World of Suggestions
World of Suggestions
World of Suggestions
Richard Ostrofsky
May, 2011
IN A WORLD OF SUGGESTIONS
In a World of Suggestions:
Next Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind
Richard Ostrofsky
[email protected]
March, 2011
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The title of this book of collected essays and lectures is intended precisely to define the contents. The
essays, spread over thirty-five years, combine to propose a new way of thinking about ideas and about
those aggregates of ideas which I call “minds.” This way of thinking I call the “ecology of mind,” or the
ecology of ideas. It is a science which does not yet exist as an organized body of theory or knowledge.
But the definition of an “idea” which the essays combine to propose is much wider and more formal
than is conventional. The essays must speak for themselves, but here at the beginning let me state my belief
that such matters as the bilateral symmetry of an animal, the patterned arrangement of leaves in a plant, the
escalation of an armaments race, the processes of courtship, the nature of play, the grammar of a sentence,
the mystery of biological evolution, and the contemporary crises in man’s relationship to his environment,
can only be understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas as I propose.
The questions which the book raises are ecological: How do ideas interact? Is there some sort of
natural selection which determines the survival of some ideas and the extinction or death of others? What
sort of economics limits the multiplicity of ideas in a given region of mind? What are the necessary
conditions for stability (or survival) of such a system or subsystem? Some of these questions are touched
upon in the essays, but the main thrust of the book is to clear the way so that such questions can be
meaningfully asked.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson, 1972
So far as I can tell, it was Gregory Bateson who first suggested that we think of mind as
an ecology of sorts1 – a metaphor of genius that we've by no means fully digested. The
present essay will propose more specifically that we think of mind as an ecology of
suggestions, and will try to explore some of the consequences of doing so. So I begin by
asking the reader to imagine – suggesting that she imagine – her own mind as an
ecosystem woven of prompts, prods, cues, commands, and gentle nudges to feel or think
or do what the suggestions she receives are pushing for. The idea is that all
communications, including this paper certainly, may be conceived as suggestions of
various kinds – and further, that a mind (whether of an individual, a group, an
organization, or a whole society) may be fruitfully conceived as an ecological system,
'woven' (so to speak) by innumerable suggestions that jostle and compete and sustain one
another, much as living things do in a pond or forest. This paper is a thought-experiment
along those lines. I ask the reader to follow along with Bateson's ecological metaphor and
my small expansion thereon, to see where that perspective leads.
We are often tempted to think of mind as as a matter of feelings, beliefs, desires and
intentions – ideas of various sorts. But (in that word's normal usage), we think of 'ideas'
as constructions of language – inner, spoken or written – and this view makes it harder to
see that creatures without language are also minds of a sort. Language, and the thoughts
that language makes possible, are built from implicit and explicit metaphors, which are
basically just suggestions to see one thing as similar to something else. Even a common
noun like 'cat' asks you to see some particular animal as essentially similar and analogous
to all the other cats that you have seen or heard about. It 'brings to mind' (i.e. suggests
that you think of) a conventional category of entities, now to be seen as essentially alike.
Verbs and adjectives and adverbs do the same with actions and qualities. This is all that
1 See Bateson's collected papers, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind, published in 1972. Available on the
Web at http://www6.ufrgs.br/horizon/files/teoria2/bateson.pdf
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language can do: By classifying things along conventional lines that others have found
useful in the past, or along novel lines that an author is proposing, language lets us
describe and tell stories about events – about situations that happen, (or have happened,
or might have happened, or will happen, or are interesting to imagine happening) to
ourselves or others. In this way, language makes the past, the future, the abstract and the
counter-factual almost as accessible cognitively as the present we currently are in. There
is no doubt that language is a powerful tool and proclivity of human minds, but we
should be clear that it does not exhaust the concept of mind in general.
'Information' is a broader concept than language, because much that is held in minds
and communicated between minds is not encoded in language, but in some other way – in
remembered feelings, actions, pictures and diagrams, for example. 'Suggestion,' as we'll
see, is an even broader concept. Bateson defined information as 'a difference that makes a
difference'; and with that definition he believed and argued that information was the
fundamental stuff of mind and communication. Most current thought has shared that idea,
and there is no doubt that it has been useful and intellectually powerful. Yet I have never
found it satisfying, partly because I find it impossible to think of the exchange between a
mother and her newborn infant – the basis for all subsequent human relationship – as an
exchange of information. Rhythms are shared, contacts of skin and flesh are shared;
feelings and emotions and moods are certainly communicated and internalized, but it is
not the difference that makes a difference that is so important but, as much or more, the
sameness – of mood and quality of relationship: the reliability of mother's love, attention
and nourishment, the avidity of the baby's need and trust and attention. The concept of
information glosses over such elements of context and relationship, and makes them
difficult to keep in mind. Yet some comparatively stable relational context must be the
substrate of all communication whatever.
For this reason and others, I argue that the concept of information cannot be the
fundamental unit and basis of communication or mind, but that the concept of suggestion
can do better. In fact, the whole menagerie of mental entities (e.g. emotions, moods and
desires, along with concepts, perceptions, beliefs and intentions) can be seen as
suggestions of various kinds: to attend to this or that; to feel and notice this or that
sensation; to recall this or that memory; to interpret these sensations and memories in
some way; to desire, intend and act by this or that path and means, toward this or that
imagined goal. One could argue that all these perceptions and choices involve significant
differences ('differences that make a difference'), and indeed they do. But sameness,
unvarying context, also makes a difference. Much of what creatures feel and do is not
most naturally seen as a matter of choice between different alternatives, but of habitual or
even 'instinctive' response to a familiar situation. In sum, then, the central thought of this
paper is that suggestion, rather than information, is what gets exchanged when minds
communicate, and what gets organized as minds are formed.
One note here: I must ask the reader to be patient with me, because much of this
paper's story is common knowledge – although some is still on the frontier, not fully
agreed even amongst scientists, much less the general public. But I am telling the story
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from a certain perspective, that of suggestion and cognitive ecology. The value added (if
there is some) lies in the clarity and coherence that may be gained when the perspective
of suggestion ecology is taken up and used.
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itself, without some pre-arranged coding scheme, it tells nothing beyond the fact of the
message itself. Pre-eminently, it is an engineer's concept, relevant for the design and use
of data storage and data transmission media.2
Accordingly, to think of a Shakespeare sonnet, or a Bach cantata or a Rembrandt
painting or good sex, primarily as information in either sense is to commit a serious
category error. Though each of these might be taken to convey some meaningful
information, and might be representable (more or less adequately) through some
appropriately coded transmission of information, to see these things primarily as
information in either sense is to overlook what is most interesting about them, and why
we value them in the first place. What we want and take from such events does not fully
or intelligibly reduce to information in either of the two senses. We need a different,
richer concept to articulate what they bring us. What gets exchanged in such examples
may sometimes be treated as, or reduced to information for certain limited purposes, but
is much better understood as a suggestion to feel or think or do what is suggested.
At this early stage, we can scarcely avoid getting ahead of ourselves a little, so let me
begin by sketching a few features of communication, emphasizing similarities and
differences between the two concepts of suggestion and information, most of which will
be covered in more detail later:
1) Communication in general is a process of engagement between two systems, or of one
system with another. The concept of engagement here includes every self-assertion,
intrusion and entry into another system's space. Eye contact, 'body language,' cries of
complaint or warning, attack-and defense (or attack-and-flight), the sharing of food and
drink and sex are paradigmatic examples. In each case, one system engages with another,
and communication is one aspect of what passes between them. Without some notion of
engagement in the background, communication as a transfer of information is scarcely
intelligible. Patterns of communicative engagement must have preceded the use of
language, since it is only from well-established patterns of this kind that human language
could have evolved.
2) One very basic kind of engagement is not semiotic at all, but just a matching of
rhythms – as in pushing a child on a swing, or in dancing, for example. In a martial art
too, one learns to respond to an attack by matching and dominating its rhythm. For that
matter, not only gross motor behavior, but all organic processes are organized in rhythmic
patterns. Necessarily, the primary adaptation of any living creature to its world lies in
accommodation to its daily rhythms, especially the diurnal rhythm of light and darkness,
and the annual rhythm of the seasons. Women living together find themselves
menstruating at the same time. The milk supply of nursing mothers adapts in quantity and
timing to the infant's appetite. The sex act is a mutual rhythmic crescendo leading to
climax. The most basic communications of all are just suggestions of rhythm.3
2 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information
3 See also Sharing Realities, Richard Ostrofsky (2005)
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3) Typically, communications are packaged into a message of some kind . The message
is a physical object or pattern, but what it communicates, the suggestion(s) it conveys, are
in the eye of its receiver. The message carries a quantity of information in the engineer's
sense of that term. Its suggestions may or may not convey information in the manager's
sense. We can speak carelessly sometimes, and use the words 'communication,' 'message,'
'information' and 'suggestion' interchangeably as synonyms. Still the distinctions are
crucial and must be kept in mind: 'Communica-tion,' is the process of attempted influence
– not necessarily successful. A 'message' is the physical object or event (in some medium,
or other) through which communication and influence are carried.
4) The transmission of information depends on the pre-existence of some code or
alphabet. By contrast, the only prerequisite for suggestion is a susceptibility to influence
– most basically, an influence of rhythm, as we have seen. To see communication
primarily as transmission of information is to restrict that concept arbitrarily – and in a
way that stunts our thinking later on. Communication is most generally and
fundamentally the influencing of one system (or systems) by another. 'Suggestion' is our
word for the process by which influence is effected – the message as understood and
evaluated (against competing suggestions) by the system that receives it. As a primitive
term, this concept can be pointed to, but not defined without circularity.
5) From the perspective of logic (defined most generally as the philosophy of meaning),
the basic difference is that information can be true or false, and will seem more or less
'likely' or probable before its truth is known. By contrast, suggestions must co-exist. They
may compete, and will then be evaluated in a number of ways as we will see. With
suggestions there is no principle of non-contradiction, no "Law of the Excluded Middle."
Niels Bohr is said to have remarked on one occasion that "There are trivial truths and
great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is
also true"4 For better accuracy, he might have said that the the opposite of a great
suggestion is a conflicting great suggestion.
The bottom line, then, is that Claude Shannon 5 was mistaken when he said that "The
fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly
or approximately, a message selected at another point." This is only a special case, though
admittedly an important one. The most fundamental problem of communication is to
establish or maintain relationship (conceived as a meta-stable equilibrium amongst agents
and their expectations) through the exchange of influence: When A and B are attuned to
4 But philosophers are now taking seriously and exploring the possibility that both a statement and its
contrary may be true in some sense. This idea is called dialetheism. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetheism and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/ On
November 28, 2010, the on-line New York Times had an 'opinionator' piece on this topic. See
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/paradoxical-truth/
5 One of the founders of information theory. See The Mathematical Theory of Communication.,
Shannon and Weaver, 1949.
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one another so completely that changes in one are always reflected by appropriate,
relationship-sustaining changes in the other – then and only then would we say that there
is perfect communication between them.
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tedious, generous or self-serving. The specific beliefs that some suggestions suggest (the
information they can then be taken to carry) will be true or false – at least, for some given
purpose, in some given context. But the suggestions themselves are more like cues or
prompts to actors on a stage – little hints in some direction or other. Like such cues, and
like information itself, suggestions can refer, or be about something – implicating all
manner of 'props' or persons in the behavior suggested.
3) Information per se is intentionally neutral – put forth into the world on a take-it-or-
leave-it basis. It merely describes, or attempts to describe, a state of affairs. By contrast,
the concept of suggestion implies some intent or effect of influence: Most often,
suggestions are advanced purposefully, with intent to influence the behaviors, or at least
the thoughts of others – and of ourselves too, as when we make resolutions or compile to-
do lists, for example. Suggestions are seductive, and are usually meant to be. They do not
have causal force exactly, but they do carry influence and can be used as partial
explanations. In the Bible story, when God asks Adam why he ate the apple, he replies
that Eve suggested it. Asked the same question, Eve blames it on the Serpent. Not that
responsibility is greatly diminished, of course.
4) In classical logic, the statements carrying information are not supposed to contradict
one another. But suggestions readily clash, and we have no sense of scandal or paradox
when this happens, but merely face the normal problem of weighing the alternatives and
deciding which to accept. Contradictory suggestions continue to reside in the brains and
nervous systems that receive them, and may participate in the evaluation of future
suggestions. Though suggestions normally guide us fairly smoothly, at least several times
a day we find ourselves 'of two minds' about something, sometimes seriously and
painfully so. In fact, managerial work consists precisely in riding such dilemmas –
situations that suggest incompatible responses simultaneously. To raise prices, cut quality,
or show a smaller profit? That is the question.
5) Current suggestions can only be evaluated against one another, and in a context that
previous suggestions have established; and we can think of that context as the mind's
'identity' and current 'mindset': the 'I' that makes decisions. Though we speak of 'having
reasons' for our decisions, we cannot find any core of 'self' to entertain those reasons
apart from the physical body and an identity-context (comprised of skills, habits, beliefs,
values, and whatever other attributes of mind) that past suggestions have created. More
on this in Section 4 below.
6) The crucial point about suggestions is that unlike cybernetic control signals, they are
not literal causes of the events to which they lead. They must be weighed and accepted
against competing suggestions, and their acceptance is far from certain. Though a
suggestion from the Godfather, or any power, may be difficult to refuse, defiance and
death are at least possible. Flight or evasion are possibilities. Negotiation is a possibility.
There are always competing alternatives.
Moreover, suggestions can rarely specify in full the thoughts or actions toward which
they prompt. Even suggestions to oneself can't always do so; and though bureaucracies
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*****
Suggestions are of different types and come from many different sources. An exhaustive
classification is beyond our scope. Here it must suffice just to indicate certain distinctions
that a full-blown suggestion theory will need to make.
1) To begin with, just as with information, suggestions can be distinguished by the media
and pathways through which they arrive. Language, of course, is one very effective
medium of suggestion. Pictures and images are another. 'Gestures and 'body language' are
a third. Many suggestions are 'broadcast' to 'whoever is listening' or 'to whom it may
concern,' while some are 'point-to-point, i.e. directed to an individual. Some suggestions
(sounds and odors, for example) must be caught on the fly because they dissipate as soon
as they arrive. Others, like trails in a forest or buildings in a city are 'written' more-or-less
durably onto their environment.6
2) Many suggestions originate from pre-existing physical and/or mental configurations
comparable to those called memes by Richard Dawkins to emphasize their analogy with
genes. As I think that this analogy is partly sound but also misleading in some respects, I
prefer to speak of memetic structures or of re-suggestive structures. Some of these
structures (e.g. a language without an alphabet) are purely mental. Others are embodied
stigmergically in physical artifacts of various kinds. We read all manner of written texts.
