The Cabinet of Wisdom IV — Mind and Body
The Cabinet of Wisdom
Part IV: Mind and Body
In our last episode, we asked whether, in the matter of romance, does indeed the outward material manifestations of the inward subjective experience of romantic love describe, define, or cause that love?
Can the one be reduced to the other, that is to say, described completely, described with no loss of meaning? Can the inward reality be reduced to the outward manifestation?
Reductions and Codes
Now, to those unfamiliar with the term, “reduction” means that one complex expression can be expressed in terms of simpler expressions with no loss of information. One quantity can be described as the product of two simpler quantities, and the description is full and complete, and no meaning present in the first expression is absent in the second.
For example, velocity measured in miles per hour can be expressed as durations measured in hours taken across lengths measured in miles. If I tell you the miles per hour of the velocity of an object, or I tell you the length of interval crossed in the duration given, no information is lost. The description is full and complete. You know as much as you know before. Velocity just so happens to stand in relationship to duration and length such that the complex expression like miles per hour can be reduced to simpler component measurements of miles and hours. And, likewise, for acceleration and jerk.
More to the point, colors in a picture, or compositions of an image, can be reduced, at a fine level, to specific pixels or photons, each of which, taken in isolation, does not form any picture at all. Only when gathered in the right pattern and seen as a whole do the armies of pixels form a gestalt or single image to be grasped at a glance. This is what is called an emergent property.
There is an argument, or, rather, a verbal word-fetish or recited formula, which holds that, in the same way colors emerge from hosts of photons which, taken in isolation, each itself has no color, or the way shapes emerge from pixels which, taken in isolation, each itself has no shape, can produce as an emergent property the colors and shapes of an image; so likewise mechanical brain atom motions give rise to human thought as an emergent property.
So colors and shapes are, despite that these seem to be qualities and not quantities. Hence they are ultimately reducible to the magnitudes of mass, length, duration, temperature, candlepower, current, moles of substance.
Please note also the difference between a code, when one thing stands for another, and a expression where one thing is reduced to another.
Each color is reducible to an expression of electromagnetic waveform. The characteristics of a waveform are that it has an amplitude, wavelength, frequency, velocity. The amplitude is wave height, and the distance between amplitude maximums is the wavelength, both measured in units of length. The frequency is how often the maximums or crests move past a given point, measured in units of duration. And finally, the velocity—or how fast the wave is moving—is the product of the frequency times the wavelength, measured in units of duration and length.
Now, if we express “Blue” in terms of these numbers (Wavelength = 450–495 nm and Frequency ~670–610 THz) there is nothing in the word not also present in the numbers. The hue can be generated from the numbers.
In other words, the reduced expression is like a cipher rather than a code, because the cipher can be generated by anyone knowing the properties of waveforms.
On the other hand, if we agree on a code of symbols, where a triangle stands for red, a square for orange, a pentagon for yellow, a hexagon for green, an octagon for blue, no one unfamiliar with the code will be able, from the code, to deduce the meaning of the message if he sees the octagon. The hue cannot be generated from the code.
Perhaps this code could be broken by someone who noticed that he positions on the spectrum of the hue increase with the number of sides of the polygon. But no, for the septagon is missing, and the nonagon might be purple or indigo, whereupon a decagon would be violet.
Or why assume the codebreaker is an English speaker, whose spectrum is broken into seven words? Many languages do not differentiate green and blue. Moreover, the ancient Greeks classified colors by whether they were light or dark, rather than by their hue. The Greek word for dark blue, cyaneos, could also mean dark green, violet, black or brown. The ancient Greek word for a light blue, glaukos, also could mean light green, grey, or yellow.
We can agree on any code arbitrarily. The septagon can be cyanic colors, winedark hues, and the nonagon can be the glaucous colors, brighter hues. In that case the codes for blue is ambiguous, and could be septagon, octagon, or nonagon — but all languages have ambiguous words, redundant words, or words whose meanings drift or wither. Ambiguous signs or codes cannot be reduced like a scientific expression into another expression. The whole point of measured quantities is that twice two is and must be four, and four is and must be twice two, whereas neither is nor can be five nor three.
Whereas love can be charitable, romantic, divine, or brotherly. It can also be mistaken for infatuation, friendship, affection, and craving. It cannot be expresses as an unambiguous magnitude because love is a quality, not a quantity, and if the same type of being as truth, virtue and beauty.
With this in mind, let us see whether outward physical manifestations of romantic love – we include both blushes of the cheek, measured by wavelengths of pink, and neural actions measured by brainwaves — are something can be reduced, one to the other, because they are two expressions of the same thing?
Or are they more like a code, where one thing, more or less arbitrarily, stands for another?
Common Knowledge
What do we know about the mind-body relation?
We know that sometimes drunkenness or disease causes cognitive impairment. We know senility degenerates the thinking processes. Lack of sleep can cause hallucinations. Likewise, some drugs or happy music can sharpen the intellect, or so it is alleged.
Blood chemistry seems to influence thought, but also is influenced by thought in turn. We know some brainwave patterns are associated with rapid-eye-movement sleep or meditation.
Damage to the brain can alter or destroy thinking ability, but not the contents of thought. Certain drugs can hinder the hallucinations or flights of fancy of psychotics.
Men can be lobotomized, and have their general cognitive facilities destroyed senility likewise can degrade, and certain neural diseases. Modern neurology can sometimes destroy specific cognitive faculties, or so it is alleged. Severe injury to the brain causes death, which involves utter cessation of motion, speech, life, or other outward signs of thought.
Likewise, we know that thought can alter the body: if a man wills to raise his hand, and he is not paralyzed nor bound, thought sets in motion nerves and muscles to raise the hand. He can snap his fingers or play the piano or dance a jig, assuming he knows how and his body is in working order. Oddly enough, he can also dream he has done these things when he has not.
Likewise, wrath or lust can change breathing, blood pressure, temperature, and anxiety create ulcers or hasten heart troubles, and, indeed, all fashion of placebo effects of voodoo beliefs apparently can heal or harm the body more than might be suspected.
Again, we know that certain involuntary signs or “tells” can allow a lie detector test operator, a gambler, or a suspicious woman to guess when a guilty man is lying, at least some of the time.
It is commonplace for a jury selected by lottery to be expected, from the demeanor of the witnesses, to assess the credibility of his testimony. This indicates that the art of detecting inward deceptive intent from outward signs is regarded as unexceptional. Any man competent to serve as a juror can do so. No expert opinion is needed. We expect only small children or the mentally handicapped to lack this ability. It is not perfect, and not perfectly reliable, but common experience holds that it is commonplace.
And more than this, we at least hear rumors of great advances in neurology, whereby study of brain actions, the colors or shapes the patient observes, or the bodily motions he wills to set in motion, can be deduced.
Unfortunately, since the scientific field in this generation have been plagued by junk science and political corruption, distinguishing true claims from false, or accurate from exaggerated, at the moment, is something of an art.
So that is all we know of the question of the relation between mind and brain.
Materialist and Idealist
Those who claim the issue is settled one way or the other are perhaps premature. There is some sort of tenuous causal or correlative relation between inward subjective experience and outward bodily expression, but if a materialist says the brain is a meat machine that produces thoughts as a mechanical operation, as a spleen excretes gall, let an idealist answer him, and say that the brain is radio receiver merely reacting to received signals from the immaterial mind, spirit, and soul, such that damage to the receiver may garble reception, or shut off the radio, but nothing done to the radio set make the jazz band in the live studio play a waltz.
Either man will leave at least half of human experience unexplained. The materialist cannot explain poetic inspiration. The idealist cannot explain drunkenness.
The common man knows that drunkenness and inspiration are so closely correlated that the poet laureate was rightly and traditionally paid with a yearly butt of sack (600 bottles of sherry, to you non-poets).
An Unanswerable Question
For reasons I have often repeated, I hold that the question of relation between mind and body is not merely unanswered, but unanswerable.
My grounds for so saying is that the category of causation used to describe the mind meaningfully deals with final causation, whereas the category used to describe the brain deals with mechanical causation. Since the one cannot be described or deduced from the other, the one cannot be reduced to the other. Because they are mutually irreducible, neither can be considered a side effect or epiphenomenon of another.
You do not know what a word means unless you know what the man is trying to say. You do not know what his actions mean unless you know what he is trying to accomplish.
The meaning of his logic is not known until the conclusion to which his logic drives him is known, and the meaning of his drives, his passions, his emotions and his appetites is not known until the object of his appetite is known.
Likewise, the meaning of his moral imperatives cannot be known without knowing his duty, and the goals to which those duties drive.
All these things are based on final causation: the purpose of purposeful acts.
Contrariwise, the categories used to describe the brain, or any physical object, in a meaningful way require reference to mechanical causation, to matter in motion, to magnitudes of measured quantities.
If you cannot measure it, it is not science.
Sense impressions make no sense without being categorized in terms of identity and causality.
A baby who fails yet to understand persistence of objects, for example, cannot but stare in wonder. Only when the baby understands the difference between the shape that represents his mother versus the blowing curtain in the nursery window can he identify her as a distinct object, a person.
Only when he connects in his mind the cause and effect of what passes before his eyes will distinction of objects take on meaning: otherwise, they arise from nowhere and come to nothing.
And, for better or worse, these two categories of description, the causal versus of the final, cannot be reconciled nor translated the one to the other.
Neither can be reduced to the other. Neither can be expressed in the term of the other.
Mind and body are like storybook and story. The quantities of the physical measurements of the book, as its mass, volume, dimensions, duration, the number of pages, and what the pages are made of, whether papyrus, paper, silk or stone, reveals nothing about whether the story is tragedy or comedy, lyrical or plain, well or poorly plotted, sublime, entertaining, or, frankly, anything about the qualities of the story.
Certain properties of the story can even be translated into other books and formats made of other materials, whose physical properties will differ. The only thing that arguably stays the same is the pattern of ink marks meant to represent letters meant to represent words and sentences meant to represent images and events mean to tell a story.
But, then again, the same story can be translated other languages, or told to men whose backgrounds and tastes are foreign to the original intended audience, with meaning and pleasure.
Likewise, a written story translated to song, stage, film, and so on.
These are clearly not physical properties.
But an unwritten story, a story that has no physical manifestation, not even as brain atom motions in the brain of the author, can properly be called a story. Therefore a story cannot be called a story until it is written down, or performed, or sung, or somehow embedded in a physical medium.
An aside: In the eyes of the law, which is unconcerned with philosophical niceties, a story idea cannot be put under copyright, but a story once it is written can be. And then only the written version is under copyright. Technically, someone else stealing your characters and background world or basing a story on a note for note copy of yours is not protected. In practice, the plagiarist has to at least chance the names and file off the serial numbers: see SWORD OF SHANNARA by Terry Brooks for details. End of aside.
My point is that story cannot exist without storybook, nor can storybook exist without a story. But neither is any description of the weight and shape of the book, not the mathematical values of each and every molecule of paper and ink, reducible to any description of the plot, characters, setting, theme, lyricism, nor any property of the story as such.
But a book with all the same physical characteristic but with no ink marks formed into letters, even if the ink molecules were the same in number, would not be a storybook. Likewise the unwritten story is not a storybook either.
You cannot have a storybook without a story. You cannot have a storybook without as book.
More to the point, body and mind are like form and meaning, expression and concept. It is somewhat like inside and outside.
They cannot be separated, except conceptually, but neither can they be integrated nor reduced the one to the other. Such is one of the primal mysteries of the human condition.
So what does that tell us about the Turing Test, if anything?
That question bears further pondering.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
