The Mindedness Framework: Metaphysics and Consciousness

Speaker 2
Good description. Now, let's move on to the next thing, which is you talked descriptive metaphysics for science, behavior, and mind. And for the listener, I have just pulled out my GP100 stainless steel Ruger.357 Magnum pistol, and I'm waving it around at the mention of the word metaphysics, I was very careful to make sure it was unloaded, not smart to wave a loaded pistol around. So, I mean, what the fuck? I don't believe any of this stuff is metaphysics,
Speaker 1
but... Right. As we talked about, metaphysics is a very complicated word, like mind, like behavior, and like science, Jim. I mean, what do do you mean by the terms I mean the same thing that Aristotle
Speaker 2
meant or Kant something that is outside of our ability okay our potential ability to to describe scientifically you know I am quite convinced that there's no as are you no magic about consciousness or subjectivity and it is yet another natural thing in the world. That's why I call myself a naturalist rather than a materialist. And things like phenomenology, subjectivity, language, culture, etc. are all natural phenomena, and I do not need to bring
Speaker 1
in the M word. Okay, well that's the S word. That's for supernatural. I'm not bringing in anything magical here, and that's not what metaphysics normally means to many people. It's certainly not what it is. First principles of philosophy. Many people describe metaphysics as the concepts and categories. Now, I add the word descriptive and systematic metaphysics to be very clear, and I differentiate it from pure metaphysics, which is disconnected from the empirical world. And Jim, in the garden, there's a meme effing flower that puts metaphysics right next to empiricism and makes clear that the problem of psychology turns out to be, we don't know what the effing term mind is, and we don't know what behavior is, and we don't know what cognition is, and we don't know what consciousness is, and these are concepts and categories that we don't know how to map. And what popped out of my head at the Tree of Knowledge in 1997 was a network of concepts and categories defined in relationship to each other that can be described effectively as a descriptive metaphysical system that maps the empirical knowledges that have been given to us by the sciences. So I would just say, put the pistol away. You could call it logic, call it description, call it definition. And if we want to console out metaphysics, that's fine. I disagree that that's what you should do, but I'm happy at your podcast to say, just call it a descriptive system. Yeah, that's just yet another part of understanding the natural world, right? You talk's endonaturalistic. That means we go within the natural world, we stay there. Maybe there's aliens, which would be potentially naturalistic. Maybe there's parapsychology. Who knows? Interesting stuff on that, as you know. Lots of different things. But let's stay with what we know, like this conversation, the fact that I'm sitting in a chair, the fact that I'm going to die. Let's just stay with what we know. That's what Utahx is fundamentally about. All right, let's go on to the next thing. And I personally
Speaker 2
believe this is your biggest contribution so far, is the idea of mindedness, the forgotten dimension of existence.
Speaker 1
So fundamentally, what Utahx shows through its tree of knowledge is it says, hey, there are these four different planes of existence, material objects, living organisms that come off of, and then there's this whole mind animal. Mind here, then, is a set of properties, a sensory motor loop that gives rise to a new class of behavior, the behavior of animals as whole bodies with brains acting against each other like in prey predation. Hunting is a classic example, territory. These are all the things that animals with complex active bodies do that plants, fungi, and bacteria don't. And really, that's actually what I argue the science of psychology, when you get right down to its nuts and bolts behaviorism, it's actually trying to describe minded behavior. It's a totally different kind of thing. And once you get minded behavior, then you're going to be able to get mind as consciousness and mind as self-consciousness in a clear descriptive system. And
Speaker 2
you have your mind one, mind two, and mind three. And by the way, you still have those stupid fucking superscripts in this new book. Well,
Speaker 1
I asked Brendan, you can ask Brendan Graham Dency. He's like, I like the superscript. So
Speaker 2
he was the publisher. So I left them. They're hard to find.
Speaker 1
But they're hard for your search system.
Speaker 2
Yes. I would suggest don't use superscripts. I know. But that's all right. You have. Yeah. It's the second time I've complained about that. I will also mother minor bitch about the book. There's no table of context in the... Not a table, right. There's a glossary. In the Kindle version. There was a table of contents in the PDF, which you nicely sent to me. I like to use Kindle to actually do the read through. And then I like to use PDF to go through and analyze it and make my show analysis. Now, as we've hit it about at lunch a couple of times, I do have somewhat of an objection to this mind one, mind two, mind three thing. And I think I can articulate it out. It's not really an objection because I do buy the model, but this is something I see all the time from people who come from a psychological frame, which is way too anthrocentric, right? And in reality, I would suggest that mind two, subjective conscious there is the kind that you and I share, which came up from the tetrapods, the lobe-finned fish into amphibians. And then there's a whole nother one, we think, that came through the large cephalopods, the octopi and the big squid. And those are two qualitatively different things, ontologically meaning in an ontology, not meaning in the philosophical sense. And so, you know, if I were trying to be ultra precise, I would say the mind two you're talking about is mind dash tetrapods, right? Which is the kind of mind that tetrapods have. And then mind three, I would label mind homo sapien, right? is nothing that says that there can't be other ways of having mind that use one-dimensional encoding of things that have syntax, which can then run through an interpreter and be turned from one-dimensional to three or four-dimensional, depending how you want to think about it. And that's really what differentiates the human mind from, let's say, a chimpanzee mind. And I understand why it's useful to compress this when you're thinking about it in terms of psychology. But if you back away from an anthrocentric perspective, the tree gets bushier.