We not only use our tools, but receive suggestions from them on how and to what
purposes they might be used. Streets and roads and even paths in a forest suggest
trajectories of travel. A shovel digs, but also suggests digging. A gun shoots and kills, but
also suggests killing. Our social worlds are filled with memetic structures that flood us
with torrents of suggestion in every waking moment. We cope with that torrent largely by
habit, which is itself a form of memetic structure. Of all the food items in the
supermarket, how many do you ever buy?
3) Suggestions can also be classified according to the sort of response that's being
suggested. There are purely cognitive suggestions, just to feel or imagine or believe in a
certain way. There are practical suggestions actually to do something. There are
statements (which claim to supply some true information) and questions (suggestions to
find or give a true answer. Following a distinction that Bateson saw as vital, there are
suggestions of calibration (like the setting of a thermostat) and suggestions of feedback
(like that thermostat's management of the room temperature.). 7 Beliefs and rules and
6 Communication of this kind has been named stigmergy. There will be more to say about it later.
7 Mind and Nature, Gregory Bateson (1979) p.195
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habits are calibrations – 'settings' of various kinds. Our choices pursuant to these 'settings'
are made ad hoc, in real time, through processes of feedback – with both the settings and
real-time adjustments guided by suggestion. One crucial point, already noted, is that
although suggestions may approximate to control signals on occasion, they do not
literally control. Always there is slack and 'corruption' from the perspective of the would-
be controlling system, and a degree of slack or leeway for the 'controlled.'
4) Suggestions may also be classified according to the suggestive environments in which
they compete. At one extreme, suggestions facing no effective competition at all are
habits or addictions – aspects of Identity, to be discussed below in Section 4 ). At the
other, suggestions may represent dilemmas when there is tug in incompatible directions.
There may be double binds (as Bateson called them) if a dilemma cannot be recognized
and confronted.8
5) There are helpful suggestions and self-serving or downright manipulative ones. There
are suggestions that willfully or inadvertently toxic. As suggestions are generally issued
for some reason, they can be classified according to the intentions behind them, as well as
their actual effects.
6) Suggestions are also more or less 'raw' or 'cooked' – more or less subject to
interpretation, and to interpretation in various ways. Messages to the brain from the
body's sense organs are fairly 'raw,' but need to be interpreted, along with other sensory
suggestions, in light of suggestions from memory, from significant others, and from the
culture at large. Our senses 'take in' a situation, but cannot fully determine what we make
of it .Thus, what the senses present to brain are suggestions only. A sensor or nerve cell
suggests that its neighbor fire or not fire. That neighbor must then weigh a thousand or
more such suggestions impinging on its dendrite tree to make up its cellular 'mind.'
Through innumerable suggestions of this kind, the brain as whole can settles down into
some firing pattern attuned to the organism's current situation and to its remembered past.
But it does so always according to its own architecture and existing memetic structures. It
was Hume's point, and Kant's and Nietzsche's that we do not live in the (noumenal) world
as it really is, but in a (phenomenal) world of appearances, that suggests itself to our
minds and senses. In fact, our minds are comprised of memetic structures, built by an
accumulation of suggestions, as we'll see below.9
They say that "Love makes the world go round" – but the emotion of love is itself a
matter of suggestion. Prospective lovers and love-objects make suggestions that you are
free to ignore or consider. Artists of all kinds are craftsmen of suggestion. Philosophers,
scientists, even mathematicians can only deal in suggestion, push comes to shove,
because no proof, however logical can literally compel belief. The Taoists and
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deconstructionists were right about this: Nets of language can suggest reality, but never
perfectly capture or control it.
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from and sending output to more specialized modules of the network. 10 Other types of
suggestion processor (e.g. an ant hill or a stored-program computer) might handle this
function differently, but all must handle it somehow. A suggestion-driven system can
make a choice in the face of competing, mutually incompatible suggestions. Unlike
Balaam's poor donkey who starved to death between two equally attractive stacks of hay,
it will go for one or the other. Without some facility for handling competing alternatives,
the system would be driven by mere control signals – not yet by suggestions, which are
potentially incompatible almost by definition.
4) But the outcome of step three, (think of a human belief or intention), resembles a
control signal in some respects, except that it is internally generated. One of the
suggestions in play is either accepted outright or compromised and/or synthesized with
others, and promoted to what Bateson calls a 'calibration,' – a determinant and reference
mark for future implementation. The role of consciousness, not necessary but sometimes
useful for such choices, will be discussed in Section 2 below.
5) In sophisticated minds at least, when the choice is of any complexity, there may be a
further 'planning' stage, as the system considers alternative means for achieving the goal
it has set itself. In doing so, it will generate further self-suggestions, possibly
complementary, but possibly incompatible with its first intention, and these will need to
be considered in turn. The original goal may be re-opened for new consideration. In the
end it may have to be renounced if no feasible route to it can be found.
6) Finally, as implementation proceed, there will be feedback from the activity itself,
suggesting adjustments to the plan and even to the intention itself. Bateson's discussion of
the logical duality between calibration and feedback has already mentioned. The inter-
relationship of ends and means is a notorious problem in ethics and political philosophy.
But we should remember that ends and means are alike suggestions that must always be
considered on their merits against other suggestions. A law too cruel or costly to enforce
(however that cost is distributed between the state itself and the population it hopes to
govern) is a bad law, however worthy its objectives.
10 On this point, see Bernard Baars' book, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (1988).
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with a complex world evolved a specialized organ to handle its suggestions. Even the
insects have a rudimentary brain and ventral nerve cord, and a few have nociceptors that
can receive sensations of pain – suggestions that something bad is happening to them. If
we agree to recognize 'mind' by this suggestion-processing function, then all these
creatures already have minds of a sort – as will be discussed in Section 2 below.
At the same time, for really sophisticated minding, a human mind (for example)
constructs a whole internal menagerie – a whole ecology – of feelings, beliefs, attitudes,
desires, intentions and so forth that we use to process the suggestions we receive. This
cognitive content, associated with the concept of a personal identity,12 is the other sense in
which we speak of mind. In this sense, we speak of 'changing our minds' about
something, and of upbringing and education as 'the forming of young minds.' Minds (in
this content sense) are comprised of structures – memetic or re-suggestive structures as
we've called them – through which their guidance function is performed.
The newly arrived suggestion must find its place amongst other suggestions, notably
those from the memetic structures already in place. It must be stronger, 'fitter' (in a sense)
than its competitors, resonating more powerfully and persistently in the neural circuits,
better able to seize and dominate the pathways of action. At the same time, in good
ecological fashion, it must co-exist somehow with any existing memetic structures that it
does not supplant completely.
There will be much to say here about the processing of suggestions against the
framework of existing memetic structures, and much to say about the building of such
structures through the accumulation of suggestions received. 13 Meanwhile, with this
account of suggestions and suggestion processing behind us, we turn now to a survey of
the systems capable of such processing – the systems that we call 'minds.'
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14 See Nick Humphrey's paper How To Solve the Mind-Body Problem, available online at
www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/2000MindBodyProblem.pdf and his book, published in 2000, of the
same title.
15 Near the end of Section 1.3
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people, just as people are minds comprised of trillions of cells. It makes sense to raise
questions about the competence, viability and sanity of such composite minds in the same
way we ask such questions about people. The building of composite minds will be
discussed in Section 3.2 below. A further paper now in preparation, on Composite Minds
and Mindset hopes to treat the phenomenon in greater detail.
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them.18 They experience (what we call) sensations., of which pain (a suggestion that the
system is taking damage) was probably earliest to evolve. It seems mysterious that
physical matter could assemble itself into systems capable of any feelings at all but, given
that they actually did, all future developments were computationally complex, but not
especially mysterious. The evolution and implementation of basic sentience will be
discussed further in Section 2.3.
3) We come now to a class of attention-paying, intentional minds that can use a sampling
of the suggestions they receive to actively look for further suggestions – more detailed, or
otherwise more desirable – of a related kind, or from a related source. Because a sugger's
sensory and processing resources are limited, it must be advantageous to use them
economically, prioritizing how and on what they are used. Such direction of the gathering
of sensory input requires complex direction of motor output, as we turn and focus our
eyes to look at something, and turn our heads to see what we are hearing. We also drink
to get less painful suggestions from our parched mouths, and eat to get more pleasurable
suggestions from our stomachs. Unlike merely self-monitoring minds, we economize,
prioritize and otherwise select the uses of our bodies to manage the suggestions we are
receiving. Many other minds, more sophisticated than those that are just barely sentient
but far more primitive than our own, seem to have such intentional capabilities. It's hard
to say how far down that capability goes.
4) Cognizant minds, as we might call them process suggestions not just of feeling but of
perception – a more-or-less accurate representation and interpretation of their current
situation. The gap between sensation and perception will be discussed below, in Section
2.4. The point here is that given a mind with detailed feelings of what happens – a patch
of red (say) at such-and-such position in the visual field, a high pitched tone coming from
such-and-such direction, the assembly of all those sensations into a picture of one's
current situation is (to repeat) computationally intricate but not especially mysterious. A
second point is that all this analysis and processing of sensation can happen (and is
known to happen) without the participation of consciousness. What we are conscious of,
normally is just our present situation as a gestalt – a whole, rich chord of sensation – and
maybe some part of this that we are attending to. As in a theater, cognizant minds have
the impression of experiencing a continuous, coherent show, though we know from
ingenious studies of living brains under laboratory conditions that this is not what is
happening at all. Reconciling our immediate impression of mind as theater with our
scientific knowledge of the brain as a network and of the mind as a kind of ecology is a
major problem that we'll discuss in Section 2.6.
5) Finally, the most complex minds known – our own 'sapient' ones – can handle
suggestions of events and situations that are not physically present, but only remembered
or imagined. With symbols and language, with neural structures to handle them, and with
18 See, for example Nagel's famous paper, What Is It Like To Be a Bat, available on the Web at
http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf
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the aid of tools and other stigmergic inscriptions on the environment, our sentient,
cognizant and Gregorian minds jointly create a cultural and social world in parallel to the
natural or physical one. From one perspective, this social world is just the result of many
human individuals interacting with and jostling one another. But from another
perspective, discussed in Section 2.5 and further in Sections 3 and 4, we are sapient
creatures of that social world – a world of vast collective skill and knowledge but,
sometimes, of collective insanity.
*****
What can we say here about these different levels of suggestion processing? Specifically,
there are three central questions:
• Why does it 'feel like something' to be you (or to be a bat or a cat or a cow, for
that matter)? How is this 'sentience' (as we've called it) possible?
• How do we derive more-or-less accurate perceptions of the world, from the
sensations we feel?
• What does it mean to be 'sapient' as our species name, homo sapiens sapiens
boasts of ourselves? What criteria should we use to decide that another species, or
some really advanced robot was as sapient as we are?
The remainder of this section discusses these three questions in turn, and concludes with
a discussion of two metaphors in some contention today – mind as theater and mind as
ecology. Without fully answering these questions – still beyond our present powers – I'll
try to show how suggestion theory makes some contribution to each.
The first step is to re-emphasize that consciousness is just a special aspect, a relatively
small and limited aspect, of mind as a whole. Most of what brains do happens
unconsciously, without any sense of willful direction by a unitary, conscious subject.
Indeed, the sense we have of being single, coherent subjects supervenes on a myriad of
specialized neural processes responsible for such unconscious functions as:
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• maintaining the vegetative functions of the body (e.g. digestion, blood chemistry
and temperature regulation);
• managing the sense impressions one receives and assembling them into a coherent
perception of the world;
• generating detailed suggestions to the large muscles of the limbs and to the small
ones of the vocal tract, converting general intentions into competent moment-by-
moment activity;
• recalling facts, recognizing faces, imagining worlds of fantasy, and having dreams
and nightmares in one's sleep.
We identify with the operations and deliveries of the conscious subject, but that conscious
ego is just the tip, what shows above the surface, of the whole, mostly unconscious, self.
It is well understood by now that consciousness itself is not a single, simple phenomenon,
but an ordinary-language, umbrella term for a number of distinct phenomena. 19 What we
usually mean by consciousness, and what really puzzles us is sentient consciousness,'
what Gerald Edelman called primary consciousness which experiences the feelings that
make it 'like something' to be alive. Though we cannot directly know what animals (or
other people, for that matter) are feeling, it is as Edelman says: "There is every indirect
indication that a dog is conscious—its anatomy and its nervous system organization are
very similar to ours. It sleeps and its eyelids flutter during REM sleep . . . [what] I call
primary consciousness is what animals have. It’s the experience of a unitary scene in a
period of seconds, at most, which I call the remembered present [italics mine]. If you
have primary consciousness right now, your butt is feeling the seat, you’re hearing my
voice, you’re smelling the air. Yet there’s no consciousness of consciousness, nor any
narrative history of the past or projected future plans."
Here the notion of suggestion may help us somewhat to understand how a physical
system can feel and think. The key point is that feelings and sensations are more than
mere information, in either the engineer's sense or the manager's. They are better
understood as suggestions: prompts to perceptions and beliefs and attitudes, to intentions
(or intentional orientations) and, ultimately, to swift action in life-and-death situations.
Natural selection did not work just on the capability of senses and nervous system to
receive and consciously understand the world's messages, but on the capability of the
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Pain
Pain is so basic to an organism's 'feeling of what happens' that a brief review of its
physiology may be useful here. To the extent that we understand how physical systems
can feel pain, other sensations also begin to seem possible.20
What happens in humans and other vertebrates that have been studied, is that special
receptors (nociceptors) in the skin and muscle tissue send messages of excitation to the
brain, over two separate groups of nerve fibers, which are received and parsed (at specific
sites in the central nervous system) as suggestions that something is very wrong. One
might want to think of the pain as a call to evasive action, but we know that a person
touching a hot surface jerks her hand away well before she feels the pain. Accordingly,
we must understand the felt sensation more as a teaching tool than as a trigger for
defensive measures. Pain motivates the animal to avoid this and similar situations in the
future, and to protect a damaged body part while it heals. It is a punishment and a
deterrent, more than a call to action.
