Humanness: Certainly, we know we exist. We breathe, our hearts beat. We can see, hear, feel, smell, and touch the world. But inside, we think.
Rene Decartes’s philosophical point of humanness,
“cogito, ergo sum” or Latin for: “I think, therefore I am”
Decartes (Discourse on Method, 1637) was the first to record the common experience of thinking (or cognition), which is a kind of existence that is separate from the world we sense and see. Somehow, according to Decartes, thinking demonstrates humanness. We explore thinking in this entry.
Lyle Lovett wrote the following words to the song, “In my own mind.”
Get up in the mornin
Drink a cup a coffee
Look out of the window
Try to get it started
Turn it all over
Plow it all under
Plant em Springtime
Pick em in the summer
I live in my own mind
Ain’t nothin but a good time
No rain just sunshine
Out here in my own mind
“I live in my own mind.” In fact, your mind is a fully self-contained cognitive world. If it’s raining outside, it can be sunny in your own mind. You shape experience through your own mind by way of thoughts.
The brain is an instrument of the mind. Encased in a bony skull, the brain acts and reacts to the world through bodily actions including sensations, perception and movement. Philosophers and psychologists alike argue (See Andy Clark, a contemporary philosopher from Edinburgh, Scotland) that existence occurs inside our head. The brain itself, never actually touches or sees anything directly, it all happens through senses, perception, and bodily actions. The mind reacting and acting through the body. The body, an instrument of the mind.
Clark coined the idea of the “Extended Mind” to capture the phenomenon. Below is an excerpt from the New Yorker, where Clark expanded on his point of view.
INGA and OTTO
“Consider a woman named Inga, who wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She consults her memory, recalls that the museum is on Fifty-third Street, and off she goes. Now consider Otto, an Alzheimer’s patient. Otto carries a notebook with him everywhere, in which he writes down information that he thinks he’ll need. His memory is quite bad now, so he uses the notebook constantly, looking up facts or jotting down new ones. One day, he, too, decides to go to MoMA, and, knowing that his notebook contains the address, he looks it up.
Before Inga consulted her memory or Otto his notebook, neither one of them had the address “Fifty-third Street” consciously in mind; but both would have said, if asked, that they knew where the museum was—in the way that if you ask someone if she knows the time she will say yes, and then look at her watch. So what’s the difference? You might say that, whereas Inga always has access to her memory, Otto doesn’t always have access to his notebook. He doesn’t bring it into the shower, and can’t read it in the dark. But Inga doesn’t always have access to her memory, either—she doesn’t when she’s asleep, or drunk.
One problem with the Otto-Inga example is that it can suggest that a mind becomes extended only when the ordinary brain isn’t working quite right and needs a supplement—something like a hearing aid for cognition. This, in turn, suggests that a person whose mind is inextricably linked to devices must be a medical patient or else a rare, strange, hybrid creature out of science fiction—a cyborg. But in fact, Clark argues that we are all cyborgs, in a way. Without stimuli from the world, an infant could not learn to hear or see. The brain, a dynamic organ, develops and rewires itself in response to the environment.
WHAT IS HUMANNESS?
What is Humanness? Is it, as Andy Clark surmises, an extension of the brain?
Is the brain the source of our humanness?
A good question. The answer is elusive because it requires that we define more precisely what we mean by the brain and how the brain is both separate and the same as the mind.
It was Galen of Pergamon, 129AD, a prominent Greek physician (along with Aristotle) who asserted that that the heart was the origin of emotion. The heart, in Galen’s view, was also the soul. This idea became known as the cardiocentric hypothesis, a term passed down from ancient Egypt where the view at that time was that the heart was where the mind existed (as well as the soul). Aware of this feature, the Egyptians in human mummification, took great care that the heart always remained in the body when other organs were removed. The cardiocentric hypothesis proliferated in the 13th Century and beyond because early anatomical work at that time pointed to the fact that all circulatory processes in the human body centered around the heart. So, the heart seemed the primary organ for wholistic bodily function including thinking and reasoning.
