Consciousness and the Structure of Language

The title of this post is potentially just a little bit misleading. What i will be talking about here is not so much the question of "how" but issues of what I think happens. It will be a preliminary look at a viewpoint that has been forming in my mind.

I'll start out with a general look at certain issues:

One of the hardest things for us to conceptualize coherently are concepts related to conscious experience: the general world of feelings, awareness-conscious experience. We certainly use these terms in our language in everyday life, but when it comes to analysis they seem to escape out normal categories of understanding. For example: where does experience occur? Metaphorically we might respond "in the head," but this is clearly just a poetic response. Although our experience is in a certain way localized in our person in that this is the perspective of the flow of events, and the area of our sensations, it does not "there" in the sense that a table is "there" in the center of a room. Its localization exists in a different way.

Similarly, each of us has a conscious experience, and we think of others as having this too. But where are these other experiences in relation to our own? As in the case above, we may resort to linguistic devices to try to conceptualize this, but we inevitably do a bad job and the best we can hope for is to speak metaphorically, and in a way that ultimately fails to clear things up.

The ways that we have of talking about and making sense of the world seem to be ultimately drawn from, and most appropriate for the physical world rather than the intangible world of conscious experience (of course the physical world exists within conscious experience, but that is a separate issue). Those ways that exist for talking about mental events are at best crude ways of addressing the undeniable existence of our inner mental lives. While these ways allow us to touch on the existence of these things, this area doesn't seem to be appropriately integrated into the rest of our conceptual schema.

At the core of this "conceptual schema" is the identification of the first person, experiencing "I" with the third person "you." By treating these as the same, we allow for the coherent development of a social world that brings us out of (or allows us to ignore) our isolation from others. This comes at a cost: By equating the first and third persons, the differences between the two are pushed out. What separates first person experience from the awareness of the other (third) person--consciousness--is pushed out of the conceptualization, making it the difficult topic to speak about that it is.

It seems that we are unable to trick ourselves by pushing consciousness out: the differences between the first and third person are still immediately obvious to each of us, even though they're ignored by the conceptual schema. As a result, we are compelled to create a concept of consciousness and other related subconcepts to describe experiences which are still undeniably there.

A deterministic world and free choice

A recent article in the NYTimes talks about free will, specifically the tension between the existence of our sense of responsibility for our actions and the fact that we are as people, shaped in who we are (and therefore in what decisions we make) by forces that are beyond our control, i.e., genetics and the environment of our development, and that this actually makes our actions (which are a product of who we are) not in our control.

Both of these stances are valid: we DO feel a responsibility for our actions, even in spite of believing that we as people are who we are because of factors beyond our control. However, I sensed from the beginning that the conclusion was flawed because both premises, although seeming to contradict each other, actually didn't because they spoke about different levels of existence that we tend to confuse. When a problem arises in which two facts about reality appear to contradict each other, I tend to think that there is actually a confusion of logical types. In other words, the confusion occurs because two things that are different, or exist on different levels are made to seem the same. In this way, my thinking is indebted to the work of Gregory Bateson.

The article equates the person who is the result of purely physical processes with the person who makes decisions-decides to do or not to do things. Is this actually the same person?

One commentator (Ivan) replied that the article confused inanimate matter with a conscious thinking human being. I think that Ivan is in the right direction with this. I would pose the question: Does the fact that a sequence of events follows the predictable laws of physics preclude it from occurring because of an intentional choice? While the answer is not a clear no, it's also not at all clear how it could be clearly yes.

I am inclined to think that physical processes may follow physical laws, and that our experience of an intentional domain just occurs in parallel to this. The one troubling conclusion of this is that it implies that although our decisions are intentional, the way that they emerge in our body is also always in keeping with the laws of physics.

Therefore, if we could see every process in our nervous system, and predict our subsequent actions, how would these processes be affected by this knowledge? Say for example that a friend came up and asked us to pick a color, and we looked at the state of our nervous system and found that the system was such that we would most certainly choose green. Once we knew this, we could try to stump the system and decide to choose brown instead. If both the laws of physics and our intentional decisions fully overlap with each other, then our change of choice to brown would have had to correspond to those neural changes that could be read and interpreted as implying that we would end up choosing brown.

Barriers to Progress

I commonly think of myself as, in many contexts, a lazy man. There are things that need to be done in my life that I consistantly don't attend to even when then begin to cause me inconvenience. A persistently appearing example of this is doing laundry. This morning, it became clear to me, as it had for the past few days, that I needed to do some laundry. So dire was this need, that I actually resolved to do it.

When I began to do this I was confronted by the mismatch between the way that I categorized the dirty clothes in my room, and the way that "doing the laundry" demanded the clothes to be categorized. I see the clothes scattered about my room to be in various places along the spectrum between clean and dirty, whereas doing laundry involves the cloths being either clean or dirty. Although in this case the mismatch was between a digital and an analog system of representation, this doesn't have to be the case. A mismatch can also occur between two systems of discrete categories that simply don't match up-such as if I had 4 different levels of cleanliness.

What led me to this state of affairs? I believe that it's my tendency to create categories for things based not on how they must be used, but on certain characteristics of the things themselves. With regards to the clothes, I made categories based on how dirty the clothes were without regard to the fact that the clothes would eventually have to be seen as either clean or dirty.

The merits of this tendency in other areas is a subject for another post.

Gregory Bateson's Levels of Learning

An exciting chapter in an otherwise exciting book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, is concerned with Gregory Bateson's application of the idea of logical levels to the concept of learning. His premise is that the idea of logical levels is applicable to processes of learning, and that the ignorance of this fact leads to confusion in the behavioral and social sciences. What I want to focus on in this post is simply an overview of the different logical levels of learning. I hope in future posts to proceed from there, because this seems to be a topic worthy of exploration.

I imagine each successive logical level of learning as a process of systemic activity in which the learning (understood as specific changes in the system over time) comes to occur in ever larger parts of the system. I will begin by describing the first level.

Learning 1 is commonly understood as simple Pavlovian or operational conditioning. An organism is exposed to a specific environmental event which repeats itself, and this has the result of familiarizing the animal with the contingencies of their behavior in this instance. For example, an animal that repeatedly barks and is given a treat during one session with its owner has learned at level 1 the specific barking>treat contingency.

Learning 2 involves a more substantial type of learning. Rather than learning how to act in a specific situation, an organism that undergoes learning 2 learns to approach novel situations and act in a certain way that has been rewarded in other situations in the past. In other words, learning two is the process whereby an organism learns to act certain ways in certain types of situations, rather than just act in a certain way in a certain situation.

According to Bateson, level 2 is the general ceiling for most people's learning. Despite this, learning at level 3 is attempted with some success-and some destruction. The relationship between levels 1 and 2 is the same as between levels 2 and three. Beyond this level three is (and Bateson admits this) difficult to describe.

It helps to go back down and describe level 2 in more detail, and then scaffold off of this for level three. So, level 2 involves the development of the ability to approach a novel situation and categorize it (and then act towards it) in a certain way. Although the situation facing the organism is novel, the organism still retains its acquired ways of acting. Learning at level 2 gives the organism an intelligent basis upon which to choose a certain alternative.

In contrast, learning 3 involves learning to intelligently choose between sets of alternatives themselves. The choice of alternatives is no longer at the level of the individual situation (as it was at level 2), or at the level of the individual action (level 1). The choice that must be learned to be made intelligently occurs at the level of the sets of alternative interpretations.

So, someone who has learned at level 3 would, upon approaching a novel situation, say to themselves "what set of interpretations offers the most promise in this instance?" Once a decision has been made, the activity occurs on level 2-which interpretation within the selected set will I make-and then on level 1: what is the appropriate action to take in this context?

Linguistic Structure and Overcoming the Barriers of Autism

Bullshitters rely on, perhaps more than any other thing, the structure of language. If someone doesn't know the exact meaning of a particular word, a vague meaning can be constructed if the word has been heard before in conversation because such a context often serves as a pointer arrow directing inquiring minds towards an unknown word's meaning.

Can this be taken a step further? What I mean by this is can one figure out what a whole part of a language (that refers to a specific domain) is simply by making inferences about its structure as it relates to the structure of other parts of the language? This may be confusing, though I think I can ground it by giving the example that got me started on this whole line of thinking.

I work with autistic adults as my job. Some (like Simon Baron-Cohen) have theorized that autism is the absence of an understanding of mental states which leads to problems with communication, social interaction, and imagination.

In line with this theory is the fact that many autistic people have very inhibited language abilities, though some come to have an impressive command over language. Several of the people that I work with fall into this category, and I often find myself wondering what sense they make of those parts of language that refer to mental states. In my experience they don't use these parts of the language outside of situations in which they've been explicitly taught to do so by rote.

Perhaps it's possible that the structure of language could serve as a guide towards the (admittedly artificial) construction of mental concepts in high functioning autistic people who have well developed language abilities. The existence of the linguistic domain of mental terms would not be initially understood, but this is no reason to believe that its structure would escape a careful mind. This structure would exist both within this domain (intrastructure) and between this and other domains (interstructure).

In the coming days, I hope to find out more about how this structure may aid in the acquisition of mental concepts, or something like them...

continuation of the lower post

I've been continuing along the line of thought outlined in the post directly below, and have come to the following conclusions concerning the"realization" method of overcoming undesirable (but still powerfully influential emotions).

I was wondering why the realization the the emotion was "wrong" was so ineffective in the instances I talked about (with the alcoholic not wanting to obey the urge to drink, or the obese person not wanting to follow the urge to eat more). I contrasted these cases with cases in which a certain realization can lead to the abolition of an emotion. As an example of this, take a person who suspects that, at this very moment, his spouse is cheating on him. This person knows where his spouse is, and wants to break in and confront her in the act. Doing so, he goes to the room where she is, breaks down the door and says "AHA!," only to immediately realize that she was indeed not cheating on him. At this moment, the powerful emotions of jealousy and fear that he had probably been feeling likely disappeared, perhaps leaving a residue of anxiety, but largely evaporating. These emotions were declared to be wrong or inappropriate given what was actually happening in the situation he arrived at.

