Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002
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Jordan, J. Scott, ed. Modeling Consciousness Across the Disciplines. Lanham, Maryland; University Press of America, Inc., 1999. 346 pages. ISBN 0-7618-1523-6. $ 57.50 hbk.
The book Modeling Consciousness Across the Disciplines was inspired by a symposium of the same title. It contains articles from seven of the original participants plus six chapters from others. The authors are from the fields of philosophy, art, physics, psychology, biology, telecommunications systems design, rhetoric, and art history. From the title I had hoped for a book that would give some idea of the state of the art of consciousness modeling in several disciplines, perhaps with the addition of an attempt at drawing parallels, connections, contrasts, etc. The book is rather a collection of articles, mostly each addressing a specific issue of consciousness within each of the fields represented, along with a couple of articles on education and appeals for more interdisciplinary approaches to consciousness modeling. The only exception might be the last chapter in which the book’s editor, J. Scott Jordan, and another contributor, Larry R. Vandervert, discuss a perspective from which to integrate and equally value the work of the arts and sciences. In this article references are made to the work presented in the previous articles, but not directly, and only in footnotes. For example, it would be interesting to see further exploration of the concept of multiple levels or variants of consciousness, since several of the authors here discuss that aspect, from the systems expert Coward, to Kirchoff’s view of social determinations, to the Buddhist view, etc. Other commonalities would be among those who note the primacy of mind over perceptions from the external world, such as the artists who work to overcome the mind’s imagery (It’s not only scientists who seek “exterior truth,” or are they just looking for aesthetic shock?) per Leeuwen et al. or Jordan’s discussion of anticipatory consciousness. Maybe I’m hoping for too much at this early stage of interdisciplinary studies, but it is, I believe, in these kinds of explorations, that true interdisciplinarity can be achieved.
The intent of the book is quite admirable and I found a number of the articles enlightening. Yes, consciousness studies is a field that affects every discipline and one in which a lot of “cross-pollination” is possible. I believe most readers would be looking for things they could exploit and carry into their own fields of study, insights that would enlighten areas within their own studies. Or to simply be able to find new perspectives in a multidisciplinary field that is interesting in its own right.
The intended audience of the book would seem to be an educated interdisciplinary group at least somewhat familiar with consciousness studies. Many of the articles are, however, rather difficult of access even for such an audience. A number of articles require two or three readings to be understood. (At least, I hope I understood them.) One could ask to what extent these writers would betray their material by making it more accessible to a non-specialized public. I cannot judge the value these works have within the fields represented by the authors, and that shouldn’t be the role of the intended audience, but rather how useful these articles would be to someone outside the field. I found myself constantly trying to reformulate or recontextualize what was written.
The book is divided into two sections, explicit and implicit models of consciousness. I could not decipher the reason for the division and could not see a clear difference in the kinds of articles in each division, although Wolfgang Prinz discusses the two terms in a foreward to the book.
What follows is a brief overview of the various chapters of the book.
Chapter
1 Maximizing Consciousness Across
the Disciplines: Mechanisms of
Information Growth in General Education Larry
R. Vandervert
The author looks at the brain as an information processor and tries to suggest ways that education should help individuals maximize its power, because of the huge information explosion of our times. Yes, we do need to be aware of how the brain works in order to maximize educational potential. But the article overlooks the fact that information management is only a part of education and that information has psychological effects that must be dealt with. And that the unconscious vs. the conscious seems to do a great deal of it. The author also advocates that students should direct most of their education themselves and should discover most things themselves (which is good in principle), but forgets to factor in that people learn differently at different ages and that no human being has the time to repeat and “rediscover” everything learned in the past. Most of what he advocates is what has been recommended by educational professionals for many years now; the problem is in the concrete implementation. The article is very hard to read, even for someone who has dealt with educational issues for many years.
Chapter 2 Modern Philosophical Culture, Education and the Fragmentation of Consciousness: Giambattista Vico and the Road Not Taken E. Paul Colella
This article is a discussion of Vico’s rejection of Descartes’ view of the mind, focussing on the various abilities of the brain/mind/conscious vs. Descartes’ exclusive focus on rationality. The article gives an interesting historical sidelight to current issues, although one must admit that it was by following Descartes’ methodology that we have gotten to a point where we appreciate Vico today. Descartes’ ideas had a particular kind of practical value as a methodology vs. an ontology, a distinction that Harald Atmanspacher and Frederick Kronz maintain in Chapter 12.