Over time, with further advances in the field of anatomy and medical sciences, it was eventually realized that the heart has almost nothing to do with thinking and reasoning. Today, it would be ludicrous to entertain such an idea, just as crazy as asserting that the earth is a flat disc and the center of the universe. But, is it that crazy to postulate that the heart thinks, feels, and reasons? As the story goes on, I will suggest that in an interconnected, but limited way, the heart does, indeed, think. Just like every organ and cell in the body thinks, independently and as part of a body collective.
But, more background is needed before you can appreciate this 21st Century idea.
Does our humanness come from the heart or any other anatomical structure such as the brain?
IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN
Recall the Scarecrow from the “Wizard of Oz.” My favorite song in this show is the Scarecrow singing, “If I only had a brain…”. Think about this song, hum it to yourself. You will notice that the image comes alive in your brain/mind/soul or whatever. This is your brain re-creating the nearly full memory of your personal encounter with the Wizard of Oz television show or play. It underscores just how powerful the brain is to our phenomenological world.
The Scarecrow, as the story goes, is bewildered because he feels inadequate. It’s not because he doesn’t actually have a brain, he just feels inadequate and has athropomorphized this inadequacy into an anatomical structure (no brain). Who knows how he got this idea, but it is his point of view when Dorothy (along with Toto) arrives as she’s traveling along the Yellow Brick Road.
Dorothy understands that, in reality, the Scarecrow does have a brain. Else, how could he sing and dance and act in these ways? Regardless, the Scarecrow is sad because he doesn’t “BELIEVE” he has a brain.
What is the source of the Scarecrow’s humanness?
The story moves on and eventually the group ends up encountering the Wizard of Oz where the Wizard gives the Scarecrow a tool, it’s not a brain, it’s a diploma, from a school or university that attests to the Scarecrow’s ability to think. This tool, psychically re-connecting or reminding the Scarecrow that he’s always had a brain, and the Scarecrow now believes he has a brain and then acts accordingly, solving problem after problem that helps the story move along.
There is a lot of depth to this story. For example, does humanness come from within or from without? Is it an extension of the brain (the extended mind), or is it what people give to us as social feedback (a diploma) that we have a brain. The term here is “Collective Consciousness.” This is important to introduce at this juncture. Our humanness is not solely our individuality, although humanness is part of the individual. Rather, humanness is a larger construct of interconnection with the human species. We are a piece of a larger collective (or hive) of others. Humanness is, therefore, an interaction of ourselves and our internal world which comes alive when we are linked-in or connected to the larger collective of humanity.
If left alone for years on a desert island, Would you retain your humanness? You wouldn’t talk or interact with others? Likely, you would become just another animal on the island with no way to interact or catalyze yourself into a collective consciousness. Would you simply be a primitive singular being, flesh and blood, living absolutely in the present with no future and no past (as happens when people are isolated for long periods of time in total solitary confinement). In this state, you might be one with nature, but you are no more insightful than a bear, a fish, or a deer.
Does humaness require collective consciousness?
If it does - and this is a big “if” - the term has implications for psychotherapy, and could explain why people gravitate to psychotherapy for help with their issues and seek assistance with their felt need to be understood by another.
HUMANNESS AGAIN
Humanness, believe it or not, is an actual word and it can be used to open doors to broader thinking about who (or what) we are.
The Dictionary defines Humanness as: A broad term that refers to the quality or state of being human. [What follows suggests that we still don’t know what this word means]… Given the diversity of beliefs about what it means to be human, the term ‘humanness’ provides little guidance as to what characteristics are implied by it.
OK, so humanness is to be human. What does this mean?
To me, it seems, Humanness boils down to some simple features: 1. To experience. 2. To attempt, within a closed cognitive self-system, to make idiosyncratic sense out of experience., and 3. To act (or behave).
Given this premise of what a human being is (or what a human being does), Where do your motivations, moral reasoning, emotions, come from? Some might say that to be human is to possess two additional features: 1. A mind, and 2. A soul. I disagree with this metaphor. It’s too constrained, even though it is a good starting point for defining humanness.
