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ABSTRACT
This essay describes a long-standing conceptual impasse regarding the ontological status of “mind” at least since the time of Descartes. That impasse has roots in a mind–body dualism that casts the mind as an “ethereal substance,” or nonphysical entity located somewhere in the brain that translates sense data into thoughts-qua-representations, which then move the body accordingly. This outlook lost traction toward the end of the 20th century. However, a newly emboldened preoccupation with certain technological apparatuses has directed attention back onto the biological substrate of the brain. This article argues that this more purely physicalist stance that seeks to relocate representational features of memory, cognition, and consciousness in the brain confuses efforts to understand the nature of mind. After briefly describing representationalist and nonrepresentionalist theories of mind, a more nuanced, “nonlocalized,” or “extended representionalism” is proffered. This outlook, which was promoted by Gregory Bateson, J. J. Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and other iconoclastic thinkers of the mid-20th century, is gathering legitimacy in the early 21st. The re-emergence and utility of this is then discussed as a conceptual fix to the localized, and much more reductive, representational theories now in vogue.
Notes
* This essay is an elaboration on Robert C. MacDougall, “Mapping the Mind: A Techno-Philosophical Probe,” Explorations in Media Ecology 15, no. 2 (2016): 173–201.
1 Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
2 Despite the “cultural,” “linguistic,” and “cybernetic” turns of the 1970s and 1980s, including the injection of ethnographic investigative techniques inspired by Malinowski, Boas, Mead, Bateson, and other pioneers of traditional anthropological fieldwork, communication researchers in the main continued to rely heavily on the soft-science of correlation that seems rooted in a representational theory of mind. The correlative approach of social science comprises a mix of quantitative analytical methods and attitude/opinion-based data-gathering techniques. However, most social scientific and humanistic scholars tend to take for granted the notion that individuals relay information to researchers that describe the contents of their mind-brains. This is a core assumption of the orthodox representational theory of mind.
3 These technologies, and the formalized procedures accompanying them, have resulted in a condensation of theories, methods, and findings. The tools humans invent and build have always been seductive. Their ability to direct attention and prefigure perceptions toward narrow ends seems almost tyrannical. Given the focus on correlations between purported intentional states and observable behaviors, we may discover that the kind of information generated after processing vast, longitudinal data sweeps will probably end up being of the greatest utility in predicting and even triggering consumer behavior, and not much else. For example, one significant concern with the big-data movement is that, while indeed tracking personal data sets, big-data initiatives objectify this information to create massive, aggregated data sets used to capture the attention and/or money of something we might dub “probabilistic fiduciary persons.”
4 David Pitt, “Mental Representation,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last revised December 11, 2012, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-representation/.
5 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1985), 84.
6 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin, 2009).
7 After all, communication (boiled down, for the moment, to describe the general study of symbolic exchange to create shared meaning) stands at the heart of the human condition. A clearer and fuller understanding of these processes may require a nonrepresentational and less localized or individualized (i.e., more ecological or systemic) view of human mind and cognition. The foundation is already in place given that the most basic unit of analysis in communication studies is the dyad. The analysis of small groups and, with mass- and computer-mediated communication, larger groups, fills out the scope of our investigations. Indeed, we have always been dealing with systems when we are engaged, consciously or otherwise, in communication. One consequence of the shift from a representational to nonrepresentational theory of mind is that concepts such as “inner dialogues” and “self-talk,” and the entire realm of “intrapersonal communication” and other ideas informed by traditional research and theorizing in the field of psychology could begin to lose traction in the field of communication. A much more holistic, ecological, or systemic outlook seems necessary at this stage in the game.
8 Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924).
9 Hayden Lorimer, “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-than-Representational,’” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 1 (2005): 83–94.
10 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); James Jerome Gibson, An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1979); McLuhan, Understanding Media.
11 Phillip Vannini, “Non-representational Theory and Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research,” last modified February 5, 2017. http://www.academia.edu/5217885/Nonrepresentational_Theory_and_Methodologies_Re-envisioning_Research.
12 Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
13 Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 316.
14 Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 19.
15 Mind is cast here as both effect and effector, an active “information space,” and, by extension, a “cultural/control space” that emerges over time as the cognitive-qua-sensory apparatus extends out into the world, instantiated in an amorphous collection of technological artifacts and systems. A “mobile media mind” is one way to describe many minds roaming the world today. The careful observer should notice how various artifacts and systems progressively constitute de facto features of the total, surrounding environment that is functionally bootstrapping human minds today. These do a lot of the navigating, comparing, categorizing, and thinking for the humans intertwined with those artifacts and systems.