. This helps explain why pain is so often overlooked in the heat of play or sport or
battle: The body needs to know that it is taking damage, but it may have more urgent or
otherwise over-riding reasons for ignoring that damage in the short term, or in training for
some higher goal, or as a demonstration of courage. It helps explain why pain may be
interesting and even erotic, when it is undergone voluntarily – as when a child flicks a
loose tooth with her tongue, or when a consenting adult takes some desired whipping in a
BDSM scene. The fact that such pains, like those of the athlete, are ultimately voluntary
and under one's own control somehow places them in a different category.
Ordinarily though, pain is a suggestion that negatively influences motivations to
persist in or return to the situations associated with it, without fully determining that
motivation. This aversive suggestion is the pain. If there were just the information of
damage without the punishing sensation, the message could not accomplish what it does.
Suggestions of pain may be re-framed or ignored, and modern medicine can block
them outright in various ways: with topical and general anesthetics that eliminate all
sensation either locally or for the body as a whole, and with analgesics that prevent pain
without eliminating sensation. Weirdly, there are even people who can experience pain
with no accompanying sense of suffering. This phenomenon, known as pain asymbolia
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has been observed in patients who have undergone prefrontal lobotomy or cingulotomy
as a treatment of last resort for intractable chronic pain. But it can also be induced with
certain drugs, and even by hypnotic suggestion. Such patients can recognize and identify
the pain as such, but do not seem to be distressed by it. 21 This variety of blocking
techniques makes it clear that pain is not just information about damage, but something
the body does to itself to influence how a message of damage is received, and its
suggestions weighed against other suggestions. We don't yet know exactly how the body
gives itself this feeling, but we are pretty clear that it does so by observable neurological
means and for good biological reasons.
As with other sensations, pain reverberates in the neural network, summing (in ways not
fully understood) to what Gerald Edelman called the 'remembered present' – our
experience of a continuous coherent world. At this level, the ordinary radio set may be a
better metaphor for sentience than the computer. The radio is basically a device that
resonates in sympathy with transmitted electromagnetic waves, then amplifies these
electronic vibrations and converts them into audible sound. Analogously, we might think
of the brain as a network of suggers that resonates in sympathy with its environment, re-
suggesting selected sensations and monitoring its own resonance patterns as it does so.
Recursively, this self-monitoring modifies the resonance of the whole network, so that the
system as a whole has access consciousness to a kind of 'executive summary' (Edelman's
'remembered present') of its current state. By monitoring its own resonance patterns, it
'feels' when it is taking damage. What we experience as pain is precisely the experience
(remembered present) of this self-monitoring. More neutral messages – e.g. of redness at
a given site in the visual field or of a high-pitched sound coming from a certain direction
– probably reverberate and re-suggest themselves in similar fashion.
The mind's suggestion processing is re-entrant – a strange loop in Douglas
Hofstadter's sense: self-referential, level-crossing, and taking you almost right back to
where you were before.22 The feeling of what happens is paradoxical in this way, and
self-referential like the paradox of Epimenides (i.e. that "Every statement in this paper is
false – including this one, obviously). Our sensations are self-referential because they
include themselves in this same way: Part of what is happening is always the sensation
itself; and this is true whether or not the higher types of consciousness are present. It has
nothing to do with language, nor even with conscious self-awareness. A creature that can
feel pain already has this strange, self-referential loopiness, because its pain belongs to it
somehow – is, in fact, locatable at some particular site on its body while, at the same
time, belonging to (being a feeling of) the whole. When Androcles' lion gets a thorn in its
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paw, the pain is in that paw, but in its whole being simultaneously. When it stalks a
gazelle, this other animal is out there in the grass, but simultaneously in the lion's mind
and her intentions. The sensory suggestions that comprise the doomed creature in the
lion's neural network are attributed directly to the world outside.
*****
In sum, then, pain (and, by extension, other sensations as well) can be seen as a self
-originated suggestion to oneself about one's current situation. It is more than
information, and more than a trigger of action. Its clamor for attention, for entry into
consciousness is an essential part of its nature and function. We can surmise that self-
monitored, insistently reverberating suggestion is the feeling itself.
23 See On Having No Head, Douglas Harding (1986). The key passage is available on the Web at
www.headless.org/on-having-no-head.htm
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messages may conflict or be misinterpreted – about the world outside. Automatically, the
brain collates all these suggestions into the most coherent picture it can construct for
itself, and then presents that picture to working memory: to what we call 'consciousness.'
What we take to be direct perception of the world is just the collated and interpreted
result of innumerable suggestions about it.24
If we think of the senses as giving us direct, unmediated access to reality, or as
delivering true information about it, then there is a philosophical problem about how
perceptual illusions and hallucinations could be possible. 25 If we think of the senses as
delivering suggestions only – suggestions still in need of interpretation as they relate to
one another and make reference to a real world – then this problem goes away. We have
no reason to believe that a brain's perceptual interpretations will be infallible, and the
culling of natural selection will explain why they are as reliable as they are. We would
not be here if our ancestors' perceptions had not kept them alive long enough to
reproduce. Just how they did that job, and how our own senses are still doing it, is a
fearfully complex problem of association and computation, but no great philosophical
mystery – given reliable feelings of what is happening, as already discussed. We have by
now a good deal of knowledge of how a brain performs the necessary analysis, and are
already building devices to duplicate aspects of that feat.
Sentience remains the hard problem, but what we usually mean by 'consciousness' is
perceptual consciousness or 'cognizance' as we might call it – the capability not just to
feel sensations but to infer the situations causing them. Other mammals also do this pretty
well – relative to their habitats and lifestyles. Our human senses are wonderfully acute,
but not much more so, if at all, than those of a gorilla or chimpanzee, for example. Their
cognizance too – direct awareness of the reality around them – is probably about the
same as ours. Apart from certain extra dimensions of classification and imagination (of
which more below), these animals represent their current situation to themselves about as
well as we do. But something about the human brain makes us enormously different from
other animals – even from our closest primate kin. What is the neural difference that
makes us human? When we speak of being human, what exactly do we mean?
24 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
25 See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
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All monkeys and apes, including us human ones, are notorious imitators. "Monkey
see, monkey do" is proverbial, and 'to ape' is another way of saying 'to imitate.' But a
chimp's imitations are highly concrete and situational. The 12 or 13 month old child
already imitates at a level that is not observed in chimps at any age, or in any other non-
human creature. Our babies seem to copy not just the behavior itself, but the attitude and
intention behind a given behavior. They imitate in a triangular pattern known as 'joint
engagement,' looking back and forth between the person they are engaged with and an
object of that person's attention. They follow finger-pointing and eagerly point
themselves. They even follow the gaze of others with their own. Remarkably, the human
eye seems to have evolved to facilitate this aspect of human sociality: We have whites
around the iris to show others where we are looking – that point out the direction of our
attention even when such self-revelation goes against our interests. By contrast, chimps
and other great apes camouflage the iris with a dark area that conceals the object of
attention. They conceal their gaze and interest where we put ours on show.
Donald, writing before Tomasello's work on the difference between concrete and
intentional emulation, draws a distinction between the 'episodic' culture of other
hominids, and the 'memetic' culture that was probably available to Homo Erectus 1.8
million years ago (MYA), well before any of the markers of language or conceptual
thinking can be found. For Donald, the culture (collective, social learning ) of chimps and
other great apes is unreflective, concrete and situational, always bound to the immediate
situation. The far richer, incredibly dynamic cultures characteristic of our own species, he
feels, must have required more advanced memetic and representational capabilities.
Donald argues that Homo Erectus (earliest specimens date to about 1.9 MYA) must
have enjoyed advanced memetic capabilities, without specifying exactly what these were.
Tomasello's work fills in this detail, allowing us to speculate that it was intentional
emulation that made the difference between signs and true symbols, the focus of Terrence
Deacon's thinking about the evolution of language.
In fact, a memetic culture can achieve – as the cultures of H. Erectus are known to
have achieved – a very great sophistication. Pre-modern China and Japan had languages,
of course, but made more use of subtle emulation than modern cultures tend to do, and
they give some idea of what is possible. Their martial arts, dance, religious rituals,
neolithic skills like pottery-making, weaving and cooking, and many other things are
taught largely by emulation to this day, because that approach is more effective than
explanation. Such skills and the values associated with them are not learned through any
amount of verbal exposition, but by closely observing and attempting to match the
performance of a respected teacher. Young children learn their native languages in just
this way.
For all its impressive achievements, however, a purely memetic culture would have
been limited in at least one crucial way. Wonderfully concrete, and often benefiting from
that concreteness, it would have lacked the wonderful powers of abstraction that modern
humans live by and take for granted. In particular, it would have done without language,
and the tremendous powers that language affords. As Donald argues, the very success of
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concrete cultures based on sophisticated emulation would have generated strong selection
pressures, both biological and cultural, toward the capabilities and skills of (what we now
know as) language.
The key to language – symbolic representation and categorization – must have been
well in place before languages evolved – and are possible in the absence of language, as
the behavior of very young children makes clear. In essence, categorization is just the
mental trick of recognizing critical similarities. Bateson argued that the mind works by
recognizing "differences that make a difference," but categorization (and the minds
capable of it) work by ignoring differences that don't make a difference – by responding,
in other words to subtle suggestions from the world at large and from other people about
what matters and what doesn't. But symbolic representation is rather more than that. It is
the mental trick of collecting huge domains of experience under a single icon that can
suggest other such icons by association and contrast.
Where signs suggest events in the real world, as the ringing bell suggested lunch to
Pavlov's dog, symbols can suggest one another – and therefore unreal events as easily as
real ones. With language we can suggest both remembered events and imagined
possibilities. We can tell stories, both true and false. We can ask questions and suggest
answers. We can suggest which questions are forbidden, and which are the important
ones to ask. Finally, with our tools and artifacts we can frame stigmergic suggestions to
one another, off-loading 'pieces' of our minds to the physical environment, and becoming
thereby the Gregorian minds that Dennett speaks of – the sapient minds we consider
ourselves to be.
*****
Minds come at different levels of sophistication, as we've just seen. In the next section,
we'll consider the ways in which minds grow, and even direct their own growth to some
extent. Like any evolutionary process, mental growth is partly random, and partly a
culling or 'natural selection' by the environment, by external circumstances that the
growing mind encounters. That there is room for individual discretion and autonomy in
an evolutionary process is not at all obvious, but that is what we find. As with science and
technology in general, understanding what is random and what is necessary may help us
make the most of the partial, conditioned freedom we actually have.
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3. Growing a Mind
Minds of a sort are ubiquitous in nature. Even single celled creatures are exposed to
uncertain or conflicting tropisms, and evolved to interpret ambiguous suggestions and
choose between competing ones. They make choices, and form themselves in doing so.
Even a seed must decide whether to germinate or wait for a more propitious occasion. A
tree in springtime must decide when to put forth its leaves. Animals have many more and
more complex choices to make. Even protozoans, one-celled creatures, seem to be
capable of habituation learning; Even fruit flies can learn to avoid odors associated with
electric shock and to prefer odors associated with sugar water. The most primitive
organisms are suggers in good standing; and must be said to have minds, though very
simple ones by human standards. The key point is that even these rudimentary minds are
not just passed with their genotypes, but formed – to some extent, however small – from
individual experience.27 All seem to have some at least some capacity for individual
adaptation to their local environments, hence for a kind of learning. We want to ask how
this plasticity is achieved, and to what extent (and in what ways) it can be self-directed.
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evolutionary learning adapts the creature's mind to draw appropriate suggestions from the
messages it receives, and to respond to its genes' advantage – i.e. to the representation of
its genotype in future generations.
2) A second kind of mental growth, the kind we mostly think of, is individual learning.29
This type can be broken down further (e.g. into recognition learning, skill learning and
fact learning) but all such learning has in common that it is a product of individual
experience – partly receptive, but partly active and willful as we see clearly with a
crawling baby. We learn skills, we remember faces and songs and things that happened to
us. We learn lots of different things, through many different neural pathways. But there is
at least one pattern that all individual learning seems to have in common: the explore-
discover-appropriate-adapt pattern, or EDAA for short. We explore the world as we live
and wander around in it, and do whatever we do. When we travel, we see new places;
when we read, we hear new stories; when we work or play or practice a skill of any kind,
we have new experiences. In every case, we receive and respond to novel streams of
suggestion. That is exploration.
We ignore most of these suggestions, but some of them catch our attention in various
ways – threatening us, or offering opportunities, or just looking interesting to us as they
tweak our senses and nervous systems. Such paying of attention and the play of affect
and emotion that results can be called discovery – of new features of our world, and what
they might mean to us. Some things please and attract us; some things scare us; some
things just pique our curiosity to explore them more closely and discover them further. In
this discovery phase the suggestions we receive are evaluated – partly through the affect
system (our built-in physiological mechanisms of evaluation), and partly through
whatever re-suggestive structures our minds have already built, to orient us and define
our values.
After discovery comes appropriation (or its opposite, rejection and escape) when the
thing discovered provokes some kind of response. To appropriate a thing is to relate to it
in some way – to arrive at some pattern of response to its suggestions. Obviously,
appropriation must be a gradual process, and it is in this phase that learning (in the most
usual and narrow sense of this word) takes place. "First you do it, then you learn how to
do it," as one of my teachers used to say. You engage with something, enter into
relationship with it, then gradually get more efficient at getting what you want in the
exchange of suggestions that results.
But finally, what we appropriate and relate to for our own purposes inevitably
presents us with needs and conditions of its own: making its own demands on us,
presenting its own requirements. Thus, a phase of adaptation always follows
appropriation, as we learn to accommodate to what we have taken, responding to its
suggestions – meeting or refusing or compromising with them – as it now responds to
ours.
Over-all, we can see EDAA as the fundamental cycle of understanding, evaluating
29 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
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and responding to the suggestions that life affords. We can see too why individual
learning is partly haphazard but partly self-directed, to the extent that the whole cycle
represents an autonomous undertaking in a precarious world evading full prediction or
control.
