IV Chapter
Psychoanalysis of the self
I am interested in the cognitive sphere of the mind, but the cognitive and the affective domain are inextricably intertwined; Einstein would have not worked so hard on his theory if there was not a feeling, a desire of some sort to motivate him and this is true of everything we do that doesn’t seem to be directly an expression of feelings. Behind every human goal there are feelings, motivations that are emotional in nature. Our thoughts are originally motivated by emotions. Our attention is stirred by emotional drives, or else we would not be able to abstract from a larger set of stimuli a smaller portion of it.
I also believe that the semantic theory[1] of dreams put forward by Freud and his school offers an important contribution to the understanding of the mind, not necessarily because the theory of dreams is true, but rather because it supports the general hypothesis that certain expressions of the mental life are stratifications of layers of an apparently different, deeper nature.
However, I am not interested in dreams, but rather in beliefs, philosophical, religious and scientific beliefs. I will argue that once the self is formed according to the path already outlined in previous pages and reformulated here below in this chapter in more detail, some beliefs show a structure that mirrors that of the development of the human cognition.
FIRST STAGE
You may remember that the idea of the monoblock stemmed from the consideration that if the advancement of knowledge can be described as an ever richer accumulation of entities and their relations, in our mental representation of reality, the reverse path seems to lead towards one single object. From a structural point of view this is just a logical conclusion. The hypothesis applied to the preverbal stage of a child would represent her as perceiving herself as one thing, indistinguishable from the perception of what it will be classified as the external world later on, in her life.
At the time I began to consider this intuition, I was clearly sympathetic with an empiricist approach to knowledge and this assumption was of an empiricist nature, as it did not require a rich postulation of innate structures.
Of course it could well be that the child is born with innate mechanisms that instinctively allow her to distinguish between herself and the world. But these mechanisms would also constitute a constraint on the mind of a human being that would prevent the child from any future speculation on the limits of her physical existence: a pre-innate mechanism of this sort is too rigid for a mind that must be flexible enough to accept incompatible ontologies with respect to the same portion of reality.[2] If she already knows a distinction between herself and the world she must know a lot about the world. She must know that the surface of her body constitutes a limit to the internal reality, that space between herself and the world signify the discontinuity of the physical world and many other things that are not clearly attributable to a preverbal infant.
A pre-established knowledge of oneself sets the individual in one possible environment only and prevents the growth of knowledge. I do not think this is the case. It must be experience that teaches the child something about the limits of herself, and this is coherent with the notion of biological evolution and adaptation. Otherwise, we would be suited for only one environment that we are biologically “supposed” to find.[3]
I am supported by authoritative opinions on this belief that we cannot be born with a fixed pre-established ontology for evolutionary reasons. Aaron Sloman writes, “…Future human-like robots will also need this. Since pre-verbal human children and many intelligent non-human animals, including hunting mammals, nest-building birds and primates can interact, often creatively, with complex structures and processes in a 3-D environment, that suggests (a) that they use ontologies that include kinds of material (stuff), kinds of structure, kinds of relationship, kinds of process (some of which are process-fragments composed of bits of stuff changing their properties, structures or relationships), and kinds of causal interaction and (b) since they don't use a human communicative language they must use information encoded in some form that existed prior to human communicative languages both in our evolutionary history and in individual development. Since evolution could not have anticipated the ontologies required for all human cultures, including advanced scientific cultures, individuals must have ways of achieving substantive ontology extension.”[4]
The child sees and perceives the surrounding environment, in which she sees also her hand. How does she know that the hands belong to her and the doll does not? Because—one answer could be—that the doll does not respond to an act of will and the hand does. But if this is the criterion, then her own body is a progressive construction of differences expressed by intentional acts, like raising a hand and raising a bottle. Only through the experience of a world that does not respond to certain commands do we learn what the limits of our will are: the child raises her hand and the hand goes up, she raises the doll placed on the table and the doll does not move; through these differences she may learn what to do and the limits of her power. But the object is not coagulated until much “experience of the limits of one’s own will” takes place. For suppose that, in a modern lab set to connect the mind and the external world, one could raise a child by tricking her into believing that the doll responds to certain mental commands; would that child reject these experiences as wrong? Improbable? Suspicious?
SECOND STAGE
Our next problem is the coagulation of portions of the flux of reality into objects. If the notion of object is innate, then each thing is perceived by the child just like a separate thing. Suppose that spatial discontinuity is the criterion by which the child acknowledges existence of objects in a preverbal stage. There is no spatial separation between her hand and her body, no spatial separation between a tree and the ground where it is growing. If the blue of the sky is not perceived as an area of discontinuity of matter (why should it be otherwise?), there is no possibility that the child can tell the sun, the moon and the stars apart from the sky: everything in the sky would look like parts (retroactively) of one large thing, just like everything in her body would be perceived as a portion (retroactively) of the one body. Moreover, how can the child know that the tree in her yard is the same tree every day and the milk she drinks is a different milk every day? Should we decide that she knows all these things, her innate knowledge would be unbelievably large.