Chapter 3 The Strange Attraction of Sciousness: William James on Consciousness Andrew Bailey
The title derives from Bailey’s attempt to resolve apparent contradictions in William James’s statements about consciousness by drawing parallels between consciousness and strange attractors in chaos theory to show that James’s views on consciousness are indeed consistent. Bailey is greatly to be admired for tackling this problem in someone so often quoted in all fields by people doing consciousness research, but a much more pertinent evaluation for someone outside of philosophy would be James’s applicability vs. his consistency.
Chapter 4 Recasting Dewey’s Critique of the Reflex-arc Concept via a Theory of Anticipatory Consciousness: Implications for Theories of Perception J. Scott Jordan
Jordan argues against representationalist theories of perception by saying that our current experience (consciousness) of ourselves is anticipatory vs. current. He argues from the basis of prey vs. predator anticipation and the phenomena of phantom limbs and the phantom array that the brain has an inborn sense of the body that information coming from the senses only modifies. Stimulus does not create a state; it only modifies it. He shows how our anticipatory models are consistent with the known laws of physics in the areas of gravity, friction, and velocity, and does not make the category mistake that Müssler makes in the following article with trying to match our Newtonian responsive body to models of relativity that work on an entirely different scale.
Chapter 5 Perceiving and Measuring of Spatiotemporal Events Jochen Müsseler
It seems that Müssler wishes to see if there is any correlation between the physicist’s measurement of relativity’s space/time and human visual perception of space/time. He uses human perception of certain optical illusions which seem to shorten or lengthen the objects perceived. It seems like a false problem; the two mechanisms involved are entirely different, the two scales of events are entirely different. Even within physics the difference in scale warrants difference in measurements.
Chapter 6 A Physiologically Based System Theory of Consciousness L. Andrew Coward
This is an incredibly long, detailed article (66 pp.) for an interdisciplinary work. Based on his work in telecommunications, Coward illustrates how biological brains seem to operate like a recommendation architecture vs. an instruction architecture in electronic systems. As best I can tell, it is a cogent argument and does provide a possible account for things like layering in the human brain and distinctions between 4 levels of consciousness, although one could question some details, such as an over-reliance on linguistics as an indicator of consciousness.
Chapter
7 Common Unconscious Dynamics Underlie Uncommon Conscious
Effects: A Case Study in the
Iterative Nature of Perception and Creation
Cees van Leeuwen, Ilse Verstijnen, and Paul Hekkert
This
article is an attempt to show that art (an uncommon result) is often a result of
the repetition of common mechanisms, of common effort vs. uncommon inspiration.
The artist, rather than working with a preconceived idea of the end
result, plays with certain exernalized structures (i.e., a sketch), looking at
them over time (because of the instability of perception, then sees new things),
changing them, until a new, surprising, relatively satisfying result is
achieved. The authors’ arguments
draw upon the idea that it’s hard to change images in the mind and easier to
change exernal objects, something often commented upon.
(One wonders if one could draw a link to Jordan’s article about
feedforward images in the brain.) The
authors compare this process with scientific discoveries and the AHA
experience—which occur because of incubation through time.
The article ends with a Breton-like statement, that the conscious
evaluates the unconscious.
Chapter
8 Is the Dialogue over the Nature of Consciousness Limited by
Its Own Terms? Lawrence Souder
Souder
looks at underlying limitations on thought experiments caused by the choice of
words used, specifically “I” which “endorses introspection as the proper
way of studying the phenomenon of consciousness” (223). Alternately, the use of 3rd person pronouns
focusses on studying consciousness as inputs and outputs to be observed, while
the use of 2nd person sees consciousness as “something
intersubjective” (227). He
disputes the claim that consciousness is primarily linguistic and concludes that
consciousness needs to be studied interdisciplinarily—not just through
language but also through art, dance, music, sports, eating, etc.
