. The lizard brain has no room for learning. The mammalian brain allows the creature to actually participate and interact in a “seen” world, where objects have experiential identities, though no labels. It also enables the mammal to accumulate experiences and learn.

Then there is the hominid brain which we share only with the other apes. The cerebellum. This is added on, on top of, so to speak, the other two. We have the lizard brain of primitive pattern matching, strong emotions and reflex action, but which provides no “world” in which to recognize objects as members of object classes (carnivore!), and no ability to learn.

We have the mammalian brain wherein we experience a simulacrum of reality--we “see” the trees, and we “hear” crickets, and by moving our legs (or spinning our wheels) we can cause our point of view to shift within that world. We can learn from experience, so that once burned, we do not touch again. There is memory, short term and long term. But the objects and events in those memories have no labels as such. Rather than being “addressed” by a word (“lion”), they are addressed by a set of sensory attributes (size + shape + sound), and have pointers to lizard brain engrams ("panic!").

The hominid brain adds something else: symbols, storage of symbols (rather than patterns or sensory attributes) and construction of complex symbol structures. The number of brain cells required to store a “symbol” and relate that to past experiences should be much smaller that the number required to store sensory attributes.

And the symbols can point to more than just objects, events and experiences. They can point to other symbols. They can point to virtual objects, virtual events, and virtual experiences that are constructed entirely out of symbols. This in turn does something wholly unexpected: it fills in the “central void”. The “self” comes into being inside and yet somewhat removed from the simulacrum we “live” inside.

Consider this analogy: Life is a series of (Platonic) caverns opening up onto reality. No life form (except maybe for bacteria) directly experience reality -- all others must live in one of the caverns. The lizard lives in the first and smallest cavern. It has the closest perception of reality. But in its cavern, there is only room to eat, mate and run away. Its simulacrum of reality (cavern) has no room for recognizable objects, time, learning. It doesn't even “see” in the sense you and I mean. Its vision is merely a motion/pattern/danger detector.

Bison live in the next cavern away from reality, but it is far roomier. The Bison’s mind “expands” to fill this new simulacrum, which is far more detailed and sophisticated. The Bison “sees” a world with recognizable (and remembered) objects and events. The Bison cannot “live” in its lizard brain anymore, its conciousness has outgrown that primitive substrate.

Humans live in the third cavern, by far the largest, yet also the *farthest* from reality! We have *names* for all the objects and events. And we learn much faster, in fact, we learn to create new objects and events that are entirely abstract, yet we know them and react to them as if they were real (honor, love). And this contributes to the huge size and complexity of our simulacrum.

Well, you say: I can lie on my back in a golden meadow, looking at an azure blue sky broken by fluffy streams of white clouds and notice in the distance a multicolored rainbow dancing at the edge of a rain cloud. I can visualize and experience all of this and 'communicate' it to myself without ever naming any part of it. If I don't want to, I do not have to think 'cloud,' 'rainbow,' sky.' I do not think linguistically about any of these things until I try to communicate it to others!

Okay. But how long can you go without thinking 'cloud'? And if one turns into Richard Nixon's profile how can you not recognize it? As a human living in the hominid brain simulacrum, you might be able to squeeze some small part of yourself into the mammalian brain “cavern” where there are no names for anything, no meanings, but you can't stay there for long, and you can't “do” anything decidely “human” down there, like telling yourself how interesting it is to be like a Bison for a moment.

Okay, I understand that we sometimes think without subvocalizing words, or imagining a stream of speech. Your point is well taken that we can *visualize* without words. In any case, when we conjure up an image of a circle, the visual component may be just an image, but it was a “circle” we wanted. The identity of circle with “circle” is too close for ordinary mortals to split apart. We called up a circle specifically. Not a random shape. We knew what we would visualize before we did it, and we knew the *meaning* of the circle in that (linguistic) context, and *why* it was the circle we wanted rather than an ellipse. To think geometric shapes is to have already absorbed and utilized a vast body of linguistic structures.

The *image* is just the tip of a huge, hidden linguistic iceberg that precedes, cocedes, and postcedes the image itself. It's all part of our propensity for constructing things out of symbols. It's what we do best. It's what our cerebellum (the largest cavern) is for. Most importantly, it's in this morass of linguistic structures where the “I” (the central core of identity) emerges!