3) A third type of mental growth occurs though aggregation, as individual minds enter
into relationships with one another to form composite minds. In nature, a flock of birds, a
hunting pack of wolves, an ant hill, and every multicellular organism operates and adapts
to its world with some coherence, coordinated and driven by what we must see as a
composite, aggregated mind. A married couple, a mob and an executive committee would
be comparable examples from the human world, while a brain is itself an aggregation of
inter-relating neurons. In each case, the participating members, autonomous suggers in
their own right, give up a portion of their autonomy to collaborate, and act coherently as a
group.
4) Finally, there is a fourth type of mental growth that I will call stigmergic elaboration,
of which the human animal has made a specialty, (though other creatures, notably the
social insects also use it extensively). 'Stigmergy' (from two Greek words, stigma and
ergos ) is defined to mean 'signs causing work – suggesting work, as I'd prefer to say.' 30
It's a form of indirect communication through which semi-durable marks 'written' onto
the environment provide directive guidance to any suggers that encounter and 'read' them.
In ant colonies and brains and human societies, stigmergy forms the basis of mental
growth by aggregation, but it needs to be considered also as a separate principle of mental
growth – by individual suggers who use stigmergy to to enrich their local environments
and thereby enhance their own intelligence – for example, when they jot down to-do lists,
or draw pictures and maps and diagrams, or write books and essays like this one.
You can try this thought-experiment to see the role of stigmergic elaboration in your
own life: By an effort of imagination, take all the pictures off the walls of your home.
Generously, allow yourself the walls themselves, though these too are are certainly
stigmergic artifacts. Get rid of all the furniture and appliances. Give away all your books
and phonograph records and CD's. (You might think of keeping the TV and radio as
broadcast media rather than stigmergic ones – though as furniture, organizers of your
activities and time, they will have to go. Now imagine having to live like this . . .
*****
In each type of mental growth, as we have just seen, there are elements of chance and
happenstance but possibly too of choice and self-direction. In biological evolution, there
is the Baldwin effect, exploiting whatever autonomy and plasticity that organisms have in
choosing specific habitats and lifestyles for themselves, and therewith the selection
criteria that will act on them, and perhaps on their descendants. For individual experience
and learning, there is the EDAA pattern, again exploiting the creature's autonomy in
30 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
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choosing potentially risky exploration over the seeming security of a known status quo.
With aggregation, there may be room for affinity, sympathy and choice, whether by the
individuals or some existing group in the forming and breaking of relationships, and the
acceptance or refusal of group affiliations. In stigmergic elaboration, the environmental
markings are suggestions that are encountered haphazardly, but will require
interpretation, evaluation against other suggestions and the synthesis of a response –
again leaving room for autonomy.
To understand how minds configure themselves and grow, we'll begin with a closer
look at the formation of composite minds through aggregation and inter-relationship.
Next, we'll introduce a recently discovered mechanism or effect called self-organized
criticality (SOC), and consider the role of this effect in suggestion-driven learning.
Finally we'll consider the effects of competition and a kind of Darwinian selection on the
re-suggestive structures built through learning of this kind.
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31 To use Arthur Koestler's word. See The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler (1967),
www.panarchy.org/koestler/holon.1969.html and www.integralworld.net/edwards13.html
32 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability
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33 See www.rmastudies.org.nz/documents/AbileneParadoxJerryHarvey.pdf
34 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behavior and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
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order – posing a completely different and political problem that we would never ask
about an ant hill or the neurons in a brain. In fact, the process here is not so much
emergent as convergent, a matter of threats and promises and negotiations. Neither
emergence nor political convergence are well understood; and, in detail, both are beyond
this paper's scope. But several remarks should be made:
1) The building of minds through intercommunication is far more intelligible as a
bandying of suggestions and counter-suggestions than as a mere exchange of information.
Suggers do not influence one another just by describing states of affairs, but by
alternately prodding and soothing one another with well-framed messages intended to
draw a desired response. With these they can build composite minds that are larger, more
powerful and possibly smarter than themselves.
2) The framing of messages marks a crucial difference in the ways that composite minds
are built. With emergent building, the component suggers just do their thing – swarming
(or not) and and responding to stigmergic markers according to their simple natures.
(Ants, for example, leave pheromone trails as their situations suggest, heedless of how or
whether the other ants will read and follow them.) With convergent building, the suggers
seek to dominate and control their joint situation, with winners and losers as they do so.
Wittingly or not they load their messages with rhetorical freight designed to strengthen
their suggestive force. They use promises and threats, they draw imaginative pictures
with intent to influence as many others as they can reach. Their suggestions don't just
compete, but actively conflict. Convergent intercommunication is strategic as the
emergent kind is not.
3) However, emergent and convergent modes of mind-building are not mutually
exclusive. Human societies use both. Like birds and buffalo, humans strongly feel the
pull of what their immediate neighbors are doing. The resulting swarm effects can be
very strong. Like the ants and termites we use use unconscious stigmergy to guide the
behaviors of our fellow humans. Unlike those social insects, we make extensive
conscious use as well. In fact, our social world has often been seen as a kind of labyrinth
with high and thick virtual walls – lacking only the language of suggestion to explain
how those walls are built. We practice other forms of suggestive communication as well:
point-to-point and broadcast, not to mention each individual's personal sensing of her
environment. One might say that the composite minds of human society are largely
emergent as we are influenced by stigmergy and swarm effects, but also convergent in the
politicious relationships we form with others.
4) Whether built through emergent or convergent processes, or through some mixture of
the two, composite minds typically need memetic, re-suggestive structures to understand
and evaluate the suggestions they receive. The remainder of this section will discuss what
we know of how such structures are built and pruned. Two ideas – an extended theory of
evolution that might be called 'ecoDarwinian co-selection,' and the much more recent
concept of 'self-organized criticality' afford our best understanding to-date.
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good bet that Nature as a whole is a self-organized phenomenon, revealing the same
underlying patterns in every area and at every scale that we can study. If and when
Bateson's 'ecology of mind' is fully realized, it's very likely that SOC, some cognitive
version of natural selection, and the mathematical patterns associated with these
mechanisms will be central features of such a discipline. Already, we can imagine minds
of every type and scale growing, suggestion by suggestion, much like the hillocks of sand
in Bak's experiment: memetic structures piling up (but sometimes breaking down), and
engaging with one another as they do so. In the next and final part of this section, we'll
explore this model (or paradigm) of mind in more detail. Then, in Section 4 on identity,
we'll apply the model to consider how an individual mind is grown.
38 In present context, the 'natural selection' of memetic structures might be better termed 'ecoDarwinian
co-selection – first to highlight a) that these structures engage with and co-select one another; b) that
ecology is just the flip side of evolution because all evolution is really co-evolution; and c) that we are
speaking here of the co-selection and evolution of memetic structures and not of natural species.
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populations; they engage in trade and diplomacy; they sign treaties; and sometimes they
go to war. All these memetic structures are of two kinds: stigmergic artifacts and
internalized mentifacts. Both kinds can now be seen as aggregating, sometimes collapsing
structures of suggestion.
In the ecology of mind, suggestions are generated partly by internal senses of
homeostasis and appetite, partly by impacts of the physical world on the sugger's sensory
receptors. In human minds, they are generated too by memories and fantasies of the mind
itself. At every scale, from groups of neurons to individual organisms to large
populations, even very small suggestions and self-suggestions can reverberate and
amplify into compulsions and obsessions, out of all proportion to the magnitude and
power of the original stimulus.
*****
As they are processed, suggestions play against each other, and against whatever
physiological and memetic structures have previously been built, weaving a meta-stable
ecological system as they do so.39 (We'll speak of 'suggestive weaving,' to underline the
metaphor of mind as a kind of fabric, as many writers have called it, and as an Internet
search on the expression 'fabric of mind' will show. To give some idea of how this
'weaving' happens, a few familiar examples can be mentioned:
1) A first example of suggestive weaving is the familiar process of cognitive association.
Thoughts (i.e. suggestive patterns) subconsciously suggest other patterns which reinforce
or thwart and neutralize one another. Freud and his followers used dreams and Rorschach
cards and word association methods to access the unconscious in this way. The scientific
validity of a therapist's interpretations from such tests is beside the point here. Everyone
is familiar with, and no one doubts, the phenomenon of thoughts suggesting other
thoughts – mental patterns suggesting other patterns. Through such processes of
association, a myriad of potentially competing suggestions are resolved into fairly
durable desires, beliefs, and intentions. Perceived situations and responses to these are
constructed in the combination of immediate sensations with pre-existing memetic
structures – be these synaptic configurations in a brain or stigmergic traces in the
external, social world. Through association primarily, the shower of suggestions resolves
itself into meta-stable cognitive states – ultimately into firm intentions, resource
commitments and actions. A kind of order emerges from the mind's primordial chaos, as
we see in the behavior and development of very young children.
2) Typically, the outcome of suggestive weaving is a holarchy of cognitive contexts,
constructed hermeneutically from the bottom up in much the same way that texts like this
one are constructed from individual words and a myriad of word choices. Context in
39 The reader is reminded that 'against' in this context really means 'with and against. 'Against' is used in
its sense of background, not necessarily opposition. Collaboration and reinforcement are just as
possible.
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general may be understood as an interplay of suggestions between a whole and its parts.
The individual words of a sentence suggest a meaning for the whole; but that reading of
the sentence directs one's understanding of each single, frequently ambiguous, word.
Similarly, an ecosystem maintains itself through the activities and mutual influences of its
individual creatures, who in turn are influenced by the context in which they interact,
survive and reproduce.
3) One predictable outcome of suggestive weaving, association and the construction of
nested contexts is the pattern we think of as identity, especially that aspect of identity to
which the generic name 'comfort zone' has been given. 40 We tend to build and live inside
situations that are perceived as familiar and safe. Some people may be willing to step
outside their comfort zones a bit – to take risks when it seems worthwhile to do so. But
we all have such zones, and we tend to protect ourselves, and also to compensate
ourselves in various ways when we step outside their boundaries. Well-known effects of
social psychology – e.g. cognitive dissonance, Noelle-Neumann's 'spiral of silence,'
group-think and the Abilene paradox – can all be seen as comfort zone phenomena. In
turn, comfort zone can be seen as an effect of memetic structure and habituation. We are
comfortable in situations that we have learned to cope with – for which we've built
memetic structures that we have learned to trust.
4) A fourth feature of suggestive weaving might be termed 'propagation of desire, a
generalization from the so-called 'Law of Supply and Demand' in economics: that the
price of a good in any competitive market will tend toward a point at which the quantity
demanded by consumers is equal to the quantity that producers supply. In the real world,
where markets are less than perfectly competitive, and where producers collaborate as
oligopolists to the extent feasible, the validity of the economic 'Law' is questionable. Our
desires, however, will propagate even in the most imperfect market, as we recruit others
to help us satisfy them.
The idea is that a given person's wants and desires will affect others, by the mere
suggestion of what she will do – or may do – to get what she wants. If you want toast
with your coffee in the morning, your lover may make and bring it to you. Someone
somewhere will raise a wheat crop; others will grind and ship the grain and then bake and
stock the bread. In a commercial society this propagation of desire is handled through the
market and the monetary system. In primitive, or tribal , or communistic societies the
propagation works differently, far less efficiently perhaps, but it will happen in some
fashion. Desires for power, for property, for knowledge, for sex will likewise propagate
through various channels and in their various ways. Any serious want or desire gets
passed along as a suggestion to others. Of course, the force of that suggestion against
competing suggestions is something else again. The suggestion of a desire may or may
not find acceptance or expression in some other person's behavior, but it becomes one
thread in the whole cognitive fabric if it is noticed by anyone at all.
40 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_zone
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5) A fifth pattern, the last that I will mention here, is the phenomenon of envy, aka 'the
evil eye,' not the noblest of human emotions but one of the 'cements' that binds society
together, as Jon Elster has argued.41 Envy is aroused by any suggestion that someone else
might have something that you lack, or might be something that you are not. Adults learn
to mask the feeling in various ways, but we observe it poignantly in young children,
especially between siblings. Parents must be careful not to provoke it, but will sometimes
do so despite their best efforts because their children are, after all, of different ages,
capabilities and temperaments.
Envy might be seen as a special case of desire propagation, but it is important enough
and peculiar enough to be worth mentioning separately. Your desire to drive a fancy car
could motivate you to work or steal for it, but bears little connection to the fact that
someone else actually has one. But envy works differently, aroused by your awareness
that the other person has such a car, whether you originally wanted one or not. Desires
propagate, but envy is an important source of desire. Much of what people want stems
from an intrinsic wish to be as good as, or preferably better or better off than others.
Rather than envy others, we prefer to be envied by them, if possible. The bare suggestion
of superiority – any superiority of any kind – may cause us to want, covet and strive for
things in which we otherwise have little interest.
*****
Above are just a few of the best-known ways in which suggestions arise and play against
one another, and against memetic structures already in place. More such patterns are
known, and a full catalog and analysis of them would take a volume. In this paper, the
few just given must suggest the many that could be. Obviously, there is much work to do
along these lines – in connection with the generation, inter-weaving and competition of
suggestions. What can be claimed, however, is that Bateson's great insight has been fully
vindicated, and that we now begin to have a fairly clear of what a mind fundamentally is,
and of how minds are ecologically woven.
William James had already declared in 1890 that "the thoughts themselves are the
thinkers."42 Today, we can expand on that bold dictum: A mind is constructed in the flux
of suggestions that it receives and processes from other suggers that surround and
communicate with it. A given individual's mind can be seen as an ecology that forms and
evolves by the suggestions dropped upon it, as these build up and break down like the
cones of sand on Per Bak's table. Composite minds are ecologies of similar kind at
another level. We are moved and formed by suggestions from our own bodies, and from
the natural and social worlds. We are moved too by suggestions of context that arise
endogenously from the whole cognitive system (the collective Mind) itself. Combining
and competing with one another, and aggregating toward criticality, suggestions stock our
minds, shape their memetic structures, and make us who we are.
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In the next section we'll further explore this metaphor of mind as suggestion ecology
for what it might have to say about the identities of individual humans and their groups.
We'll begin by conceiving a person's identity as a structure, analogous to the dunes on our
imaginary sand-table, formed by the individual as she grows and matures, with the
specific function of evaluating and responding to further suggestions as they arrive. The
identity of any group or nation is shaped in much the same way. We form identities to
process the suggestions that existence presents – to survive and thrive as best we can in a
suggestive milieu.
4. Identity
Psychologists use the word 'identity' to mean both the aggregate of traits that make for
individual uniqueness, and the individual's own sense of biographical continuity. Life-
cycle theorist Eric Erikson saw identity as a structure of the mind, serving as interface
between the individual's 'self' (a much broader concept than the Freudian ego) and her
social roles.43 In ordinary language the word 'identity' is roughly synonymous with words
like 'personality,' 'individuality' and 'character' – each with its own connotation, yet
overlapping so much as to be used almost interchangeably.
Here we'll define 'identity' in still another way, intended to supplant these other
senses, while clarifying their basic inter-relationship. As we've seen, all suggers bring
'something of themselves' to the suggestions they receive; and we can think of 'identity'
as that 'something' that they bring. By formal definition, 'identity' is the inclusive memetic
structure that serves a given system (notably a human individual) as context for
receiving, evaluating and responding to suggestions from its life and world. A few
remarks, specifically with reference to human identities, will make that usage clear:
1) That identity is an inclusive memetic structure puts it at the summit of a holarchy of
such structures (e.g. skills, concepts, beliefs, habits, and so forth) that comprise a
contextual order distinguishing one individual from another. As most people seem to feel,
the structures associated with language, ethnicity occupation and worldview (or religion)
are probably the most important of these, serving to anchor people's sense of identity; and
it is by these features (and countless lesser ones) that we know ourselves and are known
by others. Human identity begins with a skill-set and conceptual repertoire acquired in
earliest childhood, that develops and modifies over a lifetime, to be capped (hopefully)
by the worldview, life history and self-knowledge of the mature adult.
2) That identity is a context for suggestion-processing means that current suggestions are
received, interpreted evaluated and answered against this pre-existing background. Even
simple machines (that do no suggestion processing to speak of) already have a sort of
43 See Identity Youth and Crisis, Erik Erikson (1968) e.g. P 50: Ego identity . . . is the awareness of the
fact that there is a sameness and continuity to the ego's synthesizing methods, the style of one's
individuality, and that this style coincides with the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for
significant others . . ." [Italics in the original.]
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'pre-identity' in this sense. A car goes faster in its characteristic way when you press down
on the gas pedal, and goes slower when you press the brake. It corners just so when you
turn the steering wheel. Such responses, mostly designed and built into it, make it the car
it is and define its automotive 'identity.' True suggers, dealing in suggestions, not just
mechanical causes, have leeway to interpret and weigh the messages they receive, and
need identity structures for doing so. Animal identities are largely impersonal and
phenotypical, set mostly by the species to which they belong, and relatively little by
individual learning. By contrast, human identities seem to be orders of magnitude more
sophisticated: Though partly phenotypical, they are largely formed by 'culture' and by
individual experience.
3) That identity 'evolves' means that its memetic structures are shaped largely by SOC
and cognitive selection – by repeated, partly random testing of behaviors and attitudes,
with "longer lasting patterns lasting longer than those that last not so long." 44 In general,
memetic structures are sources of suggestion, as we've seen, guiding actual behavior in
rough, intentional terms, but not with great precision. The result is just the sort of 'natural
selection' (cognitive selection, as we might call it here) that evolution requires: varied
replication from one time to the next, with future likelihoods adjusted by the feedback of
positive and negative consequences.
4) Again following Bateson,45 we can think of identity as a calibration of the organism,
analogous to the setting of a thermostat, or the sighting-in of a rifle. Typically, such
human calibrations (also known as memes or scripts) are patterns of thought and feeling
and behavior – normal ways of being and doing. For example, all the different ways of
making a cup of coffee represent so many memetic structures – under the broader
structure of coffee-drinking itself . The way I usually make my coffee in the morning is a
calibration of mine, a small aspect of my identity, playing its part in making me the
individual I am. What happens as I follow my coffee-script can vary according to the
circumstances, and also by accident. Each performance will be an interpreted version, not
an exact copy, of the script itself – my learned memetic structure for getting up in the
morning.
5) Infants and young children are calibrated first of all by their genetic inheritance and
temperament, and then by their environments and significant relationships, learning to
respond with tolerable accuracy and consistency to the situations their lives present. The
saying that "children learn what they live" puts it in a nut shell. Their developing
identities will include all the values and expectations of normality that guide the moment-
by-moment course-corrections (feedback) of everyday life.
In sum, human identity can be imagined as a 'face' to meet not just the faces that one
meets, but as a context for all the suggestions that one receives – a context (formed by the
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individual's whole past) through which she understands and responds to each current
situation as it arrives. As such, it is a much broader concept than personality, if we take
the latter term in its etymological sense as a kind of actor's mask through which the
character's words are spoken.46 Personality is a face constructed and presented to the
world, needed because the world demands a certain consistency from us. Identity is an
interface constructed for our own use, to filter, weight, compare and collate all the
suggestions that we receive. Identity structures coordinate, for example:
• a given individual's sensory sampling of her environment (i.e. her selective
attention and blindness);
• her activities in response to her environment (i.e. her skills and habits);
• selective obedience to the customs, norms and roles of her community; the social
'face' that she presents;
• selective cooperation and relationships with significant others and with expanding
circles of 'public' (neighborhood, workplace, city, nation, and so forth);
• prioritization, timing and serialization of activities;
• access to memories;
• construction of imaginative counter-factuals
• etc.
It's on this concept of identity that our ecological paradigm of mind must prove its worth.
Does the conceptual apparatus help us to understand ourselves better? In particular, does
it help us understand how it is possible for people to respond to specific events and
situations with the advantage of previous learning and preparation, and yet as flexibly as
we do? Those are the central questions for this section, and for this paper as a whole.
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the narrowest of these contexts, comprised of family, peers, school, neighborhood and
whatever else the individual can influence directly, even as she herself is shaped. History
itself – all the economic, political and climatic circumstances of a life along with our
understandings of these – would be the largest context – except for the biology of the
species, which the psychologist must take as a given. Bronfenbrenner's model can be
considered ecological insofar as it is alert and sensitive to developmental context, but it
has little to say about the uptake and response to environmental conditions by a specific
individual, nor about her presence in, and potential impact on, the system as a whole. It
comes nowhere near to being 'an ecology of mind' in Gregory Bateson's sense.
From the present paper's perspective, we can say that Bronfenbrenner's 'systems' –
more like levels of study – will be fertile sources of competing suggestions, but that we
will have to look deeper if we hope to understand how the cacophony of influences gets
resolved into some more-or-less coherent identity,. We will have to rethink Erikson's neo-
Freudian stages from an ecological perspective – a considerable task, far beyond the
scope of the present paper, that I can barely hint at on the next few pages.
*****
Erikson argued, and I surely agree, that identity development continues throughout life.
Yet he writes of a transcendence of identity that begins (hopefully) with the conclusion of
adolescence, as the individual commits herself in love and work to her own version of
adult life. His chart shows eight phases of identity over the life-cycle, but he regards
identity as mature, at least in the sense of being ripe for transcendence, by the conclusion
of stage five – the end of adolescence, and just the threshold of full adulthood.
My treatment corresponds roughly to Erikson's first five stages of identity
development – building on his achievement while departing from it in several ways:
1) To begin with, the focus here is on issues (loci of competing suggestion) and not on
developmental 'stages' as such. We'll identify and discuss certain issues that recur
constantly and urgently, over the course of a lifetime. Stages of development, similar to
Erikson's will be treated, but only secondarily, as their corresponding issues are
prominent and/or come to crisis at certain times of life. We even discuss these issues in
rough chronological order. But our central interest is always on the issues, and the
memetic structures that a healthy identity will need to cope with them – failing which, an
overload of competing suggestions may end in a paralysis of hope and volition – one
obvious risk factor for clinical depression.
2) I treat the development of identity as an evolution of memetic structure, which can be
regarded as an abstraction and generalization from skill-learning – the process of trial-
and-error and adaptive refinement, closely analogous to evolution, that we considered in
Section 3. As James Marcia has described,49 we form identities by exploring alternatives
– alternative suggestions, I would stress – settling eventually on what gets reinforcement
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(i.e. suggestions of pleasurable outcome). One fails a lot, succeeds occasionally, and
(with or without flashes of conscious insight), steers closer to the patterns that lead to
pleasing results. One forms viable habits to handle recurring situations more or less
automatically, stops paying conscious attention to them, and goes on to other matters.
3) As well, to the extent these issues can be said to emerge and come to crisis in
predictable stages, the periodization offered here is somewhat different from Erikson's
neo-Freudian approach. I break Erikson's second stage into two parts, treating
autonomous locomotion and bowel control as separate issues. Likewise, I break his fifth
stage apart, to treat the issues of puberty as preparatory for those of a separate stage that I
will call 'sociation,' dominated by an issue that I call arrangement Reasons for these
departures are given below, at the appropriate places.
4) Finally, the reader is cautioned that this discussion of identity issues is speculative and
theoretical insofar as it is at all original, with no backing (beyond what is already
common knowledge) from clinical experience or research. My present purpose is merely
to explore possible consequences of our ecological paradigm for the theory of identity
and its development. Empirical testing and refinement must be a task for the future.
The first efforts of a human life are just to get a first breath and, shortly after, a first meal.
For her first few months, the infant remains a remarkably helpless creature, unable to
move or even turn over or sit up without the assistance of others. She spends more than
half her day sleeping. When awake, however, she is tremendously active, soaking up
suggestions about her body and world and working hard to make some sense of it all. She
enters into her first social relationships, charms and engages the adults around her, well
prepared by evolution to gain from them the welcome, love and care that she must win or
die. It is for this reason, I think, that Erikson, a tad romantically perhaps, sums up the
infant's sense of identity as "I am what hope I have and give." More prosaically, but in
complete agreement with him, we can say that the central issues of earliest life are
'sustenance' and 'trust.' Expelled from the automatic safety and satisfactions of the womb
into a precarious world, the infant receives alternating suggestions of pain and
satisfaction, emptiness and fullness, warmth and cold – of being abandoned alone, but
sometimes of being held, fed, comforted and flirted with by marvelous beings whom it
soon learns to recognize and long for.
If all goes well, the infant forms what John Bowlby called secure attachments, and
what Erikson sees as an underlying life-mood of confidence that her needs will be met.
Where we might differ slightly from previous writers might be in treating the pathologies
of this stage as difficulties of communication, resulting from suggestions that are not
received and answered properly by the potential care-givers to whom they are sent.
(Typically, the infant's messages are loud and adequately clear – though it is an
interesting question whether this is always the case. How they are heard and responded to
is less reliable.)
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The factors that can interfere with happy bonding and attachment are mostly well-
known and need not be repeated here. It's well understood, for example that even breast-
feeding is a significant skill and relationship, where the proficient performance of neither
party can be taken for granted, that takes practice and patience from both to get right.
And it is understood that expectations of failure formed at this stage, can have permanent
consequences, e.g. a difficulty forming relationships in later life. As an alternative to
Erikson's formulation, we might sum up the infant's sense of identity as a dim awareness
that "I am the systems that suffer unpleasant suggestions and provide pleasant ones."
Including my own body, of course.
Despite intense curiosity, ingenious experimentation and a great deal of theorizing on
the subject, we don't really know much about identity in this earliest phase of life.
Controversy here centers on the extent to which the infant already has some sense of
separateness or individuality as against her caregivers and her immediate environment. 50
How, and to what extent does the infant already recognize herself as a separate being?
How does a sense of separateness get formed? Or is it present even from birth in normal
infants – those not prone to the condition that we call autism?
Defining identity as we have done here might seem to sweep the problematic of
object relations theory under a rug by focusing on structures that shape the infant's
behavior in relation to the suggestions she receives, while ignoring her budding
subjectivity (if any, and if that concept is even meaningful at this stage of life). However,
its clear enough that the infant is born with or quickly gains the use of some critical parts
of her own body, and very soon learns a working distinction between the features of her
universe that she controls directly, and those that she can only influence with her cry, her
attempts at suckling and her smile. Certainly the normal infant comes primed for social
interaction – with her fascination with faces, her propensity for imitation and that so-
rewarding smile that her adult care-givers must work to earn.
What we can say for sure is that after a few months of complete dependency, taking
in suggestions, gaining the use of her own body and entering into relationships with a few
caregivers and other familiar persons, these older persons find that the latest addition to
their group is no longer a complete infant, but an active baby with a prodigious curiosity.
Autonomous Activity
The first months are spent getting a grip on life and gaining the use of one's own body.
By the 7th month or so, the baby begins to get around on her own, clearly seeking a new
and tactile familiarity, her own kind of intimacy as we might say, with every portion of
the world that she can access. She is no longer a baby, strictly speaking but first an
effectively crawling 'rug rat' and then a 'toddler,' balancing precariously on her two hind
limbs and taking her first steps. Likewise, the cognitive balance of her world has shifted
completely from a soaking up of suggestions to an active taking in. She is no longer just a
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little appropriator of her world, but a researcher, an explorer, who boldly goes where she
has never gone before. At this time of life, she and the Starship Enterprise have a lot in
common.
Unfortunately, the toddler's discoveries find limitations because even her home (never
mind the wide world) can be a dangerous place, and is governed by the will of others
more powerful than her own. Her parents and other protectors will keep certain places
and objects off limits either because they are dangerous or because they do not want them
damaged. There will be power struggles over such limits; there will be accidents –
hopefully not too serious, but painful and frightening regardless. Wise parents will not
over-protect, but will allow safe accidents as part of the learning process. With a little
luck, the kid survives to learn some judgment and progresses to a new stage of identity,
aptly characterized by Erikson as "I am what I can freely will."
Centrally, what gets learned at this stage is autonomy and its limits – not just free will,
but also free judgment – necessarily engaged with, sometimes in conflict with, other
people's wills and judgments, and with hard reality itself. Negative outcomes for this
stage would include the emotions of fear and doubt. One positive outcome, as Erikson
suggests, would be a sense of "law and order" – and of rightful authority as distinct from
overwhelming and frightening power. Along these lines, the contributions to later identity
from this stage are manifold and obvious. Not only can we not get everything we want
just by crying for it, but cannot get all we want even by going after it. Ideally, the key
lesson of this stage should be, "You win some, you lose some"; and that when you fall
down, you pick yourself up and try again.
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elicited in the youngest infants, and require no learning at all. Nine such affects were
identified by a psychologist named Silvan Tomkins, but that list need not be repeated
here.51 The crucial point for us is that without suggestions from these systems, nothing
could matter to us. Or, putting it the other way round, events and situations can matter to
us only in ways and to the extent that these systems suggest. Adult emotion represents a
blending of physiological affect with memories, narratives, scripts and expected
outcomes. Affect is hardwired but emotion has to be learned – and it is in early childhood
that most of this learning occurs.
Specifically, although shame affect is innate, shame emotion is not; and what I want
to suggest here is that toilet training is central to the way that shame emotion is
construed, as its connection with shame affect is far from obvious. Shame affect is a
reflex that can be observed, as I've said, even in infants, (and in some higher animals as
well, though it is not nearly as powerful nor as important for them as it is for us). Eyes
and face are averted and downcast; eyelids lower; there is a loss of muscle tone in the
face and neck causing the head or even the whole body to droop. It can be understood as
a physiological reflex of renunciation – a literal turning away from and giving up of
something when other negative affects, e.g. fear or disgust, do not avail. As such, its
crucial importance to a social animal is obvious. A young man sitting next to a lovely
woman who would not welcome his coming on to her, a poor man in a store full of
wonderful items that he can't afford, needs shame affect, not just the prudent fear of
prison to keep his impulses under control. As Nathanson explains, shame can limit the
expression of any other affect52 or intention, cutting off otherwise desirable goals as
beyond our reach, and setting limits on any otherwise attractive project.
But shame emotion usually involves something quite different – as the story in
Genesis 3 suggests. In our own and most other societies, shame emotion is bound up with
an impulse to clothe oneself and/or hide – to cover one's face, or vanish under the earth.
Shame emotion involves feelings of embarrassment and unworthiness. Unlike guilt, the
sense that one has done something wrong, shame emotion includes a sense that one is
wrong or bad oneself. And what I what to argue is that this possibility, which never
occurs to babies and toddlers is easily raised in connection with the absence or loss of
bowel and bladder control, and the responses of significant others when this happens.
For autonomous activity, the governing value is something like Csikszentmihalyi's
concept of flow – spontaneous action at an optimum level of challenge. For continence,
the governing value is self-restraint or self-control – not quite the opposite of flow, but
definitely action with a proper sense of time and place. I think this sense is first and
51 The reader can find a concise account of affect theory in a book called Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex
and the Birth of the Self, by the psychiatrist Donald Nathanson or in an essay of my own called Affect
Theory, Shame and the Logic of Personality available on the Web at www.secthoughts.com/Misc
%20Essays/Shame%20and%20Personality.pdf
52 Only surprise seems immune because it happens too fast and stands, as it were, logically prior to
shame, as it is to every other affect. We must “take in” a situation, and interpret what is
happening, before we can respond to it. Surprise, the startle reflex, instantly redirects attention
and prepares for a fresh take.
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primarily learned in connection with toilet training – and easily over-learned there. If so,
the Freudian concept of 'anal personality' is perfectly intelligible even while keeping
autonomy and continence as separate issues.
Power
The passage from infancy to toddler-hood is perhaps the first great transition of life.
Sometime around age four there is a second great transition – to what might be called
prime or mature childhood, which is really less of a contradiction than it sounds. The
four-year-old is still a child clearly, and very 'childish' in many ways, but is already
showing a remarkable grasp of her little world. She knows how things should be, and she
wants them just so – partly because she knows how to cope when they are kept like that,
and partly because she has already learned the rules, but not yet their exceptions. Though
definitely hanging on as best she can to the prerogatives and privileges of baby- and
toddler hood, she can be remarkably adult within her limits when it suits her. Thus, the
phrase 'mature childhood' seems apt for this period, because the child is consolidating and
enjoying the huge gains already made while not quite ready yet for the challenges of
formal schooling, and the much larger, more impersonal world this will involve.
Again, Erikson as a neo-Freudian tends to see this phase in phallic, intrusive terms,
and to focus on the Oedipal issues of identification and rivalry with the same-sex parent,
and desire for the other-sexed one. To his credit, however, Erikson rather downplays the
family dramas to characterize identity at this stage in a much broader way as "I am what I
imagine I will be." Indeed, the current research suggests that Oedipal issues, while
present and sometimes important, are not nearly as central as Freud thought. Though the
child is always getting into things, and can be quite intrusive as Erikson suggests, and
though the child is quite likely by this age to have discovered the pleasures of his or her
own genital region, there is little specifically phallic about her activities and interests.
What is conspicuous at this time of life, is a new intensity of play, especially role-play, as
the child tries on all sorts of possible identities – first, to get a sense of what it might feel
like to be a princess or Spider-man, or whoever, and second, to test what responses these
roles draw from the adults and older kids around her. One can see such play as imaginary
insertion of the child's self into the situations and roles of grown-up life, but the Freudian
analogy with phallic intromission contributes little to our understanding, especially
because girls are as avid as boys for play of this kind, though they may already be
preoccupied with 'feminine' roles and will probably get different feedback (which will, of
course depend on how the culture they are being raised in construes gender and
distributes roles). But it's the whole self that gets imaginatively inserted – and not just
into Mommy or Daddy roles, but into all attractive or interesting roles within the child's
ken.
If all goes well, the outcome of this stage is much as Erikson suggests: the basis for a
realistic sense of ambition and purpose as will be needed in later life. But there are new
hazards also: I remember my own discovery of death at this age, and the sinister
attractions of violence. I remember the shock my daughter experienced at this age when
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she first made a connection between the cute little chickens in her picture books and the
chicken on our plates at dinner. Aggression, cruelty, fear and guilt are normal discoveries
– and necessary ones, because these things too are a part of life, much as we may wish it
otherwise. One can protect children from these terrors only so far. Even when we screen
the books they read, and the movies and programs they get to watch, they soon discover
the negative facts of life in themselves and from one another.
Perhaps the key issues at this age are those of power and face. The child can no
longer just cry for what she wants (though she still tries that tactic more often than her
parents would like), but must learn to ask politely and negotiate, and keep the promises
she makes. Soon enough, she comes to understand the powers and interests arrayed
against her. Sometimes she can get her way, especially from loving parents who like to
please her, and sometimes she can't and shouldn't. In any case, hopefully, she learns the
difference between holding a strong hand and a weak one – and learns to play, with some
skill, whatever hand she holds.
With new skills of self-control, role-play, language and negotiation, a child comes to
appreciate the tactical advantages of coherent face – to present to others, and to deal with
the faces that others use when they deal with her. At this age, you can hear a child
verbally reminding herself of what she is supposed to do, and scolding herself when
impulse gets the better of her. You can see her hiding behind a curtain or a rock or the
sofa when she has lost face in some way.
In fact, toward the end of this stage, the child is well on her way to becoming a full-
fledged person, dealing with other persons in a social world of other persons who once
imperfectly learned or are still learning the same lessons. And so prepared, she is ready to
start school.
It is surely no accident that every known society and culture pushes its children into
whatever formal education they are going to receive roughly between the ages of five and
seven. After the role-play games a little earlier, the kids are eager for real-world roles and
responsibilities, and with suitable instruction and some protection from life's hazards,
they are ready now. While the so-called 'latency period' of this age range is probably a
Freudian myth (as it cannot be established cross-culturally nor, with much solidity, even
in our own), it seems clear enough that children before puberty have little interest in the
opposite sex as such, once their own gender identity is established – once they know how
to present themselves as little girls or little boys respectively. But they surely understand
that they are still weak and ignorant and relatively helpless as compared with the adults
around them, that they themselves will be adults some day, and that they have a great deal
of growing and learning to do in preparation for that eventuality. Erikson rightly stresses
that this apprenticeship period is crucial for identity formation – especially in retrospect,
as we look back on it from adulthood. The children themselves can recognize, though
they may chafe at the discipline of schooling or at its local conditions and arrangements,
that they have much to learn – though not necessarily what their adult teachers are trying
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to teach.
From the perspective of society and its designated teachers, as Erikson puts it,
"Nothing less is at stake than the development and maintenance in children of a positive
identification with those who know things and know how to do things." Their task, in
other words, is to make society and its roles appear sufficiently attractive – effectively
suggest them to be so – so as to inculcate in school-age children the ambition to fill the
adult roles eventually, and to start learning now the skills and knowledge that they will
later need. Children at this age love to make things, and to do things that lead to visible
and tangible results. In the early school-years at any rate, skillful teachers in safe and
pleasant schools can readily channel this love in the desired directions.
In hunting-and-gathering societies, the preparation and smooth absorption of each
new generation is relatively straightforward. The children quite naturally admire their
parents and hope to be like them soon. The older generation's roles are intelligible, and
there are not many alternatives. Tragically, however, in modern industrial and post-
industrial societies this same issue – the need for smooth generational replenishment –
may be insoluble for all but a small minority of the children in each cohort. Too many
modern jobs are unintelligible to a young child – and may not be on offer to the young
adult. The parents' lives don't look all that attractive. Society as a whole looks pretty ugly
just now. No one should be surprised that 'juvenile delinquency' is a social problem. What
is surprising as this piece is written is that the alienation and anger of youth has not led to
even more rebelliousness and criminality than we've actually seen.
We are getting ahead of ourselves. The failures of education and assimilation at this
apprenticeship stage will only become evident at the sociation stage below. But in all
societies and cultures, there is a tension between the work-roles that are heroic and/or
creative and/or lucrative and those that are none of the above; and it's in this
apprenticeship period that the tension becomes manifest. As Erikson says, "It is
immediately obvious that for the vast majority of men, in all times, [work] has been not
only the beginning, but also the limitation of their identity; the majority of men have
always consolidated their identity needs around their technical and occupational
capacities, leaving it to special groups (special by birth, by choice or election, and by
giftedness) to establish and preserve those 'higher' institutions without which man's daily
work has always seemed an inadequate self-expression, if not a mere grind, or even a
kind of curse." Beginning around age five or so, identity is not so much what I can "learn
to make work" (in Erikson's words) as what I can learn to do that wins both adult and
peer group approval. These are seldom the same today, and there is a real dilemma
between them that very few people seem actually to overcome and get past. In the long
run, most of us are doing well if we can win a reasonable income at not too high a price
in health or tedium or self-contempt.
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caused a scandal when Freud first proposed it, and remains controversial to this day. But
the controversy is largely based on misunderstanding. What Freud meant by 'sexuality' is
more accurately called 'erotic love' or by Freud's technical term 'libido.' We need not
think of it, exactly per the Freudian model, as driving the mind in the way that steam
drives a Victorian locomotive. We can see now that Freudians became fixated on that
libido theory to the exclusion of other issues equally important. But it is no more than
justice to acknowledge his courage and insight( especially for his time and place), in
recognizing the importance of erotic love for the mind's development. In part, at least,
one can even forgive Freud for making a dogma of his libido theory, given the reception
it met.
Where ancient Greek had four words for the different varieties of love, 53 English has
only one. This unfortunate poverty of language almost forces confusion between love as a
noble and generous emotion and love as a possessive and self-centered one. It was the
latter that Freud made central in his thinking and tried to put before the public's attention.
For that reason, let us stick with his term 'libido' meaning not just sexual attraction but
the avid, possessive love that one can see already in an infant rooting for her mother's
breast or looking at her face, or at some brightly colored mobile over the crib.
At this early age, libido is not really an issue, though it is already a powerful driving
motive. It becomes an issue somewhat later when the child develops a craving for sweets
and television and other things that (she is told) should be enjoyed only sparsely, in
moderation, if at all. But it is in puberty that possessive love really comes to the
foreground as a competition of powerful but incompatible suggestions, for an assortment
of reasons, all very well known:
• first, because sexual activity may lead to pregnancy, an event with enormous
personal and social consequences;
• second because the young male, already at his sexual peak and desperate for
sexual expression is probably not yet in a position to attract a mate or support a
family;
• third, because societies and the older generation usually take a strong interest in
who produces children with whom and under what conditions; and
• finally, because for whatever reason, the love-object one reaches out toward may
not wish to be possessed.
For these reasons, sexuality is always more than a simple drive, like the needs for air or
water or food. Always it is accompanied by a welter of impulses and injunctions pulling
incompatibly in different directions – by a competition of suggestions, in other words.
As with the other issues we've discussed, resolution of these competing suggestions
will be achieved only through new formations of identity – new memetic structures, as
we have seen. Seen in purely psychological terms, the outcome will be the discovery (or
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invention) of what we call sexual identity, a resolution of identity issues that new-found
sexuality is raising. Pragmatically, however, the partner(s) one finds, the expressions and
satisfactions one achieves are features of what we'll call an arrangement, the public
identity and lifestyle next considered.
Arrangement
Apart from sexuality and its issues, the world of a human adult differs from a child's in at
least two clear respects:
• there is at least a partial emancipation from the supervision of parents and other
authorities, and an assumption of responsibility for one's own actions;
• there is a shouldering of the problems of adulthood: notably of winning and
defending a secure place and status in society, gaining a livelihood and catering
for one's own needs – and eventually those of some others as well.
As a child, you live inside arrangements that are largely made by others. As an adult you
make your own arrangements to the extent that circumstances permit. I use 'arrangement'
here as a technical term for the compromises of full adulthood and their outcomes:
compromises of one's own autonomy with the conditions one encounters and with the
autonomy of others. We start out with desires and dreams and ambitions. We end up
having lived specific lives, in specific places at given times, having participated in
particular institutions along with particular companions and adversaries. These particulars
are what I mean by 'one's arrangement' – not just the conditions and circumstances
themselves, but the way one copes with and adapts to them. Arrangement is an issue,
along with the others we've discussed: the choice to "stick it or chuck it," as one of
Bernard Shaw's characters says.54
We encounter issues of arrangement even as infants, adapting to the parenting we get
and to the families we live in; but arrangement comes to the forefront toward the end of
puberty, in a separate phase that I would call 'sociation.' In today's world this usually lasts
much longer than puberty, and must include arrangements not just for sexual expression,
but for income and major social affiliations (e.g. of politics and/or religion) and whatever
else. Arrangements are likely to change over the course of a lifetime – quite drastically
during a mid-life crisis, for example. But the major effort of arrangement typically
happens in the late teens and twenties when adolescence is largely complete, but we are
not yet full adults. In fact, the elders will not consider us full adults, until our
arrangements are firmly settled.
*****
We can break off here. Of course, identity continues to evolve over the remainder of the
life-cycle, with several significant issues and transitions still to go, and with striking
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changes and 'conversion experiences' always a possibility. Still, the anchoring features of
nearly all identities – their basic structures and capabilities – are well in place by the time
sociation is complete. The basic traits formed in early childhood may well change their
expression but are not likely to alter much in themselves. The native and really fluent
languages have been acquired, as have most skills and qualifications. Ethnicity and
nationality have been established. Sexual orientation has been discovered and explored.
One's most significant and enduring personal relationships have probably been
established. Memetic structures corresponding to all these traits and features have
evolved and are well in place by the end of the sociation period, based on capabilities
already latent in the genome itself. Radical changes are still possible for some, but for
most people in the second half of life it seems that what chiefly remains to be established
might be summed up as 'worldview.'
Typically, worldview is shaped by suggestions from all the other key features of
identity: certainly from temperament and basic character structure, from the language(s)
one speaks, and all the groups (ethnic, national, professional, religious etc.) to which one
belongs. Even sexuality bears on worldview, in ways too subtle for discussion here.
We might say that worldview represents a culmination of identity, insofar as it
summarizes and expresses all of identity’s other aspects, reconciling and justifying them
to one another. Sandy Harris, a friend of mine who has taught ESL in Saudi Arabia and
Iran and China, liked to say that "From inside, all cultures make sense." That is to say,
their worldviews are self-justifying and self-confirming – ecologically stable, in other
words. With a given worldview one tends to see the things that confirm one's identity
(including that worldview itself) and to overlook things inconsistent with them. 55 Except
as it is taken over uncritically from elders and peer group, worldview is usually the last
element of identity to lock in place.
But what is a worldview, and what are its crucial features? How to get some grip on
this vague notion – on its characteristic elements, its connection with other aspects of
identity, and on the functions it serves?
4.2 Worldview
Worldview is a sprawling notion and a slippery one. 56 Let's see if our ideas about
ecological mind, suggestion and memetic structure can help at all.
In Brussels there is an interdisciplinary research center, founded by and named after
the late Belgian philosopher and scholar Leo Apostel, aimed not just at understanding the
concept of worldview, but at constructing integrated worldviews consistent with modern,
scientific knowledge. According to the Apostel Center's booklet, 57 a worldview will
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provide a descriptive model of the world with answers to at least the following questions:
1) What is the nature of our world? How is it structured and how does it function?
2) Why is our world the way it is, and not different? Why are we the way we are, and not
different? What kind of global explanatory principles can we put forward?
3) Why do we feel the way we feel in this world, and how do we assess global reality,
and the role of our species in it?
4) How are we to act and to create in this world? How, in what different ways, can we
influence the world and transform it? What are the general principles by which we should
organize our actions?
5) What future is open to us and our species in this world? By what criteria are we to
select these possible futures?
It can be seen that these questions, framed as neutrally as possible, are just those of the
traditional religions but only partly amenable to scientific treatment. For example, "How
is [the world] structured and how does it function?" is a scientific question. "How are we
to act and to create in this world?" is an ethical, aesthetic and 'spiritual' issue, not a
scientific one at all. Yet all are humanly important questions that science (psychology and
the social sciences, in particular) must recognize as valid and urgent. One crucial result of
modern science, we might say, is a recognition of its own radical incompleteness in the
face of human questionning. How to terms with that incompleteness – fill up the Void, so
to speak – is not for science to say, though it can certainly offer comments on the
veridicality of the myths on offer. As alternative suggestions, however, those of science
and of religion are on equal footing until they are weighed (by someone, with certain
acquired memetic structures) and taken up as a basis for choice and action.
The simple, painful fact – for the science-minded, at any rate – is that human
identities are incomplete without memetic structures that science cannot supply. Where to
look for such structures is beyond the scope of this paper, but their function is not, and
their contents are much as Apostel and his center have identified. Without some sense of
the world's nature, structure and functioning, of why it is the way it is, of the role of
humankind and ourselves within it, of the future that we should hope for and work
toward, human identities are incomplete.
One question that science might attempt would be a taxonomy of worldviews: How
can these be classified? Which basic types are currently on offer? An ecology of mind
will do this along lines that Richard Dawkins first proposed, by treating worldviews as
alternative memetic structures vying for 'space' in people's brains: which 'niches' they fill,
and on what bases they compete. 58 This paper's contribution to meme theory – a more
adequate account of the way that memes are physically represented in artifacts and in
and the site of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/
58 See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme and http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMIN.HTML
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people's brains – needs no further elaboration here. But we might say a little more about
how people build or choose their worldviews before concluding.
We can rework Apostel's questions against the specific functions (mentioned at the
beginning of this section) that our identities and their memetic structures subserve – that
is to say, against the classes of current suggestion that we process with their assistance. In
doing so, we see that Apostel's list is much too abstract and theoretical for the concrete
purposes of life. As phrased, probably not one person in a million could give any sort of
coherent answer to them, and I for one would not care to try. Yet most people do get
along somehow without an articulate worldview in this sense, and even philosophers
manage much of their lives without one. How do we do this?
We have skills and working knowledge of how things work. We have some vague,
mostly mythical and dormative ideas to dismiss real questions and make them go away.
We have a folk psychology, perhaps hard wired, that connects people's intentions and
actions to their beliefs and desires. We have an assortment of sloppy ideas about 'human
nature, e.g. that humans are sinful, that males are aggressive, that women are nurturing,
want to have babies and can be expected to take care of them. These ideas may be more
or less correct, or just plain wrong, but none could pass muster as components of a
worldview that a philosopher or scientist would dignify with that name.
We have ideas about proper behavior and about the rights and legitimate expectations
of others that we took over rather uncritically from our parents and peers and teachers,
and that we follow when it suits us. We have myths about our own and other peoples,
about our nations and about the future. We may believe in an afterlife – tenaciously, but
without the slightest evidence; and if we do, we probably cherish some fantasy about
what it will be like, and what we must do in this life to qualify for a pleasant spot
hereafter. We may have some grand myth of history, and of the purpose of it all.
I write cynically here just to make the point that although none of this can qualify as a
'worldview' in any scientific or philosophically serious sense of that term, such ideas do
serve at least three functions fairly well: they characterize and configure and help hold
together the societies we live in; they hold anxieties below some tolerable level; and they
provide sufficient basic orientation to get us through our days and lives. The history of
heresy, a fascinating compartment of religious and general history, suggests that people
often wave their worldviews like battle flags to rally around and fight under. In this
respect, the worldview of science is no exception. Reading the speeches of politicians in
the daily newspaper conveys the same idea. A fine-grained account of the suggestions
that people have to process, especially those regarding death and taxes and their status on
the social ladder will go a long way toward explaining how our worldviews are
configured.
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researchers and philosophers are no longer just 'taking steps' toward an ecology of mind,
but have arrived at that destination and are applying its program across the board – not
only in psychology, but in all the social sciences, in ethology, in linguistics, in religious
studies – in every field where issues of mind, communication and group interaction are
central. Suppose further (what at the present time seems unlikely) that this bottom-up,
science-based world view and self-understanding becomes the accepted view, not just for
a science-minded minority, but for the public at large. Suppose, in short, that what I have
called the ecoDarwinian paradigm59 – the vision of a bottom-up, self-organizing world in
place of a top-down, designed and ordained world – prevails completely, with this
ecological suggestion-driven concept of mind among its central features. What might we
expect?
Bateson himself believed that a great many of the evils of our world today could be
traced to the fact that its mainstream worldview was totally obsolete. As he said in a
memorandum to the Regents of the University of California, written in the midst of the
Cold War: "Necessarily, every aspect of our civilization is split wide open. In the field of
economics, we face two overdrawn caricatures of life – the capitalist or the communist –
and we are told that we must take sides in the struggle between these two monstrous
ideologies. In the business of thinking we are torn between extremes of affectlessness and
the strong current of anti-intellectual fanaticism."60
Bateson points specifically to three ideas that he claims are obsolete: the Cartesian
dualism separating 'mind' and 'matter'; the physicalism of metaphors like 'power,'
'tension,' 'energy' and 'social forces' used to describe and explain mental phenomena; and
the physicalist idea that mental phenomena can and should be studied and evaluated61 in
quantitative terms. In place of these old ideas, Bateson argued that Mind was and had to
be a part of Nature, emergent from natural processes of self-organization; and that both
biological and mental features had to be understood in a qualitative language of pattern
and inter-relationship, not in a quantitative language at all. Specifically, he thought it a
lethal error to believe that if a little of something is good then more of it will be better. He
saw clearly that our society today is addicted to growth, and knew that in the long run,
this addiction must prove fatal.
The situation has scarcely improved since Bateson wrote. Scientists have learned a
whole lot more, but the public at large and especially its politics seem more deeply
committed than ever to the obsolete ideas that Bateson hoped to scrap. But suppose, just
as a flight of imagination, that Bateson's ecological view of mind and nature became
conventional wisdom at some point. What would that outcome look like? At the level of
thought and then of daily existence, what would it mean for the way we see ourselves and
manage our lives? This paper can end with a few suggestions along those lines.
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6) Perhaps the most fundamental of all suggestions is the suggestion to 'pay' attention to
something. (This expression itself is interesting – suggesting, as it does, that attention is a
cost – scarce resource that we must 'pay' or 'invest.') The choice to invest sensory and
suggestion-processing resources in one thing rather another – and some given instant, and
cumulatively over time – is partly voluntary but partly not. The suggestion paradigm
offers an approach to the process whereby attention and the stream of consciousness are
directed.
7) Finally, a suggestion-based psychology poses a challenge of taxonomy:
the classification of human minds, and of minds in general, based on their
sensitivity to different types of suggestion, and/or the mechanisms through
which competing suggestions are evaluated.
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We'd have a better sense then of the amazing capabilities of human minds, and of their
limitations and genetically conditioned proclivities as well. We'd be better prepared to
encounter mind elsewhere in the universe.
2) We'd face the challenge of framing an appropriate taxonomy of mind: a valid and
useful classification scheme for the kinds of minds there can be.
3) In particular, human groups, organizations and whole societies could then be
recognized without dispute or reservation as an interesting special case of mind in
general. The psychological traits of human groups (including their divisions, conflicts
and episodes of insanity) could then be studied unabashedly, and their histories written,
from one perspective at least, as psychological 'biographies' of a mental development.64
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culture even as we learn and use them, so that our relationship to culture is always
reciprocal. Our tools (or, more precisely, the conceptual structures behind those tools)
always use us as much as we use them.
2) To the extent that human institutions and cultures are shaped by the SOC process 66
with its endless cycle of build-up and collapse, the Greek myth of Sisyphus is an apt
representation of the human condition. The king rolls his boulder up the hill, but it keeps
rolling back down again. The child builds her tower of blocks, which keeps collapsing as
soon as it gets tall enough to be really interesting. What we have learned, however, is that
this limitation on achievement is not a curse or a punishment, but a tautological law of
nature – in fact, one of the principles behind evolution's astounding creativity. We have a
name for that process now, and begin to have a general understanding of it. When the
conditions are just right ("Not too hot! Not too cold!"), what we call 'self-organization'
(or 'auto-poiesis') builds local order in a field of over-all symmetry and chaos. In
particular, self-organized criticality builds stigmergic structures in the physical world, and
re-suggestive, memetic structures in our minds. Structures of both kinds continually re-
combine with one another to form larger and more complex structures, but they collapse
sometimes, or else get pruned by ecoDarwinian co-selection.
3) Mental structure is influenced moment-by-moment and cumulatively, by the
suggestions that a mind receives. As James Gibson emphasized, what a mind is inside of
shapes the structures inside of it. And vice versa, to some extent. In Tibetan Buddhist
thought, the totality of re-suggestive structures that we inhabit (and that we are) is
represented by the diagram known as a mandala. Borrowing that word, we can say that
each of us lives in a suggestive mandala – a context of suggestion and re-suggestive
structure – that we encounter in the natural and social worlds, but then re-arrange and
decorate for personal use.
4) Typically, human suggers not only receive and respond to suggestions from our
external world, but also originate suggestions to ourselves. In fact, we humans are
specialists at auto-suggestion of many kinds; and much of what we do is self-directed by
suggestions that we make to ourselves – either on 'impulse' or by firm intention. We
stimulate ourselves through feelings, memories and fantasies that motivate behavior. We
move and touch our own bodies, and we feel ourselves doing so. We do things just to see
what happens, to feel how the world responds. We use language to add rich symbolic
overtones to the ordinary objects that surround us. We make amazingly rich use of
stigmergy – writing notes to ourselves, keeping diaries and all manner of other texts, and
creating 'art' of every description in every medium available.
In all these ways, human behavior could be described as masturbatory, to quite a
significant extent: We are constantly getting ourselves excited just for the pleasure and
interest of excitement itself, whether or not there is anything around to get excited about.
To stave off boredom – the blahs, to use that perfect slang expression – we send ourselves
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drastic as the first, but by no means trivial once it is taken seriously. We'll still receive
messages from the physical world, and pass our messages to one another. But we'll
consider and evaluate those messages not primarily as information (true or false
statements), but as suggestions to feel or think or do something, perhaps in some
particular way. Where statements are judged as true or false, (or more or less probable),
suggestions are weighed quite differently, in various other dimensions. As we've seen, 69 to
think of a suggestion as true or false is just a category mistake. Statements purport to
represent the world, and should be coherent and consistent – not allowed to contradict
one another. By contrast, in a world of suggestions, ambiguity and contradiction are the
norm. Suggestions clue, or hint, or prod, and may easily do so in different, mutually
incompatible directions. A suggestion may or may not be interesting or helpful, or self-
seving or power-based, etc. It may even be sound, or well-grounded, but not even the
statement I am making now can be flatly true. As a suggestion to see the world in a
certain way, the reader must decide for herself whether it's worthwhile.
In a world of suggestions you must find a degree of coherence for yourself, in the
choices and activities of your body and (quite secondarily) in the beliefs and intentions of
your mind, but that world itself is indifferent to contradiction and has room for
multitudes. You accept or reject all suggestions at your own discretion and risk.
Truth is still possible, and messages (in the beliefs they suggest to you) may be
factually correct. The implicit claim of any message – that it is true – is often worth
accepting, because universal doubt, of everyone and everything, is just not a feasible
strategy. Yet media, language, and the senses themselves have their limitations, many
communications are self-serving, and there are plenty of liars. Indeed, most modern
organizations have professional ones on their payroll. For suggestions, caveat emptor is
the rule. Accepting that one is a sugger, one tries not to be a sucker. Here are just a few of
the implications that seem to follow:
1) First, reality is as it is, but all knowledge is a human artifact. What passes for truth is a
structure of suggestions that builds up but sometimes breaks down through processes of
SOC and memetic co-evolution that we've begun to understand. The knowledge structure
is more like an amusement park than like a solid pyramid: You pay your money and you
take the ride.
2) Before suggestions can be accepted or rejected they need to be received and
understood. Interpretation is indeed an act of power, just as Nietzsche suggested, but
merely willful interpretations just make a mess. Making coherent sense from the myriad
of competing suggestions requires not just power, but a high degree of cognitive
craftsmanship. Ultimately, suggestion theory seems to point beyond cultural relativism to
what one might call conciliatory pluralism: The different ways of making sense must
leave respectful space for one another or there will be violence – no sense at all – for
anyone.
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3) Suggestions prod in this or that direction, but no suggestion completely specifies the
action that it suggests. Always the recipient is left to accept or decline what is suggested,
and then to implement the suggestion in her own way. For this reason, suggestion theory
draws attention to the incompleteness of human communication, to its limited bandwidth,
and to the many ways that communication can fail. In particular, since rules and laws are
ultimately just a structure of suggestions, the idea of completely liberty constrained only
by law cannot workable in the long run – as I think we are seeing today. Something must
always be left to the sense of solidarity, discretion and good will of the individuals
concerned – or to self-organization itself: the spontaneous emergence of order (not
necessarily order we would enjoy) from chaos.
4) It's well known that language can trick us in various ways, suggesting ideas that just
aren't so, or that have no basis except in our grammar and speech habits. One such trick,
possibly grounded in the physiology of the brain and prior to language itself, is our way
of dividing the world into polar opposites: true or false, good or bad, yes or no; and a
side effect of this habit, stemming directly from the way such words are used, is the
notion that if a little of something is good, then more of it must be better, while an
unlimited supply of it would be best of all. Language suggests that we should get as much
of the good things and as little of the bad ones as we can, but living systems don't work
this way. As Bateson puts it, too much of anything is toxic 70 In the same chapter, entitled
"Every Schoolboy Knows . . ." he lists a number of other common blunders, deeply
grounded and constantly re-suggested by language itself. Another general suggestion,
certainly not original to this paradigm but strongly confirmed and detailed by it is that we
readily mislead ourselves and each other, even when we don't want to.
5) Finally, then, thre is the metaphysical implication that we live not in a Platonic world
of ideal forms, nor in a Judaeo-Christian world of Divine Fiat and Providence, nor in a
material world of interacting particles, but in a world of suggestions. The state of physics
today leaves open the possibility that this may be true at the quantum level even in raw
nature, but it is surely true of the phenomenal world as it appears to us, that we must
survive and thrive in as best we can.
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individuals from everywhere encounter, and learn from, or annoy or frighten or disturb or
just confuse and puzzle each other – challenging each other's certainties, at any rate.
Before the 1950's and widespread commercial television say, and before the Internet,
although the torrent of suggestions was much thinner and simpler for most people than is
the case today, there have always been people who lived 'between worlds' as it were,
because their identities had been formed in different worlds of memetic structure. There
has always been some tension, and sometime culture war (often bloody), between the
'umbrella' culture of court, marketplace and city street and the ethnic culture of home,
tribe and temple. Such culture war shaped the world of Jesus and his contemporaries in
Roman Judea two thousand years ago,71 and it is rife again today. Both then and now,
there are people who see their future in the globalizing, ecumenical society of the great
world-city, but others who see only the destruction and loss of everything they hold dear.
Culture war itself is not new, but modern technology and global commerce have
amplified both its scope and its intensity, if only because both the weaponry and the
means of social organization are so much more powerful. Paradoxically, perhaps, as
people are moved to assert such differences as remain to them, globalization has been
trending not toward cultural homogeneity, but to a more complex and compulsory
pluralism.
I believe that pluralism, and eventually this ecological view of mind has been inherent
in modernity all along, though it has taken centuries to articulate it clearly. Its first
definitive statement came as early as 1649 when the English Parliament tried and
executed Charles I, not as the anointed vicar of God but as a bad servant of his people.
Obviously they could not have done so had not the glimmerings of this bottom-up,
emergentist paradigm gone back much further still. Even today, the culture wars in
modern North America and around the world have this same sea-change as their basis.
Not surprisingly, these conflicts are bitter, as people feel their identities at stake.
This paper's perspective is to some extent an outcome of pluralism and of the culture
wars around it. To begin with, the idea of mind as suggestion ecology is inherently a
pluralist's vision. We no longer think of mind as a reflection or image of the single Divine
Mind, or as a fragment of Cosmic Mind. We see minds (in the plural) as constructions of
the suggestions they have received – of the memetic structures they've taken aboard. We
see the diversity of minds not as 'sin' – not as the falling away from an ideal bequeathed
to us by the gods or the ancestors, but as the normal of state of beings with only generic
guidance from their biology, who have to navigate as best they can in a world of
bewildering complexity.
Modernity (modern psychology and the social scial sciences in particular) remove
any expectation we once had that societies and cultures would inform and speak to their
members with a coherent voice. To the extent that any group really does tell its members
what they should become and how they should behave, it does so only through conflict,
negotiation, trial-and-error. Through some political process, in other words. The
71 On the conflicts between Hellenist and Zealot Jews of that time, see Josephus' chronicle The Jewish
War, written c. 75 CE.
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collective mind of society, and our individual minds with it, are formed not by grand and
absolute truths, but by innumerable competing suggestions. This was the case even in the
ancient past, but in those days, social and cultural evolution did a large part of the
processing required. Modernity, especially modern cities and media have shifted much of
this processing down to the individual level – freeing us from many of the constraints of
community, liberating us 'to be ourselves,' but forcing us to judge and choose for
ourselves between the competing suggestions, assimilating these on the fly, as best we
can, to our individual conceptions of identity and self.
*****
As the social animals that we know ourselves to be, where does all this leave us? Does
this ecological paradigm of mind carry political implications for human relationships and
societies? At any rate, here are a few things that it suggests to me:
1) As suggestion processing systems, human organizations, groups and whole societies
can be seen as collective minds in their own right, easily differing in their beliefs and
values and judgments from most or all of their constituent individuals. One reason, of
course, is that individual members will be instrumental to their group's collective
purposes and may be expendable from the group's perspective. The logic of strategic
interaction, and of politics itself may push the group toward choices that few or none of
its members would make on their own. Swarming behaviors, peer pressure, status
seeking, envy, and anticipation of such behaviors are familiar effects of social life.
Human identities are enhanced but also distorted by their group affiliations – sometimes
hideously distorted as the notorious Milgram and Zimbardo experiments demonstrated
under laboratory conditions, and as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Nazi Germany, and too
many places elsewhere have shown in real life. A first political conclusion, then, is that
from the perspective of their individual members, human groups are both necessary and
dangerous.
2) A second is that social relationships tend to be politicious, as we have seen, driven by
mixtures of common and conflicting interest. A corollary is that harmonious and effective
relationships require advanced skills in conflict management that do not come easily to
young humans, and that we often mislearn. Worse, the religious teaching of unselfish
love as a basis for social life fails completely to address our the central problem in living
with others: In practice, we can never manage to love our enemies without great skill in
fighting with our friends and loved ones – able to hold our own, and sometimes get our
way on the matters vital to us, without irreparable harm to the underlying relationship.
3) Further, this ecological paradigm underlines Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiyyah, or
'solidarity' as the basis of social existence, and strongly suggests a Rawlsian view of
ethics: that justice is and can only mean what people would agree to from 'behind the
veil of ignorance,' without knowledge of their own situations and how they themselves
might lose or benefit from the settlements proposed. The reason is that suggestions of
self-interest are typically very powerful, and tend to turn all discussions around
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competing values into negotiations, competitive games, if not to open conflict. Of course,
in real life, there can be no 'veil of ignorance'; suggestions and calculations of expected
'pay-off' are not to be avoided. Correspondingly, suggestions and calculations of 'the good
of all' – in other words, of the group as a whole – tend to be fairly weak. Still, Rawls was
correct that the only way to think sensibly and realistically about justice and joint
interests is to consider what one would agree to if fully aware of the interplay of interests
in the particular situation, but setting aside one's own position.
4) Finally, then, in a suggestion ecology, confusion is the normal state. Dilemma,
conflict, ambiguity and uncertainty are only to be expected. Accordingly, whether for the
individual or the group, coherence – defined as focused attention and purpose, followed
by consistent and appropriate activities in the world – must be the high-level achievement
of a working identity (holarchical memetic structure) learned at the biological, social and
individual level. In this way, our ecological perspective recognizes both the strength and
the fragility of cognitive ecologies: our human minds, societies and civilizations.
*****
One can anticipate the charge, commonly leveled at attempts to apply what we know of
biology to the human condition, that this ecological, suggestion-based conception of
Mind is reductive, and offensive to human dignity. I don't think this is the case, though
admittedly, its departure from the ordinary view of ourselves as wholly free, conscious,
rational agents takes some getting used to.
Like any other metaphor and model, this idea of communication and of mind only
becomes reductive when deployed with intent to dismiss or trivialize or demonize
alternative points of view. Otherwise, it's just one view among others, that affords
whatever understanding it can from its own perspective. Beneath the surface of language,
things remain what they are, and life continues much as it always has been, unchanged
except in what is suggested to the people receptive (or hostile) to such suggestions. Our
myths and theories become reductive only when seen as absolute and mutually exclusive
truths. In reality, however, their utmost claim is to be just so many interesting and/or life-
furthering way of looking at the ineffable something that is modeled – suggestions, in a
word, but nothing more.
The table below offers a list of milestones toward our current understanding of the
brain/mind system. Obviously, its dates should not be taken too seriously: the entries are
suggestions only, albeit reasonable ones that are generally agreed in most cases. But all
the ideas mentioned had forerunners, some ancient,.and all have seen further
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development. Some remain controversial. The dates should be taken only as rough
indicators as to when these ideas 'arrived' in the scientific mainstream – certainly not as
their dates of origin or acceptance. The entries themselves are just a shortlist of seminal
experiments and books (and a few papers) that definitively set forth some key ideas about
the mind and its physiological substrate in the brain and endocrine systems.
Several features are striking: First, I continue to be amazed at how recent these ideas
are, many developed after the Second World War, within my own lifetime. Second, the
number of distinct disciplines and sub-disciplines contributing to this theory of mind is
also worth noting: clinical psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, genetics,
linguistics, and neurophysiology to mention just a few.
At the same time, despite its multidisciplinary sources, the coherence and elegance of
this theory is remarkable. To say there is much we still don't know about the brain/mind
would be an understatement; and it's not impossible that the over-all picture could change
completely in light of future discoveries. Still, what we think we know today hangs
together wonderfully and tells a remarkably comprehensive story: how multicellular and
mobile creatures evolved a central nervous system, and a vertebrate body plan; how these
central nervous systems became complex brains, doing increasingly intricate suggestion
processing, and thus 'weaving' increasingly sophisticated 'minds'; how one primate
creature came to specialize in tool-making and imitative learning and, in so doing, laid
the foundation for symbolic language and an explosion of 'culture'; how the human mind
today is a mid-level system with the brain and its neural architecture below it in the
holarchy, and the global mind of all humanity above. Withal, we begin to have a scientific
and biologically grounded understanding of how the mind works, and what it means to be
human.
Finally, though not surprising, it is striking how little of this new self-understanding
has reached the public's consciousness as yet. Popular culture, at least in the United
States, is still embroiled in squabbles about Darwinian evolution. Though the news-
papers, and people I talk with seem anxious that further assaults on their traditional
worldviews are in store, hardly anyone is really aware of the new mind-science and its
implications.
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1906 Golgi and Ramon y Cajal share the Nobel prize "in
recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous
system" By this time, the so-called neuron doctrine is firmly
established:72
1. the fundamental structural and functional unit of the
nervous system is the neuron
2. neurons are discrete cells which are not continuous
with other cells
3. the neuron is composed of 3 parts – the dendrites, axon
and cell body, and
4. information flows along the neuron in one direction
(from the dendrites to the axon, via the cell body).
72 See http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/08/29/the-discovery-of-the-neuron/
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1952 Ross Ashby publishes Design for a Brain, which contains his
'Law of Requisite Variety': "If a system is to be stable the
number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than
or equal to the number of states in the system being
controlled."
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Bak, Per, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (1996)
Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972); Mind and Nature: A Necessary
Unity (1979)
Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene (1976); The Extended Phenotype (1986); The Blind
Watchmaker (1987)
Deacon, Terrence, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain
(1997)
Edelman, Gerald Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992); Second Nature: Brain Science and
Human Knowledge (2007)
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Nathanson, Donald, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex and the Birth of the Self (1992)
Sachs, Oliver An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (1995); The Man
Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1987)
Affect Theory
www.secthoughts.com/Misc%20Essays/Shame%20and%20Personality.pdf
Baldwin Effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect
Cognitive Science
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/
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Comfort Zone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_zone
Distributed Cognition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_cognition
Double Bind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind and
www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1997/Koopmans.html, for example
Ecology of Mind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis
Flow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29
Holarchies
www.panarchy.org/koestler/holon.1969.html
www.integralworld.net/edwards13.html
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Information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information
Learning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
http://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/plants.html
Knowledge Ecosystem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_ecology
Mind, Theory of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/2000MindBodyProblem.pdf
http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf
Miscellaneous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love
Neural Darwinism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Darwinism
Pain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain
www.anaesthetist.com/icu/pain/Findex.htm#pain3.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pain/
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Perception
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
Self-organizing Systems
www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm, Question 3.2
Simulation
http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/RootWeb/simulations.htm
Swarm Behavior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behavior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
Systems Theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point
Turing Test
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
Vygotsky, Lev
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vygotsky
Worldview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view
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www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/pub/books/worldviews.pdf
www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/WORLVIEW.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
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