16 Interestingly, even the big-data movement that offers its massive outputs for researchers and practitioners in and out of academe is confusing matters (matters of mind, of society and culture, of politics, etc.). These and other technological artifacts are foisting a kind of contextual structure onto our investigations that often confuses objects and levels of analysis because it prompts a conflation between brains and minds. While our mechanical understanding of injuries sustained, some processes associated with debilitation and breakdown, and the proper functioning of the human brain may be enhanced by these new initiatives, it is not at all clear that we are enhancing our understanding of human minds.
17 Walter J. Ong, Language and the Human Sensorium: The Presence of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). Ong's concept is in keeping with Bateson's notion that minds or mental systems are aggregates of interacting parts and with cognitive philosopher Andy Clark's suggestion that mind is an extended mental system that constitutes much more than the brain and has probably never been confined to “skin and skull,” (Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003]).
18 Paul Levinson, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium (London: Routledge, 1999); Robert C. MacDougall, ed., Drugs and Media: New Perspectives on Communication, Consumption, and Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 2011); Digination: Identity, Organization, and Public Life in the Age of Small Digital Devices and Big Digital Domains (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2012).
19 Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart, “Media Grammars, Generations, and Media Gaps,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2, no. 1 (1985): 34.
20 However, persons habituated to the near constant recontextualization and re-embodiment that is part and parcel of digital communication forms will diverge from their more purely oral counterparts in terms of their willingness and/or ability to attend to embodied (F2F) contexts. While there are always exceptions and certainly some qualifications to obtain, the emergence of the FOMO (fear of missing out) phenomenon is one manifestation that accompanies other predictable habits and practices of the “mobile media mind,” including communicative/experiential disconnects, discontinuities, and perturbations during shifts between fully embodied contexts and partially embodied or almost entirely disembodied mediated contexts.
21 Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, “The New Languages,” Chicago Review 10, no. 1 (1956): 45–52.
22 While the original AAP restrictions were empirically informed, little or no science seems to have been involved in the decision to open the proverbial floodgates. It appears to have been more of a convenience, a pragmatic decision to reduce the mounting pressure pediatricians are reporting, to ease up on the rules in the face of ubiquitous screens. However, this recent development will likely be remembered as an important bifurcation point, a cultural moment or collective decision point that deserved closer scrutiny. This essay lays out some of the reasons we should be better attending to the patterns (and tacit prescriptions) of our everyday media use, and the tools and methods employed in our efforts to understand the sociopolitical influences and effects of such prescriptions.
23 The different ratios and tensions along the material–immaterial dimension render human beings especially vulnerable to external control. Remote control and control-at-a-distance have always been on a two-way street. To be sure, the human user is also used. The material–immaterial is a spectrum along which human beings sometimes find themselves going from using particular tools for their own, specific purposes, to being utilized by tools and systems for purposes other than their own. But in order to understand this ontologically peculiar state of affairs, one must be brutally honest when engaging in any self-assessments regarding the ways things and ideas do much to govern different aspects of thought and action.
24 Seth Borenstein and Jack Gillum, “‘Anonymized’ Credit Card Data Not So Anonymous, Study Shows,” US News, January 29, 2015, https://www.usnews.com/news/science/news/articles/2015/01/29/anonymized-credit-card-data-not-so-anonymous-study-shows. This lends new meaning to the Gen-Y notion of Too Much Information (TMI). In a related story, science historian George Dyson highlights a time when he was invited to the Google Complex recounting a poignant remark made by his host: “‘We are not scanning all those books to be read by people . . . we are scanning them to be read by an AI”’ (“Turing's Cathedral,” Edge, October 23, 2005, https://www.edge.org/conversation/turing-39s-cathedral).
25 Murray Shanahan, The Technological Singularity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
26 Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (New York: Bantam, 1982).
27 In the foreword to Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mary Catherine Bateson nicely encapsulates her father's theory of mind: “[A] mental system was for Gregory one with a capacity to process and respond to information in self-corrective ways, a characteristic of living systems from cells to forests to civilizations. Now he expanded that characterization into a list of defining criteria for mind. It becomes clear that a mind is composed of multiple material parts, the arrangements of which allow for process and pattern. Mind is thus not separable from its material base, and traditional dualisms separating mind from body or mind from matter are erroneous. A mind can include nonliving elements as well as multiple organisms, may function for brief as well as expanded periods, is not necessarily defined by a boundary such as an envelope of skin, and consciousness, if present at all, is always only partial. This emphasis on mental systems as including more than single organisms leads Gregory to the insistence that the unit of survival is always organism and environment (x–xi original emphasis).