Speaker 1
Okay, well, there's a lot there in relation. Let's back up and say, all right, so what's first mind? Okay, first mind is a nervous system that can consolidate in a brain. And then really have insects, cephalopods, and the vertebrates. Look at Peter Godfrey Smith. He delineates this and emphasizes the importance of complex active bodies and the consolidation of brain, and I would say we share all of that. Then, if you're going to talk mind two, mind two refers to the epistemological gap, meaning there's an opening of subjective point of view, which I would say, if it's in octopi, then certainly's a, certainly it's a different thread. But if it is the case that we're talking about subjective experience, like that is something like to be an octopus, it's a different kind of mind because I mean, like an octopus has got brains in its, in its arms and God only knows what that is. In fact, there's a great book by Peter Godfrey Smith on other minds, emphasizing octopus minds. I think that calling it mind too, would say, well, it just has the features of a subject of conscious experience. That's where the hard problem comes in, what I call the neurocognitive engineering problem. Exactly what that is and where that gives rise to is a good thing. I think that the word mind two would be useful in that context. It is absolutely important in Utah to recognize that we are across a historical line. It is our history that we're embedded in and operating from. Often you could call it the unified theory of human
Speaker 2
knowledge to emphasize the fact that these are humans pulling stuff together. Yeah, that works better for me. If you were to call this map of mind, map of human mind, then definitely it works. Well, certainly
Speaker 1
I believe that the vocabulary works in terms of what people are referring to. You're also right that you can gain increasing recursion on Mind 2 and other animals, like... And if you pass the mirror self-recognition, the famous Gordon Golub, although some fish may even pass that, that's debatable. But if you pass that, that's a good example of a particular kind of proto-self But Mind 3 in YouTalk, because it gets paired with the tree of knowledge system and the emphasis on novel information processing communication networks that are open and generative says that propositional language is a tipping point, and then you get an entire mediated structure through a novel propositional language system, which may be true in ORCA's, may be true in, but I don't see the kind of, that it hasn't become an open, self-recursive, self-generating system, at least the way the culture person plane is in humans. So you and I are clearly, certainly with human minds, we can now say, okay, this intersubjective language mentation is a different kind of thing than my private vision for experiencing the world and my embodied
Speaker 2
behaving mind of mind one. Yeah. And specifically the lot where you draw the line is around having sufficient language and sufficient linguistic culture to build a web of justification.
Speaker 1
That's right. That's right. Because the argument is that you get socialized into a network of legitimizing structures. You need language to gain access to that. You build a network of propositions. That's what culture, capital C culture is, which is different, by the way, than society. But capital C culture is the network of propositions that we get socialized in. And to be a person is actually to have accountability on that and to be able to justify your actions accurately or wisely or whatever is a different question. But to be able to justify your actions on the social stage. And that is mind three culture person dimension. And you gave a good example. You know, Gog says there's an antelope over the next ridge.
Speaker 2
Then Og says, how do you know that? Are you sure you're not lying because you want to go hunt a rabbit over on this side, right? Totally. And that is really somewhat, I'll call it the lever that created this arms race in language and brain probably. But on the other hand, I think this is important for people to know, and it doesn't invalidate your system, but I call it a footnote. That probably didn't arise in humans until something like 70,000 years ago. We had proto-language, which was not complete. Totally.
Speaker 1
That's what my system says, that it follows Tomasello, who emphasizes our capacity to sync up minds intersubjectively, shared attention and intention in a way that's better than the other apes. Then you symbolically tag them from about half a million years ago to about, I don't know, 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. Then there's a tipping point of propositional language where you get symbolic syntactical syntax that allows the proposition to emerge. That immediately triggers questions for counterfactuals, and then you get a tipping point that's generative. And we do see the explosion of human culture over the last 100,000 years that would be suggestive of that. That's where I'm pointing.
Speaker 2
Yeah, and more specifically, in the last 60,000 years. Right.
Speaker 1
60, I mean, there's the 70, you know, mine's big bang is 75 to 60,000 years ago. Oh, by the way, the Ruddian contribution to this discussion, people used to say 40,000. I'd
Speaker 2
say it can't possibly be 40,000, and here's why. The out of Africa event was about 65,000 years ago, maybe 70,000. And it's quite clear that the people that came out of Africa and the people inside Africa both shared full language, right? Right.
Speaker 1
I won't be surprised if we push that thing back 100,000 years. We'll see. There's a bottleneck on the genetics. It's an interesting question. The point is logically, there's a tipping point when you get a sentence that has propositional meaning that opens up the dynamic to question it. Once you get question-answer dynamics, it builds legitimizing structures. And then you look at us here today, and what are we doing? Question-answer dynamics to legitimize. Yeah, and I'm making you justify your stuff, right? As you do with the guests.

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