It is my view that these two terms, 1. MIND and 2. SOUL allow scholars and thinkers on this subject to have an “extra- or extended space with which to place higher-order cognitive processes, but it is a misguided term. This is because it proliferates ideas subject to all kinds of fragmented conjecturing about who we really are. Plus, when you think of the mind, the spirit or the soul, you can’t really comprehend what this is. So, a first attempt at comprehensibility is to simply say that mind/soul exists as an ethereal part of the brain as this figure below depicts. Note in this figure that there are two eyes, two arms, one being slightly different from the other. This is an early drawing of mind-body dualism. Example: One eye is the physical eye; the second eye is the eye of the mind. Decartes linked the two mind-body eyes through a structure in the head that he called “The Pineal Gland.” (see the tear-drop shape in the back of the head). The Pineal Gland was hypothesized, by Decartes, to exist, but it was never found or identified. To the best of our knowledge there is no integrating structure that connects the mind and brain. In fact, the mind, itself is ethereal in that it has no real or identifiable substance.
Mind, spirit, soul are terms akin to the idea of “ghosts” that, although there may be some validity to these terms, they have certainly led people down some difficult rabbit holes of belief that have not helped to clarify who we really are and why we exist as part, but then again, as separate from the animal world in general.
A Mind
There are some powerful paradigms that have been pushed on all of us as human beings by the dominant social system. One is that: To think we have a mind which is separate from the brain. These paradigms are not malicious per se., but they are pernicious and for lack of a better word, old fashioned and uninformed, and this terminology can be as faulty as the notion that the “heart” is the soul of the human being or that our emotions originate from the heart (The Cardiocentric Hypothesis).
Take, as an example, the Mind-Body dualism paradigm. I started this entry with Rene Descarte (1600s) who, as an historical figure, tried to convey what it means to be a human being. At the time, the 1600’s, there was a trend in continental Western philosophy to push rationale thought as an alternative (or possibly better approach) than static organized Christian dogma. In Catholicism, for example, mysticism is central, rationalism is shunned. A case in point: The Holy Trinity. What is the Holy Trinity? It is an idea that God, as one god, exists in three coequal and coeternal persons, God the Father, God the Son or Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit. Three distinct persons who share one essence. The three persons describe who God is, the one essence describes what God is.
I use the Trinity as just another perplexing paradigm that someone came up with to explain the concept God.
Why? Because human beings experience feelings and states and they have difficulty making sense out of. How can God speak to my soul or spirit if God is only a glorified person? How can God be my conscience? Who do I pray to? Who do I worship: God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Ghost?
What better way to shape things than to employ an incomprehensible paradigm of an anthropomorphized god image. Such a deity idea can only be clarified, or so the story goes, by the leaders of the organized religion (whatever that might be) who came up with it. These people have establish a point of view that is so incomprehensible that God can only, really, be approached through the organization which they lead (The Church). In this way of thinking, it goes back to the follower’s personal belief system. “Don’t worry about the incomprehensibility of it all, just trust us and we will tell you what is right and wrong and how or how not to worship.
Like the Trinity, mind-body dualism is an anthropomorphized structure of what it means to be human (a body with a spirit around it or a two bodies linked by a ghost).
The body, of course, is easy to grasp. Hold a glass of water, our brain (body) registers the fact that we have touched something in the real world with our real physical self. It is through the body that we generate knowledge, understanding or more simply, that we act.
The mind is a more elusive idea.
Is the mind our consciousness?
Is the mind our spirit or our soul?
Is the mind our sense of moral obligation?
Is the mind our emotions?
Back to the Trinity, the same structure for what we can’t understand about the Divine exists in a quasi mind-body dualistic God.
Does the Holy Ghost influence our consciousness?
Is the Holy Ghost how God instills in us moral obligation?
Is the Holy Ghost the source of strange experiences?
Like the Trinity, Mind-Body Dualism caught on as a formalized idea in the 1600s and proliferated. The idea ultimately became so pervasive that even if it were questioned, no one has an alternative way of thinking about our humanness than to believe that we have a mind, spirit, or soul that conforms roughly to the body.
An Alternative
What if we let go of the idea that we have a mind? By extension, this would mean that we do not have a soul or a spirit at least in the dualistic way we are trained to perceive it.
What would take its place?
