A Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Human Consciousness

Harry T.
Hunt1
A Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Human Consciousness

Incommensurable Cognitive Domains of Purpose and Cause as a Conjoined Ontology of Inherent Human Unbalance
Abstract: Kants account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases in the two European traditions of philosophy that feed into modern cognitive psychology, the holism of Leibniz and the analytic reductionism of Locke, are used to develop a new theory of human nature in terms of developmental interactions between initially separate cognitive domains. More recent illustrations of this separation/interaction are found in debates over emergence in modern science and theories of consciousness. Shifting from competitive epistemologies to a resulting ontology of human nature, the cognitive development of mind through childhood can itself be understood as multiple but necessarily incomplete fusions between person knowing (theory of mind) and a thing/tool knowing (naive physics), based here on a Vygotskian model of their reciprocal internalizations, and leading into our ostensibly differentiated and humanly unique multiple adult intelligences. A consequence is that human consciousness, while based on these selective and
Correspondence: Harry T. Hunt, Psychology Department, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, L2S 3A1. Email: hhunt@brocku.ca
[1]
The author thanks David Goigoechea, James Lawler, and members of the James Lawler discussion group for invaluable stimulation, and Linda Pidduck for editorial assistance.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, No. 9, 2009, pp. 2754 Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011 For personal use only -- not for reproduction
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necessarily partial domain integrations, as in the separate directionalities of spirituality and science/technology, is fundamentally and permanently unbalanced. Kants sublime and Rudolf Ottos related analysis of numinous-uncanny feeling exemplify the inner dynamism of this intrinsic unbalance, constituting the species specific form of the perpetual orientation to novelty that drives us forward toward the very best and very worst of the human condition. Keywords: cognitive domains, person and thing; Kants sublime; domain fusions; species specific forms of life; uncanny-numinous experience; James on pure experience. In his Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant brings together his previous independent analyses of human ethics and the apriori categories of scientific reason by focusing on the experience of the sublime a transcendent sense of beauty, wonder, and ecstatic feeling in response to majestic patterns in physical nature. Kant understands the sublime as arising out of the juxtaposition of ostensibly incommensurable epistemologies of what in current terminology we would regard as the separate cognitive domains of person knowing (theory of mind) and thing knowing (naive physics) (Wellman, 2002).2 In Kants account, a category of purpose/meaning, combining Aristotles final and formal/design categories of causation, emerges as the moral inspiration of a sublime and mysterious beauty in patterns of nature whose causation is in fact physical and mechanical, the latter roughly combining Aristotles categories of efficient and substantive causation (Ross, 1959). The mountain pass evoking this aestheticspiritual inspiration has been produced by blindly repetitive cause and effect relations akin, Kant says, to the processes of crystal formation or frost patterns on windows whose appearance, it will be important to note, we can also find subjectively fascinating in their own right. Kant posits a supersensible unity between these two domains, joined in this experience and within the same universe, but unspecifiable as such in epistemological or psychological terms. We find two logics in the same mind that both juxtapose and interact while at
[2]
Although the focus here is on the separate cognitive domains of person and thing, some cognitivists (Boyer & Ramble, 2001) and phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) have followed the lead of Leibniz and Aristotle and located three core domains human, vital/animal, and natural/inorganic. Since the first two domains involve categories of consciousness, purpose, or final causation, in contrast to the physical or efficient causation of the thing domain, and a middle vital domain can be seen as already fusing this dichotomy (below), we will not develop a full trichotomy of domain relations in the present context.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011 For personal use only -- not for reproduction
THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
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the same time finally passing each other by.3 In what follows we will see that Kants sublime can offer a more general, species specific, model of the human mind of both our highest and lowest and most dangerous potentialities.
Top Down Purpose/Meaning vs. Bottom Up Causation: Science from Synthesis vs. Science as Analysis
The cognitive domains of purpose/meaning and cause/mechanism do intersect, and indeed mainstream modern science posits a complex emergence of the former from the latter, but, with Kant, their logics appear to be incommensurable even at their points of maximal juxtaposition. The best way to see this is by comparing their most abstract formulations as philosophies of science, reflected on the one hand in Leibniz holistic monadology and on the other in Locke and Newtons more predominant science of analytic atomism (Lawler, 2006). Leibniz version of science rests on a panpsychism consciousness and proto-consciousness are everywhere. It is a science of and from synthesis, beginning top-down from the present reality of human consciousness and looking down through less and less complex levels of organic and inorganic nature for our own seeds or organizing principles (Hunt, 1995a; 2001). Leibniz (1898) finds three levels of organization, moving from rational or self-aware monads, as the dynamic patterning of the human mind, to the motivational/perceptual basic monads, best illustrated in motile animals, to the proto-conscious bare monads of physical nature, with their prototypes to be found in the dynamic flows and turbulence of air, fire, and water. It is these bare monads of physical nature that became the optimal focus for both his differential calculus and the aspects of nature of most direct aesthetic appeal and fascination. Of course for Leibniz the necessary organizing principle for the synchrony he posits across these three levels of reality was God. If, however, we remove God from this system of thought, to be considered instead perhaps as the most abstract expression of ourselves as self-aware monads, we are left with an epistemology very
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Collectors and afficionados of objects such as antique clocks and classic cars, with their outer patternings of aesthetically crafted form juxtaposed with an inner mechanism or engine, are drawn to these artificial re-creations of both sides of Kants antinomy. Although there is no necessary logical relation between the exquisitely painted design, shape, and wood grain of a specific New England banjo clock circa 1820 and its original clockwork mechanism, the fascination of the serious collector is fully engaged only when both sides of the original are preserved or restored together. The clock design with a different inner mechanism or none at all, does not hold the same value or fascination. It is not as perfect for the collector not as sublime.