It is only with the acquisition of language that certain abstractions from the flux of reality can be operated. Our ability to pinpoint the same and the diverse forms our linguistic competence. And this linguistic competence is a cultural vector, constructed by a stratification of progressive convenience along millions of years. Therefore it is only when the child learns the language and understands those words belonging to what Quine called the apparatus of reification that a coagulation of an object as we perceive it comes into existence. “This milk is not the same as the milk I drunk yesterday morning, that is gone!”, “This is my bottle, not yours, mine is blue, yours is red” and so on.[5]
Once we have established that the preverbal child cannot see and perceive the world as we do because she would know too much about the world, the next problem is how the external world gets separated from the self and how it multiplies its entities. She comes from a stage where she had only the notion of the One. We can suppose that the archetype, the One, will work as a unifying and separating device: it will be projected on each portion of reality that must detach itself from the universe for reasons of putting the world under control, as we adults do.
The mind is a machine that generates objects during the appropriate stage guided by reasons of convenience imposed by the culture. Only if the ontology is a flexible hypothetical reality is knowledge possible. In fact, the mind could not conceive of the existence of atoms, for instance, if ontology was biologically fixed. Psychologists often project their own adult understanding of the world onto the child by attributing to her the notion of objects in the preverbal stage; and there are alternative explanations of what the child may be conceiving. Artificial intelligence scientists are more appreciative of the problem, although they have no clue yet of how to solve this problem.
In AI, the problem of the object is represented by what they call ‘pattern recognition programs’, and these programs are also given an interpretation in terms of neuronets. But there is little similarity between what a mind does and what a machine does. The programmer not only constructs the object, but also eliminates all the possible differences that can correspond to change. A simple example would be a letter of the alphabet, let’s say: B. The letter B, perhaps written by a hand, is encapsulated in a grid (they call it mask) consisting of cells, and each of them has the same dimensions. Each cell contains a 0, 1 or blank, and they provide the information to digitally represent the letter. Of course a letter B, handwritten or printed, has a continuity and a pattern. But it is not the continuity of the line that constitutes the object. The object is whatever there is inside the grid; independently of continuity, the object is given. Other similar objects, let’s say Bs written by different hands, are recognized by the program because of their identical sequence of 1s, 0s and blanks. As long as the ‘B’ follows a certain pattern, no difference will be detected: they are always the same letter B.
But what I have called ‘the coagulation of the object’ is a much wider and prior problem. It may include not only spatial continuity, which may be a primitive guiding, built in mechanism (maybe implemented by relevance of function, in spite of some occasional internal discontinuity of forms). The discontinuity of forms is made even more dramatic by the problem of justifying uniqueness in spite of some changes—we live in a dynamic world and we must learn identity through changes. It may be that the child eliminates some irrelevant changes, on the basis of a prior knowledge of the contexts, in which objects appear to her. In the visual field of a child, ‘mama’ is recognized no matter what she is wearing and how she has combed her hair that day, and what moves around in a more or less compact way is ‘mama’.
There may be other, additional steps leading to a first stage of the coagulation of the object. The potential discrete object will be finally isolated by its name, and its relations will find a final step in the language where connections of that name associated with some abstract outcome of diachronical perception will be linguistically (mentally) conceptualized. It is only when the child is fully immersed in her environmental culture (knows the language) that she will master the notion of identity. A computer capable of learning as a child does must be designed as a dynamic object with needs in order to embrace a vision of the world similar to ours. The problem then becomes an interpretation of needs that can meet the requirements of a machine.
THE WILL TO REGRESSION
If at a first stage the child’s mind coincides with the entire
universe, the sum of each perception of the world, any traces of it may be retroactively experienced as a loss of some nature, an unpleasant becoming. This change from a child to an adult mental life is important to put the world under control, but it is also painstaking. This idea is in harmony with some of Freud’s and Jung’s cases, although they did not share the conclusions put forward here.
It is important to notice that we are floating on the surface of a fluid and vague semantic field, and the only way of ascribing plausibility to these hypotheses is by looking at individual cases and evaluating the interpretation on an intuitive basis. It was so for Freud’s theory of dreams, which is semantic in nature. For explanatory purposes I introduce a distinction between surface mind and deep mind, not necessarily adherent to the facts of the mind, that could be a more complex and multileveled reality, with different grades from the deepest to the ultimate surface level.[6] At any rate the distinction is designed to show a potential partial conflict, among different areas of the mind, in the end. In particular, in the deep mind there is a memory of the preverbal stage and the one universe that the individual once lived in and enjoyed.
The adult life is characterized—this is my claim—by an attempt to reconstrue the monoblock or a surrogate of it. The stimulus comes from the deep mind, but the project of how it must be realized comes from the surface adult mind.[7] A program of reconstruction is set in motion at a certain moment of the adult life, often reflected in a life style or career choice. The program used to achieve this reconstruction is determined by the individual psychological type.
Let me speculate on possible psychological types. One type, call it Abstract knowledge Reconstruction, might consist in an attempt to put under control a large portion of the universe by knowing its laws. This scientific/philosophical type can express itself in philosophy. A philosopher of science may devote her life to the attempt to construe a TOE, a reduction to a unique universal theory of everything: reducing and unifying serves both the scopes of the adult life and the will to the monoblock. If there is only one theory of the world, then the monoblock is reconstructed somehow, through a corpus of a few universal laws that underlie the infinite apparent diversity.
