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Alessandro Bavari - Prelude to incest between Monozygote Twins - 2003 | |||||||
Some hypotheses of the mind As has been noted, the modular theory of the mind is pertinent when one is concerned with explaining an immense series of what is taken to be automatic behaviour, innate or learned. From this point of view, it lends itself to making the bridge between the computer engineer and neuroscience. But not inconsequent difficulty springs not just from their intention to connect the models of functionalism of superior perception, auto generation (the sense of self), recursion (the faculty of introspection, whatever it is, but it doubtless exists), sensitivity (the said Qualia, which Searle insists to exist), ethics (the articulation of belief and of desires), not to say affective, performative functions etc. Other scholars, conscious of this difficulty, sustain a model of conscience similar to a not well defined “emergent” structure, in various ways implicated in the superior cerebral functions. But, and this is relevant, a not essential structure, in the philosophical sense, Aristotle-istic in terms, that is in its significant function. That, today, still remains to be shown. Leaving open the way of the immaterial (or that which today appears still as immaterial and is not a deeper structure of material reality), it is necessary to confront these theorists with the hypothesis of the collective planetary mind. I in fact maintain that the idea of a collective planetary mind is fundamentally poor, born from the mixing of the reductionist hypotheses and holistic theories about the ontological states of individual minds. The “Collective Mind”, in the various formulations which circulate, is in fact among the most enigmatic of oxymorons. Not only do these theories not take any account of the complexity of the biological mind, but they don’t distinguish in any way the scale of value, and tend to confuse the influence of cultural and technological products with some derivations, among other things obselete, of the concept of the computational mind. But the point remains to discern the retro-active influence of events and of the cultural (and technological) activity of the mental dynamic of that which is to be connected. The theories of the so-called collective mind ignore the ecology of the mind, in fact that which the person, the individual, the unitary psychomatic person, or in whatever way one wants to define the single mind alive to senses and desires, is invariably immersed in a complex environment make up of many layers, and on the top of which we find that particular and very fine environment which can also e defined “material culture”. This is becoming more and more a technologically auto-poetical environment. Therefore every human being reacts, according to the modality that can be in any second and competitive, at the impact of artificial environmental solicitations, which constantly restructure human behaviour. And it’s also sustainable that the retro-activity of the artificial environment is always the product of a primary semiotic activity. The level of complexity is, in brief, always a product, which then becomes primary material for a further psychosensorial development, and of consequence neuronal. But at what level? With regard to this question I maintain that the model proposed by Merlin Donald is coherent and explicit. The idea that systems of thought, through the arc of time have evolved and stratified, the idea that at each layer, that is at every cognitive and symbolic acquisition there is a corresponding new biological capacity, seems to me to be of such force and power as to be impossible to argue with. The work to be done, if anything, consists of defining the phases of the evolving process. All the same, Donald remains onside the anthropologic paradigm stream because he excludes the possibility that the species, even though immersed in a technotronic environment, can acquire new biological capacity. Donald attributes to external memory intermediate electronic property which would be placed halfway between the hypothesis of a collective mind and the idea of a global network is simply a very sophisticated piece of software. “You can say that the brain, in recent times, hasn’t undergone genetic changes, but its connection to an external memory in constant expansion confers it with cognitive capacity which couldn’t have developed in conditions of isolation.“ (2) The idea expressed by Donald is much more than a metaphor: “Every so often the brain performs an operation in concert with a system of storage, it enters and makes part of a network, the structure of its memory is temporarily altered and the locus of the cognitive control changes.” (3) Personally I would eliminate that “temporarily”. In my opinion global tecnotronics aren’t only an external memory of complexity and extensions. The scene which is presented today has transformed the system of external global, electronic memory into an electronic sensorial system that internally is also equipped with a memory total in its expansive possibility. But the sensory system is by a long way the most interesting part of the whole process. It could be perhaps the starting point for a new process of specialization, according to the ideas proposed by the theory of punctuated equilibrium. A model of human speciation The theory of punctuated equilibrium, the model of evolution devised by Stephen Jay Gould and da Niles Eldredge, of the American Museum of National History of New York, helps to understand the singular, dynamic relationship that human beings display with this particular environment. As you know, in the model of biological entities, “as much individuals as members of a species”, that is, members of a significant group, of a sovereign organism which entertains complex relationships with the biosphere. The model, as has been said, explains the otherwise unexplainable “stasi” which characterize the evolution of a species, but forsees rapid genetic mutation, responsible for the process of specialization, occurring under the pressure of a series of convergent factors. (4) | |||||||
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