In my Nursing Research paper laying out Two Minds Theory (TMT), I argued that a person’s sense of self is connected to the Narrative System, which "usually involves conscious thought, expressed in language or imagery" and "involves the sense of a continuous self." I might now revise this a bit.
Certainly, the Narrative Mind involves language (as opposed to the Intuitive Mind's focus on emotions, sensations, memories, "gut feelings" about truth, etc.). And definitely, the Narrative Mind's operations are normally accessible to us for reflection whereas the Intuitive Mind's workings are not. In my original paper I followed Freud, who identified the Narrative Mind with "I" (ego meaning "I" or "myself", das ich in German), and the Intuitive Mind with "the other" (id meaning "it," in German das es). This dichotomy fits with Western thought dating back at least to Plato, who suggested that reason was a bit of divine nature existing within a human being. Rene Descartes (pictured above) gave us the most famous formulation of narrative-as-self in the cogito: “I think, therefore I am.” The situation has become more complicated with the rise of artificial intelligence systems that confidently make this same statement. Based on the available evidence, we have no valid means to refute the AI's statements. Yet most of us don't believe that AI systems in their current form are conscious, and most of us still believe that our fellow human beings are. To the extent that AI systems operate in a similar way to the human Narrative Mind (and I think they do), then Descartes was wrong: The Narrative Mind does not control behavior, and simply thinking is not sufficient proof of consciousness. Where in the brain, then, does consciousness reside?
An obvious alternative would be the Intuitive Mind. We do definitely identify our sense of self with our conscious experience of the world. This is what philosophers call qualia, the feeling of "what it's like" to be human. Experience is largely intuitive, something that we see and sense as we move through the world, without necessarily paying attention to it or being able to put it into words. But our sense of self also linked to words and concepts -- stable traits like "I am an anxious person," as opposed to momentary states like "I feel anxious right now." The Intuitive Mind doesn't have this kind of stable concept or schema to describe itself; that's a product of the Narrative Mind.
In another source cited in the original TMT paper, Plato offered a form of dualism that envisions the human soul as a charioteer, attempting to steer a chariot pulled by two horses, one with noble impulses and the other with ignoble ones; one pulling upward toward heaven and the other down toward the earth; one well-behaved and leading down good roads while the other is ill-tempered and tends toward the worst possible outcomes. In Plato's model, neither horse was the "self." Instead, there was a charioteer who was separate from either of the horses, and who was able to choose between their competing impulses.
Plato's views were translated over the centuries by the Christian church, which saw a fit between the dualism in the Greek philosophers' writings and the dualism of St. Paul. Paul identifies the body with sin and death, and the spirit with holiness and life (e.g., Romans 6). These ideas echo pre-Christian dualisms that were prevalent in the eastern Mediterranean of the first century AD, including Syrian and Egyptian gnosticism that posited the physical world was created by a lesser divine being, the Demiurge, and that the true God was remote from physical existence. In this tradition, humans could approach God by acquiring appropriate knowledge (gnosis) and separating themselves from the physical world. Over time the Syrian-Egyptian Demiurge became identified with the more familiar Christian adversary Satan or the Devil, but his identification with the "things of this world" would remain strong. Christian mind/body dualism almost certainly underpins Descartes' thinking -- although he starts from a rational and empirical position of doubting everything, his views were colored by the society in which he lived. That society was just beginning to move away from a medieval model in which "reason" (i.e., the Narrative System) was clearly identified with the "good horse" of Plato's analogy -- the idea of a separate charioteer selecting between the two horses' direction had been lost. This type of dualism can be seen in the still-popular "moral model" of health behavior, where people need to take personal responsibility for their health choices, including financial accountability.
Contemporary mind/body dualism often still suggests that people must choose between reason and emotion, with reason being the "higher" or better path. Even Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow falls into this type of description of the Narrative and the Intuitive Minds, with the Narrative Mind lauded as being better in most situations, just slow or "lazy" in its efforts. If we could all just rely on our Narrative Minds in most circumstances, the book implies, the world would be a much better place.
TMT, on the other hand, suggests that the rational capabilities of the Narrative system are not capable of directly controlling behavior, so logical thinking alone cannot produce better life choices. This is not to say that behavior is unchangeable; far from it. But TMT suggests that different strategies -- based on environmental changes, habit formation, mindfulness, and gradual change in narratives -- are needed to bring about lasting change. Plato identified a fundamental tension between intention and behavior (akrasia, or "weakness of will") that still remains in this theory, but solutions to that tension require a more complex understanding of the mental systems from which intentions and behaviors arise.
TMT definitely does propose a form of dualism in saying that we have two separate mental systems, which operate independently of one another. In this it is similar to the Cartesian view. Dualisms like this can be dangerous because they tempt us to lionize one of the two systems while we identify the other as the source of all problems. By contrast, TMT insists that our two mental systems are simply different and cannot be arranged hierarchically. And to return to the original question that motivated this post, it's likely that neither one on its own can be identified with our consciousness or sense of self.
Neurobiological research suggests that a feeling of conscious awareness is connected to activity the cingulate cortex, a lower part of the cerebral cortex that is located spatially in between the major Narrative and Intuitive mind systems. The cingulate cortex shows different types of activation in mental disorders including depression, schizophrenia, and autism, all of which have implications for a person's sense of self. This part of the brain is strongly connected to both the Narrative-Mind structures in the frontal cortex and the Intuitive-Mind structures in the limbic system and memory areas of the brain.
What I would propose at this point, then, is that consciousness is connected to the interaction of the Narrative and Intuitive systems in the brain, rather than located in one system or another. Some approaches to developing conscious AI also suggest that "embodiment" is a necessary step, to give the AI input from sensors and ongoing interactions with the real world (a sort of Intuitive system) in addition to the purely language-based (Narrative) interactions in which it currently exists. The idea that consciousness requires both types of process may be more similar to Plato's original model with mental dualism, but also a charioteer that's separate from either set of mental activities.
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