The same type may believe in Marxism, or any other sociological theory that transcends the individual in favor of a notion of social class, a larger portion of reality. For those less modernly educated and inclined to fusions of some form, religions may be of some use: oriental religions preach unions with a larger portion of the universe and consider the self an illusion to be abandoned in favor of a doctrine, the yoga, which means ‘union', and preaches the search for a deep universal, unique self to substitute our illusory self. Western philosophical doctrines, like Stoicism, contain the same message up to a point: we exist only as part of a whole.
Another type may place in the possession of material goods its aim to a larger portion of the universe. Call it the physical type. We often wonder why people already worth billions of dollars keep trying to accumulate richness. They usually justify their thirst for money as a question of prestige, a dubious rationalization.
A less demanding type tends to enlarge her universe through love of an individual or a number of people not intimately connected, like poor, sick people, children. Call it the loving type. Love for a partner is often explained in the literature as a will to annihilate one’s own self and fuse with the other.[8]
One other type, motivated by a strong frustration—latent memory of failed attempts to control the external world with acts of will in a preverbal stage—may end up practicing Magic. Call it the Magic or even the Religious type. Often one individual uses a combination of various types, with one dominant and the others recessive.[9]
Now the hypothesis goes on by affirming that a failure in the attempt to reconstrue the monoblock may be cause of mental disorders. If the ego fails the program, the inner, deeper mind may take over and try to regress the situation to the initial monoblock, the time when the individual perceived herself as one in a universe of one single object. Of course this would be experienced in the form of a conflict between the adult mind and its matrix, a conflict that would generate anomalous forms of mental activity, according to this idea.
Some physical consequences of a failed reconstruction program may favor the assessment of anorexia, bulimia, suicidal tendencies, or psychological impediments of motion and sight. All are attempts by the matrix to reestablish the primordial monoblock in its original conditions.
Anorexia can be interpreted as a refusal to allow growth and change from a physical point of view, to maintain the status quo; bulimia may be interpreted as a last, desperate attempt to acquire portions of reality in a form of symbolic representation of physical growth. Suicide is an elimination of the defective universe altogether when all other remedies have shown not able to generate positive effects.
I am going to revue one case studied by an associate of Freud and try to show how these ideas may work and apply to it. Many famous cases studied by prominent psychologists show the strength of these ideas, but, as said before, we are in the vague field of psychological semantics and I do not speak about cases to show the validity of these ideas, but just one case to show how these ideas may work when applied to particular cases.
Case of Miss Anna O.
I am going to just summarize certain aspects of this case, studied by Breuer (who worked with Freud for many years) and show their significance in the light of the will to regression to the monoblock as I have named the mechanism of reconstruction.
Miss Anna O. is introduced to us as a remarkable intelligence. Her intellectual needs were not nourished by an adequate intellectual activity, as she dropped out of school early in life. She is described as finding psychological help by taking care of patients in a hospital. She is affected only by logical arguments; aphorisms had little impact on her mind.
Some specifics of her situation described are:
1) Her life within a puritan family was extremely monotonous, which she embellished with an uninterrupted dreamlike fantasy activity that she called her “personal or private theater”.
2) Tendency to anorexia.
3) Alternation of phases of recognition of the environment (including people) and phases of rejection of knowledge of the familiar environment. In particular, changes to her environment, her room at the hospital, were not accepted. She would continue to move around as she was in the old room, positing the door and other logistic aspects of the old room in the new one.
3a) Complains about things removed or people leaving her room. These were perceived as a threat to her mental organization.
3b) Hallucinatory modification of elements from the environment (her hair was alternatively perceived as normal hair or moving serpents).
4) Very important: periods of crisis were accompanied by difficulty with expressing herself in words. She chose words from different languages known by her and after a while her linguistic mixture became unintelligible. Mutism was an alternative phase.
5) The verbalization of certain nightmares helped her to some peaceful period of time lasting until the next nightmare would take place.
Analysis
Our first question concerns the psychological type. Breuer’s description of her situation suggests we can attribute to her the cognitive type hinted above, the dominant type, with the love type recessive but not silent, and taking over when the dominant fails. In the acute stage of the disease, the failure to pursue a program of reconstruction that her intelligence and her inkling would have required pushed her towards extreme solutions.
A regression towards a preverbal stage is an easy way of reading her symptoms. This negative process is however resisted by the surface mind that is fighting with the deep mind that wants to reset the preverbal monoblock, in spite of the damage it would generate for an adult who wants to live in the society she belongs in. The regression is exemplified by:
a) The removing of things from her environment, in the form of sudden absences of objects or persons from her room, are perceived as an attempt to impoverish the multitude of the adult world which is taking place in conflict with her will to be a normal adult. Or alternatively, it can be explained as a desire for a stagnant, immutable reality.
b) The difficulty of recognizing faces of well known people is another sign of regression to the preverbal stage.
c) The impoverishment of her knowledge of the German language progresses in harmony with the impoverishment of the perceived ontology, which seems to support our idea that language does not consist in a tool made of a separate class of symbols supposed to signify or refer; they are intrinsic aspects of thoughts. Her attempts to rescue her adult ontology resorts to the use of foreign languages learned in her student life, making it seem that later stages of her intellectual development are blurred.
d) Occasionally she mentions to Breuer that she has experienced a confusion due to the fact that several people were talking simultaneously. As an infant one experiences vocal sounds as unintelligible. The retroactive way of representing this, picked among experiences of her adult life, could be resorting to a figure of speech—it is like many people talk simultaneously—that may be very close to the preverbal perception of voices.[10]
BELIEFS
Beliefs are reflected in language in what philosophers call “propositional attitudes”. “X believes that…”, “X thinks that …”, “X doubts that…”, “X knows that”, “X understands that”, etc. are the introductory phrases that precede a proposition that may be true or false, or undecidable. It is not the problem that propositional attitudes eschew ‘substitution salva veritate’ and it is not even the general problem of their intensionality that makes them a suspicious category, it is rather the fact that they refer to an internal reality.
Take the sentence ‘snow is white’. In analyzing its meaning, we do not need, at least it seems so, to go through the mind of anybody. It describes a portion of reality out there. But the sentence ‘I believe that snow is white’ refers to something inside my mind, however it may be connected with my perception of external reality. What is the difference? In the first case we ignore the fact that the uttering or the writing of the sentence is the act of a mind-haver, in the latter the mind is indirectly mentioned by the phrase ‘believe’.
In my proposed sketched theory the entire extensional language is a plausible shortening of propositional attitudes. An entire scientific text book expresses beliefs of the author, but even a question that apparently cannot be dealt with as a propositional attitude may be reduced to it. I may ask “what time is it?” and the real underlying structure is “I do not know what time it is and therefore…” If every meaningful linguistic expression hides a propositional attitude, as I believe, then the study of language cannot be separated from the study of the mind, of which it constitutes the essential part. Language is mental and expresses internal states of affairs that are true of the individual universe they come from, no matter how many other individual universes are similar with respect to that state of affair; “snow is white” is believed by many if not all mankind and this universality makes it look like it is referring to physical facts, but there are no physical facts independently of minds.
Beliefs may also refer to the past, the present or the future. Tomorrow it will rain is a weather prediction, Julius Caesar was killed by Brutus is a belief concerning the past and this kind may be only indirectly verifiable or not verifiable at all, like in the case Jesus calmed the sea. Beliefs concerning the present are of the form Mister Obama is the actual president of US. But present, past, and future beliefs may be labeled: protocols beliefs. 1) Snow is white, The earth is round, and so on. They are beliefs directed to external objects, but there are beliefs concerning the internal sphere both of the first or the third person 2): I believe I am in love with Mary or I believe Mary is in love with me, which is a belief about the beliefs of other agents, or I believe that Arthur believes in God is an example of a belief about beliefs.
Beliefs come in varying degrees of certitude: you may believe that snow is white at a 100% level of certitude, and the same belief may enjoy a lesser level of certitude in another agent who questions the existence of the external world or because she believes that ‘white’ is not the right word to describe the color of snow. In addition to the above classification, we have also scientific and religious beliefs. I am not going to question them in terms of degree of verifiability (null in the case of religious beliefs) here, once we have established that apparent similar obvious beliefs may enjoy different degrees of certitude. Beliefs belong to the conscious mind, but contrary beliefs may lurk in the unconscious mind, as once held and now substituted by opposite beliefs, as beliefs with less degree of credibility, and so on. But whatever is the case I want to simply restate that beliefs, once enunciated, are reports on the internal setting of one’s own universe: each universe is made of present, past, and future facts, hypothetical, counterfactual, fictitious realities, whether entirely created or consisting of bits of real perceptions (conceptual blending), all distinguishing between internal and external facts, in a bundle of post litteram notions and all occupying a space on the psychological individual reality. Notice that when time is internal, we may go from past to future and vice versa, through memory and knowledge, a reality more similar to the tenet of modern physics than to our intuitive notion of time.
Beliefs only partially depend on verifiability. The majority of us accept the existence of the external world without having any possibility of verification of such an indispensable belief. However, our belief in the existence of the external world is rewarded at each step, while it is even questionable whether religious beliefs may be said to be rewarding at all. Most of what we know and believe is based upon other people’s ability to verify them; this is the case of science. That quartz is somehow in some form observable is something that we believe by relying upon the scientific community. But even the existence of the North Pole will be forever an object of my beliefs based upon other’s reports or bidimensional images. Religious beliefs are different insofar as they are not verifiable by anybody and yet so spread around mankind. They are based on dogmas but they may share, with scientific beliefs, something. I have hinted at the fact that the mind may be genetically informed about structures of its own birth and that those structures may work as paradigms for our knowledge of the natural and the metaphysical world in an unconscious way. According to one theory of the birth of life on earth, exogenesis, a reduced form of panspermia, life was originated in outer space and seeds of biological nature were transferred to earth by meteorites. It is an interesting fact that we look up to the sky for our divinities, for our collocation of heaven and to divine our future (see astrology) in spite of the fact that, according to our modern knowledge, those planets and stars are quite inhospitable.
I want to now analyze certain creative/religious beliefs in the light of this hypothesis. When I came up with the idea of the monoblock and its development I was influenced by personal, non-professional experience; by data collected while talking with people affected by psychological problems. In addition, certain aspects of my beliefs were guided by logical consideration already hinted at. Only much later did I reflect upon the concomitance of similar structures between the development of the self and some scientific theories. In particular, I have in mind an example from biology and one from physics. The example from biology is the zygote, the cell that can generate a progressive number of cells by division. From the one to multiplicity. The other example, and this is even more interesting, is the Big Bang theory. In a sense, the bang to which the name refers is a kind of retroactive reconstruction of the event, as bangs are sounds and sounds are waves, determined by vibrations of matter that travel through air and other material and do not travel in vacuum. At the beginning we learn that matter was not there yet. So whatever happened, this big bang therefore could not have been noisy.
When we explained the birth of the self we said that the child perceives herself as one. Analogous to the big bang, the idea of the One needs spelling out, as the child does not have any notion of the one yet; it is a retroactive attribution in the absence of a better way to explain the total uniformity and inability to separate things at that stage, a kind of psychological big bang.[11] One more interesting point to focus on may be the thought of a mystic. Dionysius, who employed a ‘via negativa’ in his approach to the problem of God, got as far as saying that “… It (God) is the universal cause of existence, while itself existing not, for it is behind all beings…”. A ‘via negativa’ is a Latin phrase to label a cognitive process leading to what something is not, in his conception of God, which echoes the Indian tradition describing Brahma, where even the attribute of existence must be dropped. The notion of existence in those conceptual times was considered an attribute on a par with ‘good’, ‘omnipotent’ and the like, therefore it was dropped by Dionysius as no attribute of God is conceivable by a human mind. But his nothingness was not a sheer vacuum, it was rather that in which every distinction fades away. Notice the striking similarity with the big bang and the first milliseconds of the universe, the birth of the self according to my psychological analysis, and the birth of the individual from a biological point of view. I designed a psychological development of the self, consisting in a passage from the one to the multitude; the similarity among biological development of the fetus, the big bang, and God on the other, may be no accident: whether the world is as we explain it, up to a point perhaps, or is a distortion of our mind, we may postulate the existence of parameters used in the construction of reality that are designed by the experience of mental growth and depend on our latent ability to read, inside our mind, the history of the development of the self. We have postulated a mechanism of projection to explain the coagulation of the object, the first step towards a differentiation. The story goes on with an ever richer ontology made of a growing number of objects and their relations. In physics that differentiation is called by some modern physicists a violation of symmetry. In the beginning, there were no separate particles and then all particles were alike. But, as we have seen with the platonic Dionysus the Aereopagite, even non-scientific cosmological religious beliefs may contain representations of the latent knowledge of our intellectual development.
Institutionalized Religions
In the book of Genesis we read: “...Then God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light...God called the light ‘day’” and I read this passage as a projection on the divinity of the fragmentation of the world by language acquisition, where the creation of the world is generated by the word. It goes on with a reiteration of the word creating the world cases. Immediately after God creates man in his image, this passage seems to reinforce the idea that human language is understood at a deep level as the creative principle of the world. God creates the woman from a part of the man. Let the woman be a symbolic representation of the external world, then a quasi-solipsistic account of the external world follows. Man and woman form a unity of some sort, and they suffer from no modesty, quite an obscure passage. It will be the serpent to seduce Eve into eating the prohibited fruit. Only after both of them eat the fruit their eyes open … and they realize that they are naked! If the fruit symbolizes knowledge, as they tell us, it follows in my reading of it that only after having acquired knowledge (language dependent), which in my hypothesis consists in separating the individual from the entire cosmos, do they become aware of their nudity, the limits of their material existence. In Greek mythology too, the woman is created from a subdivision of the man.
In the gospel of John we read, “In the beginning it was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (the creator = the word= God). In one of John's letters, the first, we read: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands, concern the Word of life, for the life was made visible”. In the Gnostic scriptures there is a revision of the Genesis or, better, a description of the time before the creation; and we find there other confirmations of our intuition. In the secret book according to John—I cut the passage short of complicated ontological beings all connected with one another—we read “... wished to make something by the Word of the invisible spirit and its will became deed …”. In the “First thought in three forms” we read “...the verbal expression or Word that came into being into sound that had emanated from the height having within it the name[12] (the bold is mine) ...and all unrecognizable were recognized”. Other interesting passages are found in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas[13]: “when Jesus saw some little ones nursing he said to his disciples, ‘What these little ones who are nursing resemble is those who enter the kingdom, and they said to him, ‘Shall we enter the kingdom by being little ones?’ Jesus said to them, ‘When you make the two one and make the inside like the outside and the above like the below, and that you might make the male and the female be one and the same so that the male may not be male nor the female be female…then you will enter the kingdom’ (bold are mine) … The disciples said to Jesus, ‘Tell us how our end will come to pass’. Jesus said, ‘Then have you laid bare the beginning, so that you are seeking the end? For the end will be where the beginning is. Blessed is the person who stands at rest in the beginning and that person will be acquainted with the beginning and will not taste death’”. If you substitute the ‘one’ in this passage with my primordial one, the initial monoblock, the suggestion follows that a pre-knowledge, pre-linguistic stage is the kingdom.
In the Koran we read that “… Fifty thousand years before the creation of the universe, the first thing that Allah created was the pen. Allah told it to write, it has asked Allah what it should write and Allah said write what was and what will be.” The pen realizes a sophisticated form of language in my opinion, and therefore it is a reiteration of the same intuition: language creates the world. Jabir ibn Abd-Allah said to the Prophet, “O Messenger of Allah, may my father and mother be sacrificed for you, tell me of the first thing Allah created before all things.” He said, “O Jabir, the first thing Allah created was the light of your Prophet from His light, and that light remained (literally “turned”) in the midst of His Power for as long as He wished, and there was not, at that time, a Tablet or a Pen or a Paradise or a Fire or an angel or a heaven or an earth. And when Allah wished to create creation, he divided that Light into four parts and from the first made the Pen, from the second the Tablet, from the third the Throne, (and from the fourth everything else)”.
The next passage is a letter written by an Indian cosmologist (In bold what is interesting from my point of view, while many of the statements contained in the letter are uninteresting or even contradicts some of my opinions):
My dear Abhishek,
You are a sentient human being who is capable of using symbols. There is one fact that distinguishes us from the rest of creation: our ability to use language. Or to put it another way, our ability to do abstract symbol manipulation.[14] That ability, more than anything else, allows us to call ourselves members of the species homo sapiens. All our best attributes flow from that unique faculty. How did our brains diverge from the brains of our pre-human ancestors? What were the evolutionary forces which molded our neocortex? These are questions that are fascinating to explore. Even the capacity to ask these questions and answer them in some fashion requires the ability to manipulate symbols. You will notice that there is a certain circularity involved in this process: we use the faculty to explore the same faculty. We are part of that larger creation we call the Universe. We are also that part of the Universe which seeks to comprehend the Universe. So through us the Universe comprehends itself. Isn’t that the most astoundingly astonishing thing about creation? Through us, the Universe is self-aware. We make the Universe self-reflective[15]. Our thinking about our ability to do symbol manipulation involves symbol manipulation and this is what makes the process recursive and ultimately makes it a recursive Universe. All recursive processes have a terminating condition. We are that terminating condition for the recursive Universe. We, through our ability to comprehend the Universe, bring the Universe into existence. That is what the ancients in India many millennia ago meant when they declared “Ahum Bramha” which means “I am the Creator of the Universe.” Lots of interesting implications arise from this realization. In modern day terminology, thinkers have called it “The Anthropic Principle” which basically states that the Universe exists because sentient beings exist within it which are aware of the existence of the Universe. We will discuss more about the self-reflexive recursive Universe later in these letters. But for now, we will move on to the ability that allows us to comprehend the Universe: symbol manipulation. More specifically, we will concentrate on the symbols alone and leave the discussion on the manipulation of symbols for a later date. So what are symbols, you may ask. Well, the first answer is that they are abstractions. What is an abstraction? One way would be to call them “representations in the brain.” Another word for “abstractions represented within the brain” is “word.” See I have used the word “word” twice in this and the previous sentence. When you use words to discuss words, self-reference is unavoidable. The word is primary. And all that the thinker does is to manipulate symbols — words. We are symbol manipulating entities. Through our senses we get impressions of the world outside our brains. These are stored as memory. Some of these inputs are mapped on to words and the higher functions of the brain manipulate these symbols. Without the words we will continue to sense the universe but we will not be able to do the symbolic manipulation which is thinking. Here is my claim: that unless you know the word, you cannot think.[16] Conversely, to think effectively, you have to have a very large collection of words. The collection of words that you “own” is your vocabulary[17] (nota: it is your universe). That last sentence illustrates an amazing concept — that of hierarchy. Words exist in an hierarchical structure and that is what gives them power. Words, as we keep saying, are abstractions. They represent something but they themselves are not the thing. The word “cow” is not the thing that exists out there with four legs, gives us milk, and goes moo.[18] Distinguishing the symbol and the thing is very important. When people fail to make that distinction, they confuse the symbol for the thing, and work themselves up into a rage and all sorts of nasty things happen.[19] But I digress. OK, so things exist out there in the world. Those things are what I call “atomic” things. A cow is an atomic object or thing that exists out there in the world outside our brain and we use the symbol “cow” in English to correspond to that. Atomic objects are not limited to material things. Without getting too academic about it, let’s recognize that the number “1” is also a thing and we label it and call the label the word “one.” Given our collection of atomic objects for which we have words, we then construct higher level abstractions of things that are not atomic but are what I call “compound”. So the word “cattle” stands for the abstract entity which is “the class to which cows belong”. In actuality, cows exist in the real world but cattle don’t. We just refer to the abstraction “collection of cows” as “cattle.” The word “cow” is an atomic word, and the word “cattle” is a compound word by my definition. Now you see what I mean that words exist in a hierarchical structure? The words you own is represented by another word we call “vocabulary.” That is, “vocabulary” stands in for “the words that you own.” In a sense, the higher level word is more economical, or compact. The magical thing about words is that we can build higher and higher level words based on how we manipulate the words at the next lower level. It is easy to see that even if the world out there has a limited number of atomic objects—which implies a limited number of atomic words[20]—the compound words that we can form is unlimited. And as time has gone on, our collection of words have increased. Or we can say that our vocabulary has increased. The consequence of this increase? We can think more effectively. And after all this, I want to come to the advice that I would like to give you today. To learn how to think, you have to learn vocabulary. By that I don’t mean that you open up the dictionary and memorize it. Learning vocabulary means to understand what the word means, not just its dictionary definition.
When you understand a word it means you know the connection between the word and what it represents and all that it implies and how it is connected with other words at the lower levels. All education is ultimately an attempt to acquire a vocabulary and the skill to manipulate the vocabulary to build higher level words. Think about that for a bit. You may object and say that perhaps learning languages is about vocabulary but surely engineering or physics is not about vocabulary. But it is indeed all about vocabulary. A physicist knows physics vocabulary which he has patiently learnt over years. When he finally adds “quantum mechanics” to his vocabulary after years of studying all the component words that make up the compound word “quantum mechanics”, he can then use that word without having to think about all the bits that go into making that word. Note that he did not actually add the word “quantum mechanics” to his vocabulary the first time he heard it or read the word on the page. It became part of the vocabulary after a long time was spent in manipulating the lower level words which ultimately define quantum mechanics. Here is one analogy that you may find useful. A compound word is like a theorem in mathematics. A theorem is a true statement in the system under study. Once a theorem is proved, then you can use the theorem to create more theorem. So also, when you collect (under certain rules) a number of words to create a higher level word, you then have the luxury of using the higher level words and it helps you to think more effectively. So where am I going with all this? A large vocabulary is important if you want to be able to think effectively and clearly. As I noted before, education is about vocabulary (symbols) and thinking (manipulation of symbols). The fact is that while thinking requires words as the objects upon which it operates, thinking itself creates more words. As more people think in the world, the collective vocabulary of the world goes up and this is what increases our ability to think more clearly. So what is the point of all this thinking clearly, you may ask. I leave you with a thought that Blaise Pascal recorded, “Working hard to think clearly is the beginning of moral conduct.” All evil in the world arises from faulty thinking. To become a truly moral person, we have to learn how to think correctly. To the ancients in India, ignorance was the root cause of misery and sorrow. We will go into that one of these days. With a deep bow to the wordless wisdom in all sentient beings, Atanu.[21]
In many aspects, this letter reveals a traditional view of language and a non-philosophical distinction between physical and mental. With an effort though, we may reconstruct a latent intuition in this writing of the possibility that, if the universe can know itself through the human mind, then our ability to do symbol manipulation is a more subtle notion than he is describing and it exceeds the boundaries of the human mind, permeating the whole universe and blurring our primitive distinction between mental and physical. Another subtle intuition may be contained in the passage, “...we through our ability to comprehend the universe, bring the universe into existence…”. Here I read a semantic equivalence between ‘comprehend’ and ‘existence’,[22] which is similar to the equivalence adumbrated in my analysis of the self. Of course, at least at a surface level, I could not agree more with the idea that “unless you know the words you cannot think”.
Indian philosophy and religion are a rich source of the creative aspect of language: in the Brahma Sfitras we learn that “… In The beginning a celestial voice formed of the Vedas, eternal, without a beginning or an end, was uttered by Svayambhu, from which all activities have proceeded”. In The different forms of yoga we learn that “Beginning appeared with a Division when Lord said ‘Eko Ahum Bahusiam’ and with a Bang the Universe appeared!!!!…”. Sankara, the most influential Indian philosopher, originator of Advanta Vedanta wrote, “The Vedic words (Veda are the so-called eternal scriptures) became manifest in the mind of the creator, … and he created things corresponding to those words” and, “By the fiction of avydia (lack of knowledge) characterized by name and form…not to be defined as the existing or not-existing, Brahama (the self omniscient and omnipotent cause) becomes the basis of this entire apparent world…while in its true and real nature…it remains unchanged…the fiction of avydia originates entirely from speech only”. The Buddhist Nagaryuna wrote in the second century C.E. that nirvana is the result of calming the categorizing, conceptualizing mind, “the calming of all representations, of all verbal differentiations” (Keith Ward, “Religion and Revelation”).
The creative power of the divine word is a projection of our own ability to create the universe by acquiring the language, which by means of fiction creates an apparent world; the real thing is beyond appearance. How is it possible that billions of people believe in one or another religion around the world? If religion contains an emanation of our own image projected as a transcendental entity, designed to complete our universes (for at least some of us), and these people do not need external evidence to believe in these unsupported claims, it may well be that religion is written in our genes. A genetics of spirituality is not absent from the attention of some scholars. A book called ‘God Genes’ by D. L .Damer (New York: Doubleday 2004) advanced the hypothesis that a variant in a particular gene, VMAT2, was associated with spiritual beliefs. The study was not supported by the scientific community with a follow-up interest and remained an isolated proposal, but it does not mean that the main idea will not be revived and more convincing evidence will not be uncovered. Philosophy is not alien to unconscious impulses to couple different moments of our mental development. As I have already said, Stoicism considers the unity of the individual a violation of the Unum, the whole universe. For Spinoza, we are properties of the one reality, not substances. Marxism is a doctrine that substitutes the individual with a collective entity, the social class. But even linguistic philosophy seems to empower language with the force of explaining reality.
And finally we may notice a similarity between myth and ancient philosophy on the one hand, and modern science on the other which points again to the eternal return theme. The notion of gravity, explained in terms of attraction and that of attraction and repulsion at the level of electromagnetism between opposite charged particles, was in a mythical form present in ancient philosophy: Empedocles believed that two cosmic forces which work upon the elements in both creative and destructive ways. These he personifies as Love (Philia)—a force of attraction and combination—and Strife (Neikos)—a force of repulsion and separation. These two forces permeated the entire universe, including human beings. And of course, within human thermodynamics there are attempts to explain love as a form of chemical attraction.
To summarize the ideas of this chapter: I have suggested a one way route of the individual intellectual growth that goes from a preverbal stage to a linguistic stage, characterized by an initial separation between the individual and the external world, and an ever larger ontology of entities and their relations, from the One to Many. This development will be saved as a model in the subconscious mind of the individual and it will constitute an interface, governing our understanding of the world and what is behind it. Language is somehow perceived from now on as a creative power, the primordial unity of the one becomes a last paradise during the linguistic stage and a form of nostalgia for unity is reflected in our lives in different ways and in different disciplines; to mention just what is relevant to our theme, epistemology, political doctrines, cosmologies, and religious doctrines all reflect one way or another this aspiration to the unity as an inverse route.[23] And natural sciences are not immune to this paradigm.
[1] Wherever meaning is present a semantic theory is what explains it. But there is more than one theory of meaning. Take the sentence “La neve e’ Bianca”. To say that it means “Snow is white” amounts to applying a semantic hypothesis that can be verified, and this theory is what philosophers and linguists talk about. On the other hand, if we say that the dream of you killing your boss means a masked desire of killing your father, the theory at stake is of a quite different nature, not easily verifiable. It is a theory about the semantic content of dreams; dreams, according to Freud, are the interface of a deeper sphere of feelings and desires, this is a hypothesis. But the situation is not much different from that of a scientific theory like evolutionism. In supporting evolutionism there is a lot of good sense rather than indisputable evidence. Behavior, additional thoughts, indirect connections to other facts may confirm, to our intuition, that the claim that the boss is a masked father, is right.
[2] See chapter II on the flexibility of ontology.
[3] Creationism may hold a more rigid view of initial knowledge.
[4] Bold is mine to highlight the crucial point: substantive ontology extension is his way of saying that the mind must be flexible with respect to the ontology.
[5] I am not offering a rational reconstruction of reference here, just hints at the direction it should take.
[6] That there is an area of the mind to which we have no access is an obvious fact. Memories are not present to the mind all the time, they are evoked under particular circumstances, whether they are memories of words, rules of any sort, or images of events of the past.
[7] This is very similar to the conflicts between the ego and the subconscious postulated by psychoanalysis.
[8] Frederick Nietzsche saw in this attitude a negative aspect of human aspirations. His Zarathustra is a repudiation of this tendency, together with his notion of the superman. Zarathustra, the hermit exalts solitude and place a distance between himself and everybody else, he says to the crowed gathered around him, “If you understand my doctrine turn your back and leave” to signify that union in general is the sin, embraced in many theories of the world and in religions, a sin, a mistake that he wants to mend.
[9] The classification of psychological types demands a search on the field and serious thinking devoted to this problem. I am just roughly naming some elements of a potential typology.
[10] Suppose that all known mental diseases can be individuated and chemically cured. Would we still be interested in these hypotheses? From the point of view of a neurologist or a psychiatrist, whose final scope is the well being of patients, the case is closed. But the point of view of a scholar of the mind is different. Syphilis in its third or fourth stage becomes a mental disease, but fortunately, with the discovery of penicillin, no one must experience them. But for studies of the mind these cases may still be relevant. (Of course the fact that syphilis for instance is an infection that affects several areas of the human body and finally the brain is encouraging to reductionists.)
[11] Another interesting similarity of structure between the notion of the big bang and the development of the self as I have sketched it, is elucidated by Stephen Hawking’s words (TV interview): when he talks about the first milliseconds of the existence of the universe after the big bang, he says that at that early time there was no space yet, therefore there was not a reality out there, only an INSIDE. I am not so much impressed by the possibility that he is right, as much as I am impressed with the choice of the words he uses to explain an unexplainable reality. Compare it with my monoblock!
[12] In one of Ezekiel’s books, God presents him with a scroll of paper on which there are instructions to be carried on by Ezekiel and God asks him to eat the scroll! Such a request reveals a conception of language that is far from a dichotomy between symbols and ideas: if he eats the scroll he will digest ideas, not mere symbols.
[13] This Gospel of Thomas, according to some scholars, was written as early as the Gospel of John, whereas others believe it was written in the second century. It is a collection of Jesus’ sayings very similar to those in the synoptic (Matthew, Mark, Luke) gospels. These disputes are irrelevant to my point. The interesting point about this script is that it depicts Jesus as a divine creature who preaches self-knowledge!
[14] In my view language is much more than symbol manipulation.
[15] This passage is a very close to my claim that we are indeed a universe.
[16] This is my claim too, but his is based on an unwarranted separation between words and reference that is of a traditional nature.
[17] The vocabulary in my system is the ontology of individual universes.
[18] Words are the things in my view but not in the sense of what they purport to mean. At the level of a separation between symbol and things, we are dealing with post litteram notions.
[19] This ignores that western philosophy is quite sophisticated about the distinction. See ‘use and mention’, ‘token and type’, ‘language and meta-language’.
[20] This was Wittgenstein's view in the Tractatus, an isomorphism between words and objects that is quite utopistic if not referred to a mind, or a universe.
[21] From “Of Symbols and their Manipulation”. http://www.deeshaa.org/2005/07/10/of-symbols-and-their-manipulation/
[22] Like Parmenides.
[23] The motive of the eternal return is as arbitrary as spread in philosophical doctrines, we have noticed.
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