28 Concerning our continued moves toward an enveloping digital world, the idea was implied nearly 30 years ago in ubiquitous computing, or “UbiComp,” a concept put forward by Xerox PARC's Mark Weiser. Interestingly, Weiser did not suggest a rigid distinction between the social, or human, and the technological. However, so much of the current conversation on the matter, and virtually all of the advertising, marketing, and promotional messaging suggests how these tools do things for (not also to and with) us. And here again we see the glimmerings of a neutral theory of technology. “UbiComp” describes an ongoing process that builds out an infrastructure that may also be inadvertently setting the stage for the von Neumann/Kurzweil Singularity that would, presumably, mark a total collapse or implosion of the material/immaterial (materiality), past/future (temporal), local/distal (spatial), and biological/technological dimensions. It certainly is becoming difficult to discriminate between our biological organism and our technological/digital appendages in many aspects of daily life. An increasing proportion of the information, memory, vision, hearing, and other central and peripheral components of perception and sense-making are no longer in us, or “on board.” This fact alone makes it difficult to delimit the sites and sources of intention and action today, not to mention the central locus of mind. We are riding the slippery slope: a digitally signed mortgage agreement, a persistent Facebook page or LinkedIn profile, automatic spelling and grammar correction, GPS navigation, a collision-avoidance system stepping into play, our intimate relationships with Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, a signal sent back to earth across the solar system, and the list continues to unfold.
29 James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
30 Consider the discovery of DNA. This organic physical structure inspired a whole new way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the natural order of things. Given the substantial overlap in genetic material constituting entities apparently as distinct as human beings and cobs of corn, a leveling effect was one inevitable consequence of Francis Crick and James Watson's momentous discovery. Arguably, our awareness and developing knowledge of DNA as a kind of master information molecule has also prompted a reification of the notion of the human animal as a programable, computational object. The invention of the integrated circuit and programable microchip in the late 1950s and the early 1960s further solidified the notion of the programable being and opened up the possibility of actually integrating humans and machines in some (hopefully) mutually beneficial ways. The Internet of Things is perhaps the latest manifestations of that standing promise. Of course, our “nature” is always changing whether one subscribes to traditional genetic or epigenetic accounts of evolution. And the analogs are everywhere.
For example, both the North American and Eurasian beaver builds dams. As some evolutionary biologists (Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982]) and philosophers (Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs) suggest, these physical structures should be counted as part of an animal's genotype (the genetic coding that, presumably, underwrites such instinctual activity) and its “extended phenotype” (the dam as an extended or additional component of the physical size, shape, and other potent causal properties of the beaver-in-the-world). Anthills, cricket signaling cavities, termite cathedrals, fox borrows, bird/squirrel nests (all with varying degrees of permanence or fixity) can be delimited in similar fashion. Considered along parallel lines, our relationship with the automobile represents a potent extension of the human phenotype. And this should inspire us to inspect the other end of the “biological–technological” dimension as well.
31 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967).
32 While he did not venture into this territory before his death in 1980, the wider analysis that Bateson promoted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind opens up a vista where gene therapies, nanotechnology, space probes, space shuttles, and space stations could be rightly considered physical extensions of humans too. Although that is what McLuhan was getting at, we should remain aware of the scope and reach of such innovations. While such arguments may become tenable over time as the lines continue to blur, for now at least, this manner of speaking does not help us understand the practical significance and impacts of our everyday biological–technological interminglings and extensions.
33 Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, Take Today: Executive as Dropout (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
34 George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 10.
35 We have reached a point of diminishing returns with our traditional concepts and methods. It is time to revisit and reassess so much of that received knowledge. We may come to find, for instance, that “intrapersonal communication” is a phantom, and that the time-honored distinction between intrapersonal and interpersonal communication processes does us a disservice, with the productive possibilities of an eventual subsumption of the intrapersonal into the interpersonal and transpersonal. Marvin Minsky puts the matter plainly enough: “[J]ust as Science forced us to accept the fact that what we think are single things—like rocks or mice or clouds—must sometimes be regarded as complicated other kinds of structures, we’ll simply have to understand that Self, too, is no ‘elementary particle,’ but an extremely complicated construction” (“Why People Think Computers Can’t,” AI Magazine 3, no. 4 [1982]: 2). An inconvenient truth to be sure; Minsky, like Bateson, thought of this as kind a necessary fiction. Indeed, taking Minsky's caveat to heart would challenge the autonomy or “sovereignty” of some traditional disciplines, such as psychology, and certainly more reductive and specialized areas of enquiry, such as neuroscience. Accepting the theory of mind argued for in this essay also requires that we let go of our anthropocentric chauvanisms and biases.
36 Graham Harman, Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2003). Harman's insistence that we take seriously the “autonomy of objects” is an important step toward understanding the role things play in human experience and in the make-up of mind. Harman's perspective aligns in some important ways with Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan's “tetradic” perspective on technology, which accepts the legitimacy of intentional human aims and interests encoded into technological innovations by designers and engineers (the “enhancement” quadrant of the tetrad), and also points to the unintended effects and side effects of technologies as part of their largely independent unfolding in a technologically inflected human lifeworld (the “reversal” and “retrieval” quadrants) (Laws of the Media: The New Science [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988]).
37 Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs.