Mind Field

III. History of Concepts Relating to Human Thought

Though the history of concepts relating to human thought is an interesting subject, I must say at the outset that this chapter in no way purports to be such a history. Such an undertaking would require more space than is available here, and an author with greater expertise in that area than myself in order to do it justice. Instead, I will attempt to demonstrate that such a history exists and that it is relevant to the present work: that currently-held ideas on the subject did not spring up overnight out of nowhere, but are best understood against the background of those ideas that came before; and that by understanding something about how people have thought about the mind in the past, the ideas being proposed herein can be put into the proper context.

A. Theological concepts of the mind

In Christian theology, the mind and the soul are related concepts. Because of this, thinkers who follow this tradition have often been constrained within certain parameters that do not normally apply to secular thinkers. There is the assumption that there exists a spiritual dimension to the nature and the functioning of the mind, and this assumption can be traced back very far in the history of Christian theology.

According to St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), God illuminates the human mind, making it possible for people to understand ideas. For him, the mind is immaterial, and in some mysterious way God participates in the ideas. These are understood in a way similar to Plato’s conception of them–as eternal Forms–yet of the divine essence, since God is the source of all being.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was influenced by the philosophy of Aristotle, whose works had been translated in the early 13th century from Greek into Latin. Unlike Plato, Aristotle believed that Forms did not exist externally to the particular objects in some transcendent eternal realm. Rather, he saw them as the “essence” of the particular object in question, and real only when manifested in some material object. Aquinas incorporated some of Aristotle’s ideas, along with those of earlier Christian thinkers, especially St. Augustine and St. Paul, into his own conceptual framework. He saw the mind as comprehending ideas (the essences of particular things) based on sense perceptions received by the individual. These essences, or universals, existed in the mind of God before the creation of any individual thing, and were incorporated into the particular objects by God through the process of creation. Like Aristotle, Aquinas divides the mind into and “active” and a “passive” intellect. For Aquinas, the image received by the senses resides in the passive intellect, where it is illuminated by the active intellect, allowing the essence to be abstracted from it.

One of the main critics of Aquinas was John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), a Franciscan monk who had taught at Oxford, Cologne and Paris. While he disagreed with Aquinas on the relative importance of universals and particulars, giving priority to the individual thing rather than the universal essence as the ultimate reality, the aspect of his system that I’d like to focus on here is his concept of the will.

According to Augustine, the mind is divided into the memory, the intellect, and the will. For him as well as Aquinas, it is the intellect that is the driving force. For Scotus it is the will, both in the mind of man as well as that of God. He saw God as having created the universe in an act of will; it is only thus, he claims, that He could have been completely free to do as He chose, regardless of any operation of reason. Therefore, unlike Augustine or Aquinas, who believed that God created the best possible world, the only world that He COULD have created, Scotus believed that the world that now exists is the result of an arbitrary choice, and it could have been different in any way imaginable. The same is true for morality: According to Scotus, anything that God decrees as moral is so because He wills it so, not because His divine reason determines it to be so. It just so happened, according to Scotus, that God chose the moral code that He did for the universe that He just so happened to create, all according to His inscrutable will.

As this principle is applied to the human mind, faith becomes an act of will rather than of the intellect. Scotus saw logic and reason as being incapable of either proving or disproving the truth of the dogmas of the church, the authority of which he accepted as the ultimate standard; and philosophy he subordinated to theology as a higher realm of thought. Just as God exercises His complete free will in the creation and maintenance of the universe, he reasoned, so human beings exercise the free will given to them by God to accept or reject His revelation. For the will to be truly free, it cannot be subservient to the intellect, and so the will must be the dominant force in the mind.

William of Occam (1280-1347), perhaps best known for “Occam’s razor”–the principle that hypothetical entities as part of an explanation should be kept to a minimum and that the simplest explanation is often the best–was a Franciscan monk and a student of John Duns Scotus. He continued Scotus’ drift toward the primacy of the individual thing over the universal essence to what some may judge as its logical conclusion: he denied the existence of universals entirely. For him, only individual things existed. Whatever universal quality or similarity exists among different things exists only as an idea (as we understand the term today) in the mind; in other words, as a concept. It has no reality outside the human mind.

This type of thinking was called “Nominalism” as a reference to the view that the universal exists as a name only, as opposed to “Realism” (as it was called then) as a reference to the view that universals are real things that actually exist. The extreme form of Nominalism that William of Occam held to was known as “Terminism.” (Nominalism would go on to be very influential among some later thinkers and would play an important role in the development of empirical thought, which eventually helped to form the basis of scientific method.)

Like Scotus, Occam believed that the dogmas of the church should be accepted on faith alone, because the articles of faith are not subject to being proved or disproved; and that the will of God is supreme over His intellect, making a rational understanding of theology impossible. When it came to the human mind, he made a distinction between different types of mental processes, depending on whether they dealt with individual things or abstract ideas.