I personally agree with the conclusion but would also state, since we are
presently limited to communicating primarily through language, that it’s by
being aware of and working through and with such obstacles as those posed by
pronoun choice that advances are made (i.e., see the previous article).
Chapter
9 One Model, Diverse Manifestations: A Paradigm of Consciousness in Twentieth-century Art
Charlotte Stokes
Stokes
contrasts the typical model of 20th century artistic consciousness
with that of the past and with one she finds more exact.
She contrasts the idea that modern artists are somewhat mentally
unbalanced, that they are more perceptive of various mental states, that they
are non-rational, revolutionary, etc. vs. the view that artists of previous
historical periods were considered craftsmen who were able to tap into and
interpret generally accepted concepts. She
implies that
Chapter
10 Consciousness, Communities and the Brain:
Toward an Ontology of Being Bruce
K. Kirchoff
Kirchoff
argues we need to take into account the effects of the role of our own
consciousness in creating our definition of consciousness. He writes that our
state of consciousness changes with
our activities but that our choice of one state as the one we define is partly
social, that science is based on social acceptance of new “discoveries” and
definitions. “Community processes
select and reinforce specific states of consciousness, and not just the content
of consciousness” (256). “[H]istory
is a record of [those] changes” (257). We
depend upon interpersonal validations and “we experience the world differently
when we are with different people” (259).
This article seems to extend what Souder says about the restrictions
placed upon our view of consciousness from the realm of linguistics to that of
social systems.
Chapter
11 “Not-Self” Consciousness and the Aniconic in Early
Buddhism Michael D. Rabe
This
article is an exploration of art “depicting” the Buddha by not giving a
physical representation of him but by showing others “seeing” him as
present. This kind of art is
an attempt to indicate a particular level of consciousness called “not
self”-consciousness, “to assert consciousness of being other than body or
ego or any of the other so-called five aggregates or the 12 bases (ayatana)
of consciousness or the 18 elements (dhatu)
of empirical experience” (274). Since
the whole definition is based on “not”’s, this state is represented by
absence, not because it is absent but only because there are no positive
characteristics on which to base an icon, to indicate that one “rises above”
such determinants. It is a
“visualization of the ineffable” (276),
a consciousness “beyond our consciousness of mundane reality” (276),
that which has no name in linguistic traditions.
This period of aniconism did not last and was replaced by anthropomorphic
icons. Rabe maintains that there
are many levels of consciousness for us to examine.
Chapter
12 Many Realisms Harald
Atmanspacher and Frederick Kronz
The
authors discuss dualism as a methodological tool (vs. an ontology) to examine
various interpretations of reality. They
warn against making epistemic vs. ontic category errors and write at length
about the distinctions between the two. This
danger exists because either “ontological
relativity [is] due to the impossibility of a uniquely fixed relationship of our
concepts to the totality of objects which those concepts refer to” (Putnam
speaking of Quine, 295), and/or “there is a real world, but it does not
dictate its own descriptions to us” (Putnam speaking of himself, 296), and/or
quantum holistic theory “invalidates the concept of objects at any level to
which it is applied in terms of an ontic description” (299).
The authors state that it is tempting to think we might one day reach an
“ontic enough” (301) level that
“both mind and matter are emergent domains of description (not only
mind emerges from matter)” (302).
Chapter
13 Liberal Education as a Reflection of Our Assumptions
Regarding Truth and Consciousness: Time
for an Integrative Philosophy J.
Scott Jordan and Larry R. Vandervert
This
article addresses the problem in liberal education of the perceived division
between the arts and the sciences and the current devalorisation of the arts.
The unity of the arts and sciences is to be found in seeing them both as
epistemological and not ontological in scope—both seek truth, describe, use
coherence and parsimony as criteria, one observing the objective, the other the
subjective, both of which reveal something real (318).
The authors do not say so but the problem in maintaining this point of
view is the very strong human desire (need?) for ontology and the thus far
difficulty in finding a satisfying one that maintains the ambiguity they
discuss. This article also attempts
to bring together to some extent what was said in the previous articles but, to
me, does so ineffectually, by confining most such comments to footnotes.