EMBODIED COGNITION
Embodied cognition is the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind and that the mind/spirit/soul is not a ghost image that is simply a larger outline of the brain, but is a consequence of an independent, but interconnected, human physiology. It might be construed as a kind of gestalt or “more-than-the whole” phenomenon when it comes to thinking, feeling, and acting. This contrasts mind-body dualism by abandoning the simple cause and effect notion between, say a single mind responding or acting on a single unified brain, so it opens, slightly, the tight box of thinking that over simplifies features like perception which within a dualistic system that has a one-to-one correspondence (e g., our brain takes in visual stimuli and the mind interprets is) to the brain. In embodied cognition, it would be giving other sense organs, say the eyes, the capability to exert an independent and consequential impact on the “thinking” aspects of a perceptual experience.
Of course, embodied cognition is also a paradigm, but it is a paradigm that is not restricted to thinking that A causes B because A & B are essentially at the top of the hierarchy of a human physiological/spiritual system. Thought (A) then Behavior (B), then Emotion (C) as an example.
There are two basic premises upon which embodied cognition rests: 1) reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied (it is now a wholistic feature of being human) and 2) reason is transcendent and universal. Note, I use the word transcendent here to underscore that it is an idea that is larger and more encompassing that the two-dimensional model dualistic point-of-view.
Embodied Cognition is a theory, or a viewpoint, that many features of cognition are shaped by aspects of the entire physical structure of the organism, not just the brain. Features of embodied cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The body includes, in addition to the brain, the the motor system, the perceptual system, as well as all other bodily interactions of these various systems with the environment.
A term frequently employed in embodied cognition is, “situatedness,” or an assumptions about the notion of humanness that is built into the structure of the whole organism. For example, some aspects of muscle movements require thinking or reasoning, but in this case, thinking or reasoning can occur at a cellular or musculature level (that the cells, proteins, and the DNA of the muscles generate a separate, but connected thinking system (in an of themselves) for decision-making and complex responding that would not involve, per se. brain-generated executive function. This would be the case in autonomic activity (a concert pianist who plays a piece without awareness of how, where, or why the fingers are functioning)
I realize as I launch into this discussion that describing what it means to think and feel beyond the confines of the brain (or at least removing the brain from the absolute center of our humanness) creates a less cohesive metaphor, and this can be problematic if the goal is to explain the idea to people. Embodied cognition can be grasped, but not easily with, say, visually-supported charts, graphs, or figures. Suffice it to say, our humanness is not limited to simple models or metaphors. This where, in my view, the field of psychology, medicine, and neurosciences things seem to be heading.
IMPLICATIONS
Why is this kind of reasoning important? and What implications does it have for the living and adapting to our world?
I don’t think this kind of reasoning is directly related to living and adapting to our world, but it does provide a sense that the world is bigger, or should I say the universe is bigger, and ultimately not comprehensible to us through or methods of thought and analysis. Does this mean we can’t appreciate the universe, I would say no. We can appreciate anything, really, even the incomprehensible.
Perhaps, this is where religious ideology has a place. It presupposes what exists, but what cannot be understood and it translates existence into features of ourselves or meaningful characteristics that are understandable, and even, sometimes, imaginable (A Great God in Heaven).
Science, for what it’s worth; philosophy, for what it can explain in words or symbols, are our rudimentary tools for understanding. Just like “myth” was for primitive cultures. At least this is my view. They both hinge on language. Religion, or at least some forms of it, is not dependent entirely on language (think meditation). But, it is idiosyncratic and can’t be disentangled from human culture.
I think the great key here is embedded in words like: wonder, appreciation, awe, vastness. They are all imperfect symbols, but they direct the mind towards appreciation versus despair. It is easy to despair what one can’t understand or comprehend. It is easy to think that because we can’t comprehend something we have failed, our existence is worthless, and there is no future. It takes work and an openness to keep our morale up as we live life, especially in its later years. These words: wonder, appreciation, awe, vastness are what the psychotherapist attempts to cultivate if only to build one’s morale to push on with existence.
Extending the view of Mind to Psychotherapy Interventions
To be discussed further 2/25/2022 Continuing