In keeping with his view on universals–and in contrast to the Platonists, who held that the eternal universals existing in the mind were responsible for our ability to grasp concepts of things in particular–Occam held that we understand intuitively particular things by observing them through our senses (he called this a relation of the first intention); we create an idea of the class of things they belong to and develop an understanding of their general nature through the operation of our reason on the memory of a number of particular things we have observed (he called this a relation of the second intention). Thinking about the relationship between different abstract ideas also falls into this latter category. Thus we observe, for example, a bird flying through the air, and obtain an intuitive grasp of what it is. After having seen a number of birds of different types, we come to an understanding of the nature of birds in general as an abstract class of things. The same goes for things known through the other senses, such as the smell of smoke, the feel of cold, and so on. For Occam, these abstract classification schemes that we develop are merely products of our own imagination and have no reality outside of our own minds.

B. Philosophical concepts of the mind

The line between philosophical and theological ideas of the mind can sometimes be blurry, since many of the ideas of the ancient Greek thinkers (and some more modern thinkers as well) have influenced a number of theologians, and quite a few theological ideas have made it into the writings of many philosophers, in one form or another. Often a given thinker is claimed by both theological and philosophical scholars to be part of their own tradition, and often certain ideas of the same thinker are considered to be philosophical, and others, theological. On the other hand, when one looks at the two fields in broad outline, enough differences exist (in my view) to warrant the maintenance of a conceptual dividing line between them.

One of the most influential of the early modern philosophers was Rene Descartes, considered by many to have been the founder of the school of thought known as Rationalism. Descartes (1596-1650) was French, was trained by the Jesuits in Scholasticism (the system of Aquinas), and also studied mathematics; he is said to have been the founder of analytic geometry. His philosophical methodology was heavily influenced by his mathematical ideas. For instance, his basic approach to the discovery of truth was to trust only those ideas which he felt could be demonstrated with the certainty of a mathematical proof. The way that he arrived at such a level of proof was to doubt and discard whatever was not clear and distinct in his own mind as determined by his reason, to a certainty at least that of his own self-consciousness of his own existence. Those ideas which could stand up to such a test he considered to be self-evident or axiomatic truths (which he called innate ideas); using these as a foundation, he then built the rest of his system upon them. Empirical observation–the evidence of the senses–was to be distrusted because, according to him, one could never reach the same level of certainty about it, since the senses can sometimes deceive one. The innate ideas, on the other hand, are a part of the inherent nature of human beings, and are present in the mind at birth–having been implanted by God–and therefore can be relied upon, he believed.

The best known of those innate ideas which formed the basis of his system of thought was the famous “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). Some of the others were the existence of God, the idea that something cannot both exist and not exist at the same time, and that a thing cannot originate out of nothing.

As one might expect, his system of thought as a whole is much more involved than is possible to explain in any detail in the space here available (and would require someone more qualified than myself to do the job right). For the present purpose, it need only be noted that Descartes believed that the universe consists of two types of substance: mind and matter. These two substances are completely distinct and independent of each other, and both depend upon God for their existence. The main characteristic of mind is the activity of thinking; for matter it is the occupation of space. The substance of mind (also included in this category is the substance of the soul) can think due to the power of God who created and maintains it, and the validation of our certainty regarding the truth of the innate ideas depends upon the truthfulness of the Creator (which is infinite, according to Descartes).

This type of Dualism (as it is called) exerted a profound influence on the later development of philosophy. Cartesian Dualism was characterized by an absolute separation between an incorporeal mind and a mechanical material body. Many later Rationalists would be hard pressed to explain how such completely distinct and independent substances could interact within the body, allowing thought to be translated into action, for example. Descartes himself thought that the location of the link between them was the pineal gland in the brain, but he didn’t work out the problem in any detail. Others came up with the solution that God personally intervenes to make the body move when the mind wills it to do so, and likewise God brings about a change in an idea in the mind to correspond to a change in the position or condition of the body, enabling the mind to know when an arm has moved or has touched something hot, for instance.

John Locke (1632-1704) was another influential thinker. Born in England and educated at Oxford, he is considered by many to have been the founder of the British school of thought known as Empiricism, long viewed as an approach diametrically opposed to that of the Rationalists in the minds of many philosophers. Whereas the Rationalists held that there were certain innate ideas, for Locke there was only knowledge derived from experience, and the mind started out in life as a blank slate (tabula rasa). The experience in question could either be direct sensory input, as in the sight of some external object, or mental reflection upon some idea or combination of ideas already in the mind, which would in turn ultimately owe their existence to some sensory input at some point in the past.

Unlike Descartes, who was able to build his philosophy on ideas which he assumed to be true to a mathematical certainty, Locke’s view held within it a problem that is common to many empirical thinkers: If someone bases their beliefs on experience, how can they know that the experiences they have had are reliable and give an accurate picture of the nature of reality? Besides the obvious fact that sometimes the senses can be deceptive, there is also the more subtle problem of the limited scope for experience one can have over the course of a lifetime: How can we know for sure whether the sample of things we have each been able to learn something about, from whatever sources, really allows us to generalize about the vast universe with all its mysteries?

The fact is that while Descartes’ method, whether or not it led him to believe things about the world that were false, did give him at least the BELIEF that his foundations were solid and that his fundamental principles could be relied upon with certainty. For Locke, the principles of Empiricism themselves tended to lead him to a more skeptical outlook on life. He was unable to say anything about the underlying nature of the substance that reality is made of, though he did believe that an objective reality did exist, independent of our ideas or sensations. He also believed in the existence of God, whom he argued must exist as a First Cause, and who, as an eternal thinking being, was responsible for creating the world and the thinking beings that inhabit it. As for general truths concerning the world at large (including the nature of the mind), he thought more in terms of assumptions and probabilities and less in terms of certainties.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), born and educated in Prussia, tried to find an answer to the epistemological point of division between Rationalism and Empiricism. Influenced by thinkers from each group, as well as by scientists (especially Isaac Newton), he felt that each side had some merit. He agreed that there were no such things as innate ideas such as the ones that Descartes believed in, but he also thought that experience alone was not enough to account for the range of human understanding that was apparent to him.

His solution involved the idea that the human mind imposes conceptual categories upon sense experience; by doing so, it reworks it into a form that can be used. Examples of these conceptual categories (of which there are twelve in all) include the ideas of time and space and the idea of cause and effect. Unlike Locke’s idea of a tabula rasa (or blank slate), Kant’s view was that the mind has an internal apparatus (which he called the understanding) which controls this process. Both the mind’s own internal apparatus as well as sensory input from the outside world are needed for the mind to be able to generate those particular concepts which comprise one’s understanding of the world.

Like Locke, Kant was skeptical about the ability of the mind to know with certainty the ultimate nature of external reality. He conceived of the process of understanding as a construction of a model or picture of the external world in the mind which would be only a representation of reality, not reality itself. When it came to attempts to know about things beyond sense experience, such as the origin of the universe or the existence of a Supreme Being, he regarded such attempts as pointless, since reason by itself cannot accomplish the task. He observed that when such attempts are made, the result is a set of contradictory inferences that can be drawn from the same set of premises. He did believe in God and the immortality of the soul, but based those beliefs in faith rather than reason or knowledge.

C. Scientific concepts of the mind

If one were to compare some of the fundamental ideas about the mind as described by modern psychology with those from some of the more influential philosophical or theological schools of thought, a number of differences would stand out. For instance, within psychology, the notion of the mind as an immaterial substance, somehow akin to the soul, has largely fallen by the wayside. In its place has arisen the idea of the mind as a physical part of the body, encompassing the brain and the central nervous system, and involving physiological processes open to study by biologists and chemists. Also largely abandoned is the old epistemological dichotomy between reason and experience. In its place is a more systematic view of mental function that includes sensation, learning, memory, thinking and motivation as inseparable aspects of the mind.

Some ideas that originated in earlier times continue to pop up here and there, however. For example, the debate over the existence of innate ideas vs. the mind as a clean slate still exists in some form within certain schools of thought. One notable example of this debate involves those followers of the theories of Carl Jung who believe in some form of race memory or a collective unconscious inherited from earlier generations.

Turning to the subject of sensation, we find that researchers tend to focus both on the operations of the sense organs themselves as well as the mental processes associated with handling their output. Perception, which is the mental process of receiving, sorting and interpreting sensory stimuli, is related to sensation as well as to an idealogical theory of cognition, or thinking. A number of models used today in this area include the concept that the mind is actively involved in the organization of sensory input (compare this to the views of Kant). The school of thought known as “Gestalt” psychology is one of those involved in trying to discover the rules underlying the organization of sense stimuli. One of the assumptions underlying this approach is that the mind tends to perceive the world as a whole rather than as disjointed parts.

In the area of perception the concept of innate mechanisms seems to find some factual support. One example of this is depth perception. In studies of newborn animals as well as human babies, tests indicate that this is not a learned response but is an inborn ability. There are other examples of innate perceptual mechanisms, many of which are further developed and sharpened by experience. Some of the factors affecting perception in humans include attention and mental focus, beliefs and expectations, and cultural traditions and experiences.

One way that learning is defined within academic psychology is in terms of something that brings about a change in behavior due to practice or experience. It is understandable why this should be the case, since it would be difficult to measure learning without some type of outward manifestation of it. Among the traditional models used to explain learning are the theories of classical conditioning and operant conditioning, pioneered by Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner, respectively. A number of other approaches have been developed in more recent times. As with the study of perception, certain types of behavior patterns have been shown to be innate rather than learned. One example of this is the crying of a baby. Other patterns of behavior are a result of a combination of instinct and learning, with research on the precise relationship between them ongoing.

Memory, the mental function by which we can retain and recall that which we have learned, is also a topic of ongoing research; one model being used involves the division of memory into a sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Theories of learning and memory do not stand on their own in isolation, however. The process of thinking itself is intimately linked with them in such a way that makes their separation difficult. Theories of motivation have also been linked to those of learning and thinking, as well as to theories of personality.

Finally, it should be noted that the study of the biochemical reactions underlying all these processes has come more and more to the forefront of psychological research in recent years. It should be assumed that this trend will most likely continue as time goes on. Our increasing knowledge of the details of the mechanisms underlying various mental activities may profoundly influence the particular hypotheses, models and theories currently in vogue, and it is unclear what effect it may ultimately have on the discipline as a whole.