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like Whiteheads (1929) organic process philosophy, current complexity and self organizing systems theory (Gleik, 1987; Kelso, 1995), and David Bohms (1980) implicate order, in which every dimension of reality enfolds to varying degrees the same dynamic principles of the totality (Hunt, 2001). A science of synthesis looks from and via human consciousness as certainly the most complex system available to us and so reflecting a complexity tendency of the universe toward its seeds on the way toward or prefiguring consciousness. Since the universe did produce us and we must thereby be a clue to its potential complexity, this approach must be as logical and scientific as the more widely understood science as analysis, which locates the fundamental units or elementary processes from which more complex realities are to be constructed (Hunt, 2001). It is important to note that science as analysis was already a distinct and separate logic in short a philosophy of materialism before it was a quantitative science, since Democritus, Newton, and Locke are assuming elementary atomistic processes in both physical nature and mind long before any such empirical demonstrations. Domain incommensurability is apparent here in that bottom up elementary processes and causal mechanisms are not the same as the top down seeds and organizing principles of mind. Leibnizs dynamically patterned monads are not atoms. They pass each other by of logical and methodological necessity. First, human beings are but one of a near infinite line of system complexity formations out of the cosmic big bang. The patterns located on less complex levels of reality by using consciousness itself as top down lens are certainly real but confined within our own line. We cannot see in this way all the various bottom up lines to be discovered within the analytic sciences. More importantly, despite the faith of Galileo, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke that a full synthesis could be re-assembled out of their separated elementary causes and inner mechanisms (Lawler, 2006), this has proven rather notoriously untrue. We first measured and then split the atom, but although it might in principle be possible someday, we have not yet come close to generating motile protozoan life out of organic chemistry in the laboratory. More prosaically, perhaps, sensations or qualia, as the would be elementary or atomic processes of perception and thought for the British Empiricists, derived in direct imitation of Newtons analytic science, famously fail to add themselves up into the later dynamic gestaltism of Gibsons (1979) ambient envelope of flow in all patterned perception the most basic navigational envelope of perception as
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generated by moving, self-locating organisms. Sensations, while certainly open to the measurements of psycho-physics as a separate discipline, are not the units or elementary processes of perception. The modern rejection of the early laboratory introspectionists was based on the realization that their sensations were actually higher order analytic dimensions experientially abstracted from the complex patterns they actually presuppose. These supposed units are generated by means of our neocortically based top down capacity to isolate more and more specific sensory dimensions, as the very stuff of both our material scientific analyses and our potential metaphoric/ aesthetic usages. James (1890) was perhaps the first to understand perception and sensation as alternative ways of seeing or taking our ongoing experience the first immediate and unreflective, the second more derived and abstract. Most of the concepts and theories in the human sciences are necessarily, if generally tacitly, top down in this way and based on our own intuitive access to ourselves as self referential beings. Key terms in psychology are derived from ordinary language and then given a more abstract and restricted usage, as in parallel processing, affordance, attribution, episodic memory, unconscious, ecological array, schema, etc. The specific measurements operationalizing these concepts for linear experimental and statistical analysis, methods derived ultimately from the bottom up physical sciences, in turn never seem to add up to their originary wholes. These two logics, themes taken from the humanities and methods from the sciences, creatively interact, while also passing each other by. As first articulated by Dilthey (1976) and James (1890) our resultant empirical psychology is thus oxymoronic and subject to a curious and seemingly permanent parallelism between phenomenon and method (Hunt, 2005b). This is a juxtaposition and interface of distinct cognitive domains, but certainly not their genuine synthesis. The philosopher of science Von Wright (1971) shows how even historical narrative itself makes use of pattern/purpose and causal mechanism as distinct logics also in continuous and unpredictable interaction in actual events as in the complex interface of social intentions and geographical limitations and opportunities. The gun is pointed and the trigger pulled top down but it fires and the bullet hits, if it does, bottom up. Again, lived human reality overtly juxtaposes domains that both collide and fuse, and require our most careful interpretive separation and alternative focus.
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Emergence in Contemporary Consciousness Studies: Top-down/Bottom-up Interactions and their Methodological Parallelisms
The closest interfacing of these logics of top down synthesis and bottom up analysis comes with recent approaches in philosophy of science to the concept of emergence between adjacent hierarchic levels of system complexity (Sperry, 1991; Scott, 1995; Bunge, 2003), seen by many as central to any solution to the hard problem of consciousness. At various levels of complexity in the natural order, and most particularly with consciousness, there seem to be points of supervenience, where complexly patterned wholes exceed the sum of their identifiable parts and so generally require their own new research methodology often based on pattern and design recognition. At the same time, to qualify as genuine emergence, there must also be a specific downward control (Sperry, 1991), by which the higher order or molar system principles causally dominate or slave (Kelso, 1995) the lower order molecular mechanisms that also make them possible in the first place. What is striking in these potential versions of emergence, however, is that at the same time the domain separation of such fascination to Kant is still preserved. Indeed it seems to be this juxtaposition that continues as the source of their creative tension and controversy as in the debates swirling around consciousness itself as a qualitative emergent. If we consider consciousness, with Sperry, Scott, and others, as an empirically emergent, molar level of complexity, ostensibly exercising downward control over its more molecular neural and/or biochemical constituents, we are still left with both the methodological dualisms of phenomenology (ultimately based on person knowing) and neuroscience (ultimately based on naive physics) and the incommensurability of the competing theoretical monisms of a holistic pan psychism and an analytic materialism. Each of these monisms has proven equally unable to conceive, in the language of Strawson (2006), how an entirely non-experiential reality could give rise to what is entirely experiential forcing either the pan psychist view of a proto-consciousness all the way down or the materialist reductionism of a physics that must also go logically all the way up. Again we find what may be our inherent inability to directly synthesize the colliding epistemologies of spirit and matter, person/consciousness and thing. With Kant, and here with respect to consciousness itself, we can see their unity as an empirical fact that nonetheless remains supersensible to our capacity to fully think it. The hardness of the hard
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problem may be to a large degree epistemological. An ostensibly emergent consciousness must seem logically magical to each perspective. It keeps coming apart into its distinct methodological parallelisms, competing epistemologies, and even the separate temperaments required for the sciences of its holistic outward patterning and its determinative inner causations.
Cognitive Domains and Human Forms of Life: Incommensurable Epistemologies as Conjoined Anthropology Human evolution, cross modality and cross domain integrations If we shift our attention from systems of reality linking a bottom up causation and top down purpose/form to the nature of the being who thinks and directly experiences in these ostensibly incommensurable ways ourselves we can tilt these competing hierarchies of science into a side by side ontology of the separate cognitive domains whose collisions and partial fusions actually create our specifically human and enacted forms of life. This dichotomy and only partial integration in the human sciences and in the contemporary science of consciousness rests on a deeper dichotomy in human nature itself. Irreconcilable tensions and temperaments within both science and philosophy here become a distinct theory of a specifically human consciousness. The cognitive domains of purpose and causation appear to be largely and initially independent of each other in their first emergence in human infancy, the higher primates and other proto-symbolic species, and on some views Homo Erectus (Leary and Buttermore, 2003). On the theoretical model of Geschwind (1965) both of these separate domains of intelligence would rest on an recombinatory, novelty generating, capacity for a cross modal matching and neocortical translation directly across the senses and recognition systems that remain separate and separately conditioned in non symbolic species. Initially (Hunt, 1995a) I followed Geschwinds views of the evolutionary transition from the proto-symbolic higher apes, with their capacity for cross modal matching restricted to vision and touch/kinesthesis, to the human symbolic capacity as explained by our addition of a social auditory-vocalization to vision and touch. This seemed to me to allow a specifically human and open ended cross modality reverberating back and forth among three structurally distinct modalities. The result would become outwardly reflected in language and Gardners (1983) multiple intelligences, and inwardly in the semantic synaesthesias of
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felt meaning and understanding (see Hunt, 1995a; 2005). And consistent with this model the proto-symbolic parrots (Pepperberg, 1999) and dolphins (Herman, Richards, & Wolz, 1984) cross visual, vocal, and motoric patterns, but without the complex kinesthetic gesturing central to social intelligence in the higher apes, who in turn lack a crossing of their visual-kinesthetic fusions with novel articulatory vocalizations (Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1986). What I did not see as clearly was that such cross modalities underlie both nascent social consciousness (person knowing) and tool manipulation (thing knowing) and that, apart from the social imitative learning of the latter, these two domains remain largely separate as distinct forms of life in the proto-symbolic parrots, dolphins, and higher apes. It would be the transition to humanity that entails the progressive, and we will see inherently incomplete, fusion of these domains both already cross modal and recombinatory. It is this fusion, mediated by a vocalization that gradually becomes both social and instrumental, that would be the crucial step to the fully human symbolic capacity, with its species-specific, creatively recombinatory and open ended forms of domain fusion (see below). By late infancy early levels of human symbolic intelligence are beginning a cross translation and recombination of the visual-motor manipulative play with things and an interpersonally centered, kinesthetic-gesture and kinesthetic-articulatory vocalization producing an essentially open-ended circuit of cross modality translations and re-translations, back and forth between the predominantly simultaneous spatial forms and predominantly sequential and temporarily extended vocal/auditory forms increasingly common to both domains (Hunt, 1995a; Hunt, 2005). It would be this more extended range of cross modality translation that would allow the first stabilized and progressive developmental integrations of the imitative kinesthetic bases of person knowing and the visual-motor bases of object manipulation. It is suggested here that human childhood and adult development would consist in progressively more complex fusions and integrations between the inner processes of these initially separate person and thing domains. Such domain fusions are largely absent in protosymbolic species such as higher apes, dolphins, and parrots and certainly do not develop there as sustained forms of life. It may be significant for what follows that occasionally observed forms of more transitory cross domain fusion in higher apes, linking the largely separated domains of social-personal and thing intelligence, already create a nascent, if temporary, abstract attitude, in the sense of Goldstein
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(1963). Thus in accounts by Goodall (1986) of one chimpanzee substituting several large kerosene cans in place of the usual dust generating tree branches dragged behind in territorial dominance charges, and of rain dances, in which chimpanzees move or swing in ostensible aesthetic resonance to sudden rains and waterfalls, the crossing of social and physical domains produces temporary abstractions. The noisy racket generated by the kerosene cans becomes the equivalent of the large visually perceived clouds of dust raised by the dragging branches, and the slow motion, kinesthetically expressive vine swinging in front of the waterfall is the abstract equivalent of the endlessly sustained patterned repetition of the visually perceived falling water. Bering (2002) makes this rain dance the nidus of numinous awe (below), yet it also undergoes no further development. There is no rudimentary ape quasi-shamanic trance induction, no systematic search for other still larger branch dragging substitutes.
Person and thing intelligence as separate cognitive domains The cognitive domain of human personal-social intelligence is usually defined in terms of a capacity for taking the role of the other, both in general and towards oneself (Mead, 1934). From infancy we progressively construct a sense of self by means of our kinesthetically mirrored reflections from others. More recent discussions have centered around a related development of theory of mind by which we gradually come to intuit the purposive perspectives of others as potentially distinct from our own (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Its most preliminary form appears as the neonatal and infant facial mirroring games of such centrality to Winnicott (1971) and Meltzoff (2002). This mirroring capacity is based initially on the same visual-kinesthetic cross translations presumably required for the highly variable self-recognition in actual mirrors observed in some higher apes (Gallup, 1977; Swartz & Evans, 1997). In human infancy, however, this visual-kinesthetic cross modal matching is itself crossed with expressive vocalizations by around four months (Legerstee, 1990). Spontaneous cross modal mirroring from infancy strongly supports the earlier views of Rousseau and Shaftesbury that empathy and a core sense of morality is intrinsic in early human development, whatever its ultimate fate (Lawler, 2006). It is argued here that the primary logic of the person domain would be one of completeness-incompleteness. We may later value and strive for consistency in everyday life, and certainly consistency is central to theories of cognitive dissonance, but we also often recognize
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that people who seem fully self consistent (1) are probably not, and (2) seem less fully alive, complete, and genuinely interesting as persons. Very young children respond to others intuitively and immediately as a whole, and are themselves notoriously and delightfully inconsistent. In taking the role of the other in adult interpersonal situations we still immediately intuit a complete view or perspective of the other in that one moment one good enough for now for our own communicative response only to be potentially replaced in the next moment by a completely different intuited context. The creative spontaneity of self and other in dialogue creates open-ended and formally uncompletable sequences of understanding and felt meaning. New interpersonal spaces arise, potentially enclose, and so change their immediately preceding ones in a way illustrated concretely in Lewins (1936) topologies of the life space, more abstractly perhaps in the qualitative mathematics of spaces created by Spencer-Brown (1979), and by some applications of infinite mathematical sets (Monte-Blanco, 1998; Badiou, 2005). If we consider spiritual intelligence as the most abstract adult development of Gardners (1983) personal-interpersonal intelligences (Hunt, 1995b; Emmons, 2000), then we could understand the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus as the full exemplification of the intuitively completed sense of self, while the no-self of Buddha would be the fullest expression of the self of open incompleteness at each respective end of this primary completeness-incompleteness logic of taking the role of the other. Indeed, Mead (1934) used both these paradigmatic figures as his own illustrations of the maximum embodiments of living from the fully spontaneous I, in contrast to the more socially circumscribed and consistent mes. Both Self and Other are ultimately, and alternately, unknowable in both Meads (1934) psychology of the creative, open I and Bubers (1957) ethical primacy of the Thou. Correspondingly, we can locate an initially independent cognitive or epistemological domain of thing/tool intelligence. It is manifested first in infancy in the spontaneous visual-motor cross modal matching involved in play with grasped objects, and in the higher apes through highly variable expressions of a simple tool using intelligence, and in the creative problem solving of Khlers (1926) famous crate-staking chimps. This purely physical cross translation of seen and tactilely manipulated objects is also nascent in neonates, as demonstrated in Kaye and Bowers (1994) research on the differential visual identification of orally palpated objects, and it is the basis of the difficult to teach and variable performances of higher apes on visual-tactile cross
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modal matching tasks, first predicted by Geschwind (1965) (For a summary of this literature see Hunt, 1995a). We could say that the primary logic of a creative thing/tool intelligence is one of consistency-inconsistency. All developed or skilled tool use is based on a perceived analysis of a linear physical causation. Of course by early childhood instrumental tasks are also completed, successfully or not, but here consistency is already presupposed in that determination. Inconsistency of object usage in terms of a specific goal of environmental effectance simply will not work. With designed tools, the form of the hammer dictates its linear sequential usage, its logic of first and subsequent steps, in fixed contrast to a saw or screwdriver. However, the same exclusive logic of causation is also entailed if a rock is to be used for hammering and shaping as opposed to smashing and separating. Different rocks will be chosen accordingly. As will be developed below, the fact that causal tool use, based on successful consistency vs. unsuccessful inconsistency, must on the human level interface with socially shared and often changeable purposes, means that tool use will also become subordinated to the completeness-incompleteness logic of the person domain and, as we will see below, vice versa. There is evidence that these two domains, with their respective primary logics, are not only independent but initially develop separately in infancy (Wellman, 2002). Kuhlmeier et al., (2004) found that five month old infants showed reactive surprise when physical objects moved behind screens and re-emerged in physically discontinuous fashion, but not if persons did the same thing. Baron-Cohen (1997) has suggested that early infantile autism can be understood as a selective failure to develop interpersonal empathic mirroring, while thing/tool manipulations may even be differentially accelerated, as in mechanical obsessions and prodigious linear calculations. Finally, although neo-cortical localization of function in infancy is relatively undifferentiated (Mauer, 1997), there are indications that neonatal mirroring is centered more frontally and temporally, in areas to be later taken over by language (Meltzoff, 2002), while the cross-modal matching of physical dimensions, at least later in childhood and for still later metaphoric usage, is predominantly parietal (Calvert, 2001; Faust & Mashal, 2007), as also originally reported by Geschwind (1965).
Domain fusions in childhood development The subsequent normative development of person and thing knowing can be best understood as involving their progressive fusions, with
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each domain progressively internalized as the inner process of the other. Their differences in predominant intention make each seem more independent of the other than is increasingly the case. In human ontogenesis it is vocalized language itself which may begin this domain fusion and cross referencing. Certainly this is one implication of recent accounts of language development by Carruthers (2002) and Mandler (2004). The earliest language learning consists in interpersonally shared mirroring games based on joint pointing and naming of physical objects by means of physiognomically depictive vocalizations (Werner and Kaplan, 1963). Note that it would be this beginning potential for the fusion of these two cognitive domains that ultimately generates and explains language, rather than the other way around. Indeed, the increasing temporal lobe localization of linguistically structured vocalizations would constitute the anatomical bridge linking the anterior cingulate area central to theory of mind (Gallagher & Frith, 2003) and the parietal areas of cross-modal matching (Calvert, 2001) central to naive physics. Recent research showing significant adult correlations between degrees of frontal-parietal integration and both verbal and spatial forms of intelligence (Jung & Haier, 2007), and with developed meditation techniques (Naghavi & Nyberg, 2005), helps to support such a domain fusion model for both the representational and presentational or expressive intelligences (Langer, 1942; Hunt, 1995a). A more specific line of domain fusion, centered on thing knowing and to be developed more briefly here, is what Piaget (1963) termed early childhood artificialism, also related to magical participation, in which children under five or six tend to regard all objects and settings in nature as crafted by and for human beings. It is closely related to Kelemans (1999) recent concept of promiscous teleology, prototypically illustrated by the first grader who, asked why mountains are pointy, answers so that the dinosaurs can scratch themselves. Here categories from a purpose domain are utilized for the initial understanding of what older children will take as a purely physical and causal reality. In contrast to the present approach, both Piaget and Werner pictured these developmental fusions as residues of a general cognitive undifferentiation destined to disappear and be replaced by a more differentiated and abstract separation of person and thing. Instead, it seems more plausible to follow Vygotskys (1965) view of development as progressive internalization initially modeled on the internalization that shifts an early egocentric speaking of thoughts out loud into a silent inner speech, as the condensed medium for later verbal thought. Accordingly we could say that the
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internalization of promiscous teleology becomes the basis for Heideggers (1927) specifically human at hand (zuhanden) attitude by virtue of which the entirety of the physical environment becomes a potential tool and commodity. The full development of an adult technological orientation and expertise is at least as much about the progressive differentiation of shared purposive thought as it is the utilization and invention of the linear causal mechanisms more outwardly predominant in its realization. A similar Vygotskian internalization model can be applied, here in more detail, to the development of person knowing as a separate logic whose later articulation will depend on the internalizing and subordination of the thing knowing domain as its inner process. Early childhood animism is itself a domain fusion on its way toward a later metaphorically based person knowing. Here phenomena of physical nature, and especially all that moves of its own accord, such as wind, water, sun and moon, are regarded as organically and/or humanly intentional. This can be prototypically illustrated in Werners (1961) example of physiognomic perception in three and four year old children who say poor tired cup for a cup lying on its side, or the fog is whispering to convey a cross modal and cross domain translation of the subtle visual pervasiveness of night fog in terms of an abstracted social quality of human vocalization. Here again the suggestion would be that animism does not disappear to be replaced by a more abstract differentiation, but that the latter is itself made possible by the internalization of childhood animism as the medium for the physical metaphors later applied to the progressive sophistication of the person knowing domain (Hunt, 2005). Lakoff and Johnson (1999), following the earlier suggestions of Arnheim (1969), trace the ubiquity of physical metaphor in language usage to describe the diversity and subtleties of adult feeling (fiery passion, explosive anger, stream of consciousness), as well as the metaphoric origin of separate words for emotion in all languages (the original ang root of anger, anguish, anxiety, meaning a physical narrowing or compression). For Lakoff and Johnson (1999) physical metaphor is not simply necessary for the differentiated description of interpersonal feeling, it is actually constitutive of the form taken by adult feelings (anger as a heated fluid within a column that can rise up, boil over, or explode). Asch and Nerlove (1960) documented the surprisingly slow development of full metaphoric understanding of synaesthetic double function terms like cold, bitter, or soft as applied to persons. This is consistent with an earlier gradual internalization of animism as its now subordinated medium. The specific
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words exclusively available for emotion are too narrow in all languages for the full differentiation of adult feeling without these metaphoric cross-domain applications from thing to person. For adults the widespread physiognomic, synaesthetic, and physical metaphoric bases of interpersonal language remain almost entirely implicit and unnoticed (Marks, 1978). It is such expressively animated forms, however, that allow Kants mountains to be morally inspiring and sublime. The development of a specifically human metacognition especially on its presentational felt meaning or imaginative absorption side (Gendlin, 1962) seems to require a still more abstract, spatial level of physical metaphor, allowing older children to begin to sense and introspect within an ongoing subjective consciousness (Flavell et al., 1993), which then flows and streams, with its own depth, fringe, and open horizon ahead (James, 1890). Piaget (1963) had earlier suggested that animism only fully disappears as the child begins to become metacognitively aware of its own subjective experience at around seven and eight years of age, also the years for Vygotskys internalization of verbal thought as inner speech. For Vygotsky (1965) inner speech then crosses with imagistic thinking, affording an introspectable, saturated sense of felt significance as a higher type of inner activity (p. 91). The phenomenologies of both James (1890) and Husserl (1905) understand our felt sense of an immediately present dimension of lived time, flowing into futural openness, as the externalized face of this metacognitive stream of consciousness. It is this shared metaphorically introspectable openness of inner consciousness and felt duration that makes our time estimates so contingent on degrees of subjective involvement (Hunt, 1995a), and which our creative and more driven endeavors seek to fill and complete (Heidegger, 1927).
Adult development of multiple domain fusions as species specific Forms of Life Adult cognitive and moral-aesthetic capacities, and most if not all of the forms of life that seem unique to humanity, can be understood as still more specific fusions, amalgamations, and partial integrations of our person and thing intelligences, based on their internalizations of the opposite domain as their respective inner processes. The instability and intrinsic conflictedness of some of these species specific amalgamations may also show that no genuine or complete synthesis of these two distinct cognitive domains is possible for us, but only
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diverse lines of interpenetration dominated by one side or the other. The implication will be that we are an unbalanced, only temporarily integrated being, perpetually incomplete, inconsistent, and moving toward the next culturally supported domain fusions. Because inherently persons are not things and things are not persons, human symbolic development drives together domain amalgamations that must remain finally partial and perpetually provisional.
Things as tools and meanings Every thing with physical objects for us already based on multimodality fusions in contrast to the single modality releasing cues of nonsymbolic species is both a potential tool or instrument for multiply emergent purposes and also the outer face of multiple aesthetic and metaphoric significances. These expressive physiognomies are always latent for us in every physical setting, their actual pluralities determined by set and setting. They are always potential even if in the form of flatness, deadness, or hollowness as expressions of the same underlying principle of domain fusion allowing Kants experience of the sublime. A particular tree has its own cluster of potentially expressive metaphors, as inevitably as does a concrete wall, these being latent in the same sense as their similarly emergent usages as instrumental objects of physical manipulation. The maximum integration within the developmental line of a metaphor mediated person domain can be found in the world spiritual and mystical traditions (Hunt, 2006). Here inclusive felt meanings of meaning and purpose in human existence are mediated by the cross culturally common and maximally abstract physical metaphors of light, radiating darkness, heights and depths. These are the core of what Laski (1961) terms the quasi physical sensations/metaphors of ecstasy, as reflected in Eastern meditative chakra energizations, with their synaesthetically fused colors, shapes, and sounds, and in the white light experiences of classical mysticism, which I have interpreted elsewhere as highly abstract synaesthesias (Hunt, 1995a; 2006). Their most immediate evocations indeed come through the nature mysticisms of tribal shamanism, Emerson and Thoreau, and Kants mountains and sunrises sublime (Hunt, 2003). Note that the living light which mediates the fullest of these experiences, as its own taking the role of the other evoking experiences of sacred love and compassion, is precisely the metaphoric transformation and kinesthetic embodiment of this most abstract dimension of physical space itself. Note also that while all cultures seem to mark out some such
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spiritual path for its religious virtuosos (Weber, 1963), the full development of this line of integration is always maximally exclusive and difficult, requiring precisely the sacrifice of alternative competing intelligences. The spiritual path is a maximum integration of mind in the direction of person knowing, but not a total synthesis of mind itself in all its multi-directionality. Correspondingly, we can locate the maximum integration of a primary intelligence of things in modern physics, with mathematics as its instrument. Here again, more briefly and perhaps with more controversy, we can locate the internalized metaphors and abstract analogies of person and metacognitive consciousness that would also operate as its subordinated and guiding template. In particular we have the debate over whether mathematics itself reflects laws and principles external to us or is ultimately an internal reflection of our own mental organization (Penrose, 1997; Lakoff & Nunez, 2000). On the latter model, mathematics would be a formal abstraction from linguistic syntax, with its linear sequences and its if then, and but transformations all ultimately abstracted from a template of purposive movement and its consequences. Finally, in addition to suggestions dating at least from Nietzsche (2006) that Newtonian force is an abstraction from our own purposive motoric effectance, there is the acknowledgment of Niels Bohr (Holton, 1968; Bohr, 1934) that he actually derived his own formulation of the complementarity and uncertainty principles of quantum physics from his earlier reading of James (1890; 1912) on the stream of consciousness, with its alternating transitive and substantive aspects dependent on our introspective attitude (Hunt, 2001). In between these separate lines of spiritual and mathematical representational intelligences, with whatever metaphoric convergences they may prove to have for each other (Hunt, 2006), we find the multiple species specific forms of life in which properties of the physical environment are directly made over for our aesthetic and moral purposes. Certainly we could include here music and art, where properties of the physical order are utilized in terms of their patterned expressions. Although suitably rewarded chimpanzees (and elephants) can be taught to paint, they show no sustained interest in their work after it is finished and their styles undergo no systematic development. Cooking belongs here as well, by which plants and the dead bodies of game are transformed in terms of a complex aesthetics of taste which undergoes progressive and continual refinements in all cultures. Currency and coinage can be added as well, by which specially created physical forms are utilized to measure social value and
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power. Shelter and dwelling, as further developed in architecture, and clothing, as both decorative and itself a measure of social standing, are further adaptations and subordinations of a manipulative thing intelligence to the person domain. Finally we can add the domain fusions of dance and sport, Gardners kinesthetic intelligences, in which the purposive transformations of body movement are directly pitted against the steady resistance of physical gravity and bodily limitation. As intelligent as chimpanzees are, they do not show any sustained interest in measuring their bodies against the resistances of a soccer ball and the precisely restrictive rules of its play. In terms of what follows, it is important that all our species-specific domain fusions appear as sustained forms of life that engender a permanent sense of fascination and even bliss in their more serious participants. Each is considered an art and aesthetic in its own right. For the anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1966) nonliterate tribal mythologies are complex classification grids of multiply opposed opposites that systematically mix human and physical cognitive domains. Boyer & Ramble (2001), following the earlier basic principles of Piaget and Werner, consider these as domain violations, which misses that for Levi-Strauss these mythologies are intentionally crafted in order to understand human nature itself and its insoluble personal and social tensions via metaphoric dimensions that cross and utilize the realms of physical nature, plants, and animals. The further point here is that human nature entails the actual living out of these domain crossings as species specific fusions including the above forms of life that do separate humanity from all other species.
Persons as meanings and tools Persons are both empathically understood as ones like us and as potential tools for not just social coercion but direct physical manipulation. The abstract development of the first leads toward integrated ethical systems and codes, as in Kants categorical imperative (Lawler, 2006), and is traditionally expressed in the arts and humanities. The modern novel is a sustained inquiry into this domain, making full and necessary use of metaphoric mirrorings as above. The second line of development, persons as instruments and tools, leads us toward all those species-specific and seemingly intrinsic forms of life that fully developed ethical systems in the modern West rightly regard as monstrous while often falsely labelling them animalistic. Thus we have the steady historical development of the domain fusion of weaponry through which people are slaughtered in the
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manner of hunted animals, but in the service of a purposive territoriality and social power. Meanwhile physical torture, also cross culturally and historically ubiquitous, involves the slow physical dismantling of the persons purposive moral world (Scarry, 1985), by means of technologies sometimes derived from animal butchery and cooking, sometimes from applied physics. The final form of life to be considered in which persons are transformed into things, here more precisely as tools more than things, is slavery. Slavery has proven historically universal whenever a society becomes sufficiently complex or extended to permit it. In contrast to Hegel (1807), slavery is less a limited stage of history in the world civilizations, than a mechanism that undergoes successive refinements. Witness our very post-modern digital enslavements, bureaucratically downloading tasks once assigned to real others and mainlining our endless e-mail and blackberries. More gravely, a society in which the vast majority of its inhabitants are one or two months away from homelessness, along with the steady erosion of worker rights and social safety nets in a globalizing world economy, is often termed one of wage slavery. At least on the better slave plantations one was mostly assured, on purely pragmatic grounds, of food, lodging, and some medical care. Its modern sublimation demands almost as much, but leaves out that minimum expectable security. The ultimate force and compulsion behind this mentality may be now emerging as a planetary wide single world history, in which globalizing corporations and their massively overcompensated CEOs and effectively lobbied politicians are literally willing to destroy the viability of the earth itself for future generations for the sake of continued quarterly profit margins. From the perspective of systems theory the modern globalizing crisis is indeed an example of an ultra-complex economic downward control or slaving (Kelso, 1995). As above, each of these domain fusions has its own compelling fascination, here more in the sense of an uncanniness and strangeness as we contemplate their fuller consequences. Of course Kant (1790) and Buber (1957) are right that the core of moral evil is treating persons merely as means rather than as intrinsically valued ends in themselves. But the transformation of persons into nothing other than means, both as economic tools and as the physical objects of torture and murder, is also inevitable and intrinsic to our species. Heideggers comment that the Nazi death camps manufactured mass death by means of the same uncanny technologies that modern chicken factories use to manufacture food (Safranski, 1998) is both notorious and accurate. Certainly, as we are seeing with purely materialist
45
philosophies and societal values, the application of a thing based instrumental and objective logic to the personal spheres of the ethical is withering and desiccating in its effects. But it is species specific and defining. It appears that the most we can do with this second grouping of intrinsic domain amalgamations, from the perspective of systematic ethics, is to identify their points of inward juxtaposition and continuously seek to render them as separated and distinct as historically changing circumstances will permit. The very struggle involved in order to fully understand and live the person centered, empathic ethical systems of the major world civilizations attests to a continuous, ever more complex pull of these person-as-tool domain fusions. Yet to paraphrase James (1902) all that we do in these objective forms of life must also pass through our personal intelligences, and this with life long consequence.
Numinous-Uncanny Experience as the Maximum Expression of Domain Juxtaposition: The Inner Engine of a Species-Specific Capacity for Novelty
Kants analysis of the sublime received its fullest later development in Rudolf Ottos (1923) phenomenology of what he termed numinous experience, as the spontaneous cross cultural core of mystical/spiritual experience. On Ottos view the different religions schematize these experiences in terms of their own cultural traditions, as attempts at their immediate expression in categories understandable for that time and place. In fact, his full continuum of these spontaneous felt experiences is considerably broader in application and implication than the sense of the sacred or sublime alone. Numinous feeling begins with a sense of radical dependency, as something that seizes and compels ones fascinated attention, more akin to it has you rather than you having it. Its developing phenomenology then includes feelings of awe, ineffable portent, wonder, and fascination. Its lower forms involve more a sense of the uncanny, as a strangeness, eeriness, or sense of the grotesque, with an awe shading into a more overt dread. The noetic or cognitive object of the full numinous is felt as an initially nonverbal contact with something transcendent, all encompassing, and wholly other. In its highest expression this is the core sense of the sacred and holy. As with the domain juxtaposition central to Kants sublime, the numinous is mediated by physical metaphors abstracted from the most fundamental
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thing dimensions of spatial perception light, darkness, flow, horizonal openness, heights, and depths. Influenced by Kant, Otto understands the numinous as an apriori category for the intrinsic unknown and mysterious. We could take it as an abstract, symbolically driven form of the organismic orientation response to pure novelty. It develops on the human level far beyond curiosity motivation as a general organismic motivation and reinforcer. The inherent novelty of a domain juxtaposition/collision of two logically separate symbolic mentalities creates an abstract dynamism permanently oriented to the immense range for us of all that thereby has the capacity to fascinate. As such, numinous-uncanny feeling is, among other things, at the core of all culture, and we can see its centrality not only to religion and major art, but also to modern science in the sense of the wonder, fascination, and awe described by Einstein and others in the face of our wholly other modern physical cosmology with its sudden expansion out of singularity and quantum indeterminacies (see also Hunt, 2006). However, the separate dimensions of Ottos numinous extend much wider than the higher forms of culture, since we can also find the events of serial killing, war, and torture to be weirdly and uncannily fascinating and full of awe. Indeed its juxtapositions and fusions of cognitive domains are clearest with its lower manifestations as the sense of the uncanny, which the psychiatrist H.S. Sullivan (1953) understood as the characteristic emotion of schizophrenic onset. The schizophrenic concretization of emotional metaphors is associated with a hyper-reflexive introspective sensitization to ones own metacognitive self awareness as bizarre physical forces and energies, in this most tragic and terrifying form of domain collision (Sass, 1992; Hunt, 1995a). Freud (1919), in his essay The Uncanny, describes the sense of eeriness, strangeness, and fascinated dread emerging from ghost and horror stories as similarly based on the direct crossing of the categories of person/purpose and physical thing. He divides these crossings into three subtypes: (1) the magical or omnipotent control of mind over matter, as in sorcery and parapsychological events, including synchronously meaningful juxtapositions of personal and physical realities, (2) physical objects as alive and imbued with human or animal-like intelligence the very stuff of animism and tribal totemisms, (3) persons transformed into mechanical and or purely physical objects including not only malign robots and zombies, but bodily mutilation, and death itself in the form of our shock and strange disquiet before the dead human body. Some proto-symbolic species show prolonged grieving and nurturant behaviours towards the
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recently dead, but only we bury, burn, elevate in tree platforms, or in ancient Tibet personally dismember the dead, and then protect against and/or solicit their ghostly re-visitings. Bergson (1900) offers a closely related analysis of humour and the comic in terms of a direct crossing of persons and things, but here in social situations with an initial absence of strong emotion. We thus find ourselves laughing when people give the impression of mechanism, ranging from calling attention to physicality itself as in slapstick, to more subtle expressions of a thing-like motoric and mental rigidity, and automatic rule following. Correspondingly, the core of the sense of tragedy, with its own strong sense of the uncanny, is of a person full of spontaneous vitality and brilliance following a path of blind automatic repetition, Freuds repetition compulsion. This becomes a logic of pure consistency, the linear logic of physical things, leading to the point where that promise has been systematically destroyed. The point here is that the human mind systematically crosses the domains of person and thing and that their most directly felt crossings are exactly what elicit this wider continuum of the sublime, numinous, and uncanny and indeed tragic and comic in short the sustained fascination that drives and compels all of the above species specific forms of life. The uncanny-numinous, in its various shadings, is about anything that truly fascinates us, and ultimately what fascinates us are domain crossings and fusions. These are in turn the flash points for all forms of culturally mediated forms of creativity. We can further understand the ambiguity of these crossings in and as human life in terms of a re-casting of the later William James on what he terms pure experience. For the later James (1911; 1912) this room gets counted twice over, as the personal thisness of our thought of the room, and as the whatness of a more objective, instrumental room thought of. Yet in terms of the preceding discussion, both personal thisness and physical whatness, whose juxtaposition and collision is potentially emergent in and as any human event, already contain the other as their internalized and subordinated process. As adults neither domain can encompass the other, since its supporting process is based on the opposed logic the consistency/ inconsistency of physical metaphor supporting and articulating the incompleteness/completeness of person knowing, and the completeness/incompleteness of intention and purpose guiding all explicitly constructed mechanisms and tool based consistencies. The outward juxtapositions/fusions of the domains of person and thing are thus complex, multi-level, and intrinsically open-ended.
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The more explicitly felt these domain crossings become, the more, in the present view, James third category of thatness or pure experience appears as the expression of the fascination emerging between and around them. For the later James pure experience, as for Heidegger later, is the immediate sense of isness, thatness, or existence per se. The just that or uniqueness of each situation is akin, I would suggest, to the suchness of each moment in Zen Buddhism (Blofeld, 1962), and is the occasion for the capacity for sustained wonder and fascination that defines us. The later Heidegger (2006) similarly speaks of Being-experience as latent and potential in all human situations, arising as the in-between within and around all events. Heidegger (1994) explicitly identifies this experience of Being with Ottos numinous. In its fullness, it appears as wonder, awe, and fascination. Where lost or occluded, as in his understanding of a secularized modernity, it appears as a sense of alienation and implacable strangeness (Heidegger, 2006). This is the estrangement, nausea, and revulsion so central to Sartre (1953), and which for Heidegger underlies our artificial conceptual separations of subject and object, mind and body.4
Conclusion
The collision of incommensurable yet inseparable cognitive domains means that essentially any event can become for us fascinating, compelling, numinous, and/or strange. This is the hole at the center of all specifically human experience, pulling us in, up, or down, and into our highest and lowest potentialities until the form of life thus engaged finally secularizes, satiates, and/or disenchants. The cognitive
[4]
The Cartesan dichotomy of mind and body, taking the latter as part of the purely material domain rather than as itself the purposive manifestation of Leibnizs basic (living) monads, has become a perhaps specifically Western expression of a purely conceptual and so alienated domain collision. More pragmatically, James (1912) and Merleau-Ponty (1968) talk of the body itself being taken twice over, both as a lived purposive thisness and as a material whatness subject to gravity and other purely physical limitations (Merleau-Pontys chiasm). Here our simple sense of surprise at the weirdly excessive pain of a stubbed toe pushes us toward the temporary alienation that were it to become chronic would amount to a clinical depersonalization and schizoid detachment. The metaphysical concept of a body-mind dualism creates its own artificial version of such an estrangement. From Descartes through Locke and Hume this led to the supposed mystery of how I, here defined as disembodied mind or spirit, can move my arm, as matter (Lawler, 2006). The sense of estranged perplexity that can be induced over such artificial puzzlement is best reconciled when we realize we are not similarly puzzled over how a dog or cat can move its legs. Mainstream Western philosophy, by translating Platonic/Christian spirit into mind, and animal soul into literal matter, induced its own artificial, quasi-diagnosable version of domain collision, which once evoked became permanently fascinating to later analytic philosophies.
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domains of person and thing collide and fuse. They cannot fully synthesize or fully separate, but rather must partially integrate along the multiple lines of our multiple intelligences and species specific forms of life. Their enforced crossings generate the abstract capacity that differentiates us from the other proto-symbolic species on this planet, since any dimensions linking logically incommensurable domains must select and abstract from each in a creatively emergent fashion. These domains then undergo partial fusions/integrations ever short of any completed synthesis. The categories of person and thing do divide into each other, but with infinite, perpetually fascinating remainders. We are accordingly rendered permanently incomplete, permanently inconsistent. We arrive then at a cognitive and existential version of those traditional religious/mythological views of human beings as intrinsically unfinished and/or tragically flawed.5 All specifically human forms of life thereby exemplify something like a social-psychological version of Gdels mathematical incompleteness theorem, by which the consistency and completeness of formal systems are potentially inversely related at any point in their subsequent articulation, and so rendering all such systems ultimately open and unfinishable (Bronowski, 1966; Goldstein, 2005). Given that the primary logic of the person domain is completeness-incompleteness and the primary logic of the tool domain is consistencyinconsistency, with each then becoming the subordinated, internalized process for the development of the other, Gdels theorem becomes the most abstract formulation of a domain fusion model of the human mind.6 It is we who are uncanny, and only occasionally sublime. We are now uncanny to ourselves on a planet wide basis all this mighty
It has come to my attention that the present discussion of human nature as forms of life partly fusing but never fully synthesizing theory of mind and naive physics bears some similarity to Sartres (1953) distinction between our human being for itself and a vast nonconscious being-in itself, and their perpetually unbalanced and failed synthesis. The difference seems to be that the fusions/collisions of person and thing/tool domains under discussion here are occurring within Sartres for itself. The in-itself, which sadly evoked for Sartre only a nausea and estrangement in the face of Being as such, would here be emergent within the for-itself as the fuller sense of thatness or being including wonder, fascination, and numinous mystery as well as the uncanny and strange. It would arise through the directly felt juxtaposition of James personal thisness and material whatness. As with Sartre, but on this different basis, being-experience overflows all specifiable knowledge and emerges as an uncompleteable hiatus or hole at the center of human experience, which certainly unbalances, but can also inspire and at least partially redeem. [6] To the extent that, with Lakoff and Nunez (2000), formal systems of mathematics are ultimately derived from the spatial metaphors in all human intelligence, Gdels theorem would be the maximally abstracted consequence of a domain fusion model.
[5]
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purpose in collision with the earth itself. We are both the source and object of this response. Kants sublime becomes the model for a much broader portrayal of human nature and one less optimistic than he intended. It offers a theoretical explanation for the multiple forms of life that are specific to us. Our unique ontology is this more general juxtaposition of the simultaneously incommensurable and inseparable cognitive domains of person and thing present within all that we do. It mandates our partial integrations and entails our ultimate unbalance since a complete synthesis of developmental lines and forms of life remains supersensible and unachievable. Historically and culturally we can at best tilt back and forth between eras of relative integration and eras, such as our own, of more radically open ended and unpredictable excess and imbalance religious, technological, economic. This unexpected extension of Kants sublime as a general anthropology of human nature illuminates us at our highest in the most truly sublime of our ethics, spiritualities, and artistic traditions; in our most endearingly engaged collections of what fascinates be it coins, antique clocks, or chestnuts; and in those equally compelling fusions of person as things that find us at our most very, very dangerous. What we are left with then is a human sciences restatement of the classical tensions between the domains of matter and spirit, with no completed synthesis possible across their multiple amalgams, along with a very traditional conclusion concerning the perpetual necessity of choice.
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Paper received November 2008; revised February 2009

A Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Human Consciousness - Harry Hunt

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Harry T.

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

THEORY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Paper received November 2008; revised February 2009

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