How can it be the the knowledge that the emotions are wrong in this instance immediately lead to the emotions' demise while with the drunk or the obese person, the emotions persist in the knowledge that they are wrong? The reason for the difference, I reasoned, has to do with what I will call the logic of emotions. All emotional reactions are in some way logical. There are certain conditions under which they arise, and other conditions under which they are not activated. The ways that any given emotional reaction obey this is called their logic.

With the suspecting husband, the emotion disappeared immediately after he saw his wife alone because this sight changed the conditions that led to the emotion, making its presence no longer appropriate. With the alcoholic and the obese person, the realization that their pesky emotions were inappropriate did not violate the logic of the emotional response. Instead, their ideas about the drink/food desiring emotions being wrong was not part of the logical system governing the activation of these emotions.

The desire to drink operates in accordance with the conditions of a variety of factors in the alcoholic. First of all, drinking is equated with drunkenness, a positive state which, for the drunk, is preferable to the average non-drunk state. When the alcoholic is not drunk, the system governing the desire to drink is aware that the drunken state is currently unfulfilled, and puts pressure on the system to change this. If this particular alcoholic wants to stop drinking, this urge is, on an abstract logical level in the alcoholic's mind-the level that realizes the futility of drinking and the problems it causes-, subordinate to the desire to not drink. But this abstract logical level does not have complete control over the system.

The emotional logic that led to the desire to drink is unaffected by the knowledge that drinking is not a good solution. This does not change its conditions for activating the emotion. You might say that these are two logical systems speaking a different language.

At this point, it is now appropriate to bring in the alternative explanation for the emotional discord: the competition model. In the competition model, the outcome of competing and contradictory desires is control by the desire (the emotional-logical system) that is strongest at a particular time. While the realization model accounts for how the logical contradiction is not resolved, the competition model accounts for which logical system has the upper hand. In the case of the alcohol/food addict who cannot stop eating or drinking to excess, the emotional logical system governed by the satiated-drunk/non-satiated-sober awareness is stronger than the emotional logical system governed by the doing the right thing/not doing the right thing awareness. Presumably, their relative strength is a factor of the potency of the conceptual duality (drunk/sober, or "do right/do wrong").

Overcoming Drug Addiciton

The topic of overcoming a drug addiction has risen to the center of my interests in psychology in recent weeks because it is such an interesting and illustrative example of the nature of our embodied existence as human beings. By "overcoming drug addiction," I'm referring to the process by which a person attempts to stop using drugs, while at the same time deals with the feeling of wanting to use drugs.

The coexistence within one person of these two competing desires is revealing of what I have referred to in previous posts as the constraints on the adaptive action of living systems. To briefly state this, the possibility for competing and contradictory urges to coexist in a single living system is a likely problem that arises from the fact that the system is autopoetic, and can never exercise completely adaptive control over its whole being. The last point is not a complex one, it's actually an extremely obvious observation about how physical systems have to work. This state of affairs doesn't have to happen, but there is nothing to prevent it from happening given the right conditions.

With drug addiction we can see, in society, the manifestation of this state of affairs in a certain type of way. The drug user is the victim of these competing urges that send contradictory signals, each attempting to have the body controlled in a certain way. For the drug addict who wants to stop using drugs to actually stop using drugs requires the development of control over the body by a value system that recognizes the futility of drug use. In order to attain this control, the value system must be more powerful than the value system that seeks to continue drug use. In other words, the anti drug value system must have greater leverage over the affective processes of the body than the pro drug value system.

This is actually just one view of how this might happen. Another possibility is that the user who formerly "believed" in the emotions that led to drug use, learns to stop believing in these emotions; he/she learns that they are produced by the body in error, from a bodily system that does not "get" the overall picture of what has to be done.

I will refer to these two views as the competition view (the first) and the realization view (the second). Which is correct? Are they compatible?

If we look to our own experience, some aspects of the realization view are very reasonable. Even if one is not a drug addict, it's easy to think of a situation in which one has an emotional response that is undesired (e.g., a dieting person wanting food). Our own experience shows us that we can learn to respond to such emotions by saying "that is exactly the kind of affective reaction that I want to stop happening." In spite of our awareness of its being the problem, the emotional reaction continues to hold sway over our decisions, and so, in the example, the dieting person gives in to eating a cheeseburger, despite thinking what a terrible decision this is.

So, it seems that we can evaluate our affective reactions, but in many cases, this evaluative capacity does not hold sufficient sway over the rest of out body to suppress the emotion's power (though it does in some contexts).

I'm out of time for today, but I will continue to explore this issue in the next post (as the task I set out for myself today remains unresolved). I want to finish up looking at the "realization" method of overcoming emotions and then look at the possible merits of the competition method.