The Mind’s Irreducible Structure

doi:10.4236/sm.2012.23033

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Sociology Mind

2012. Vol.2, No.3, 251-254

Published Online July 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/sm) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sm.2012.23033

The Mind’s Irreducible Structure

Mark Simes

University Professors Program, Boston University, Bo ston, USA

Email: [email protected]

Received February 6th, 201 2; revised April 2nd, 2012; accepted May 5th, 2012

The human mind is one of our most compelling subjects of scientific inquiry—and perhaps our most elu-

sive. Despite impressive biological advances, neuroscience has yet to produce a logical and empirical

analysis of the mind that exhibits universal, objective explanatory power of human mental phenomena on

both an individual and species level. This article first explores the limitations of the current neuroscien-

tific approach to the human mind and then argues for a reconceptualization of the relationship between

human mental phenomena and the brain. Here I introduce a new interpretation of neuroscientific data and

argue that this framework has the capacity to causally explain the link between social, psychological and

biological levels of analysis.

Keywords: Mind; Social Reality; Symbolic Process; Biological Sociology; Social Psychology

Introduction

One hundred and thirty years ago Nature published Thomas

Huxley’s article “The Coming of age of The Origin of Spe-

cies” in which Huxley celebrated the triumph of Darwin’s the-

ory of evolution over the epistemological opposition it once

faced. Huxley’s epilogue to Darwin’s intellectual drama praised

the spirit of theoretical advancement despite conflict in the

reigning scientific paradigm and concurrently warned us that,

“…it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies

and to end as superstitions”. Furthermore, Huxley admonished,

“it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the

new generation, educated under the influences of the present

day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the

‘Origin of Species’, with as little reflection, and it may be with

as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty

years ago, rejected them.” (Huxley, 1880). Huxley was afraid

that biology, the discipline which assumed its place in the sci-

entific institution only after the introduction of Darwin’s

framework, would one day become dogma and leave the true

spirit of science, logical criticism, by the wayside. This article

reflects both Huxley’s praises and fears; on the one hand it

confirms that dogma has captivated, and thus arrested, one of

our most precious frontiers of scientific inquiry, and on the

other hand it suggests that the progressive, intellectual spirit of

science has the capacity to resolve our impasse as we strive to

understand the res cogitans of our biological brains.

It goes without saying that the sophistication of our modern

technology has brought researchers closer to the active, think-

ing brain than Huxley or Darwin could have ever imagined. We

are able to parcel and analyze the structure and function of the

human brain down to a molecular level of detail; we understand

many neurological pathologies as never before; we observe the

seats of memory and language in action; we even regulate emo-

tion—the list of productive enterprises rooted in the biological

understanding of the brain is impressive. Science does not un-

derstand, however, our brain’s most amazing, and arguably its

defining, feature: the mind.

In March 2010 at The College of the Holy Cross, a group of

neuroscientists and philosophers gathered for a conference

focused on the biological foundations of morality. During the

discussion, keynote speaker Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscien-

tist, was asked to account for a distinction between the brain

and the human mind. Gazzaniga responded, “You can stop any

neuroscientist in his track… by asking the question, ‘what is the

mind?’. We all start to babble. That just says how hard the

problem is. I like the answer ‘the mind is an inference’. That’s

what it is.”1 I’m sure the author of this statement would agree

that his answer is not a scientifically viable one. After all, Gaz-

zaniga admits that neuroscience does not have a definition for

the mind. This is because neuroscience hasn’t needed to ac-

count for the phenomena of the mind in order to progress in the

structural and functional understanding of the brain. The luxury

of ignoring the concept of mind is temporary however, and

serious neuroscientists know that for a comprehensive science

they must account for or explain the mind in a scientific way.

The status quo is such that, when forced to take the mind into

account, responses adopt the uncomfortable, unscientific quali-

ties of being personal, subjective and irrational—they take us

beyond the limits of scientific discourse. Depending on one’s

persuasion, argument takes the form of either philosophizing

about the mind on one side or reducing it to matter on the other.

The centuries old schism between idealists and materialists

persists and one is obligated to choose a side.

Proposals for Resolving the Dualist Paradox

But what if one chooses neither side? University Professor at

Boston University Liah Greenfeld, a sociologist who has spent

the past 10 years analyzing this epistemological quagmire, is

now providing neuroscience with a solution by mandating such

non-partisanship. She first stated her position in 2001 in corre-

spondence with Eric Kandel in response to the book that details

his Nobel Prize winning research with Larry Squire. Green-

1Quoted from keynote address “Brains, Beliefs and Beyond”March 18,

2010, CREC—Biological Foundations of Morality? College of the Holy

Cross, Worcester MA. http://forum-network.org/lecture/michael-gazzaniga-

brains-beliefs-and-beyond

M. SIMES

feld’s criticism simply points out the logical fault in reducing

the phenomenon of human thought to the molecules that sup-

port it as professed by Squire and Kandel in Memory: From

Mind to Molecules. The phenomena of our mind, according to

Greenfeld, cannot be explained by the existence of our brains

because, she asserts, the two processes seem to consist of dif-

ferent types of facts which are not translatable into one another

from the bottom up (Greenfeld, 2006). The laws of biology of

course, govern the structure and function of the brain, but the

biological characteristics of the brain are not positively deter-

minant in any instance of the mind. That is to say, it is not my

American brain that determines my English speaking thoughts

contemporary with the paradigms and trends of the 21st century,

but rather the activities of a mental process underdetermined by

all biological accounts.

This mental process could not occur without the human brain;

the brain serves as what Polanyi calls “boundary conditions”

for the activities of the mind (Polanyi, 1968). Remembering

that a condition is not a cause, however, the problem arises that

no quantity of data about the human brain itself explains the

qualities of the human mind. It is the inattention to this logical

confusion between condition and cause that has prevented the

subject of mind from being incorporated into the purview of

neuroscience. Greenfeld’s new approach, however, comes not

from negating the reductionist perspective, but rather from

reorienting the focus of inquiry toward the nature of the mind

and its connection to the biological brain.

The characteristic feature of the human mind is its symbolic

nature. To understand the novelty of this hypothesis, and to

make its formulation logical, one must recognize a symbol as

an arbitrary referent whose meaning is derived from the context

in which the symbol appears. Imagining symbols in this way

implies that any particular symbol’s meaning is always a matter

of interpretation—as context changes over time, so too may the

meaning of the symbol. This definition also implies that sym-

bols stand in qualitative contrast to signs, which always appear

in a one to one correspondence with their referent in the envi-

ronment and are timeless in their meaning.2 The biological

world consists of a dynamic material environment and organ-

isms to which the environment signifies. We know this from

Darwin’s framework which illustrates that the complexity of

signs increases with the complexity of the environment and

thus requires a proportionate level of adaptation for the survival

of a species. What Greenfeld reminds us in the case of the hu-

man mind is that an increase in complexity never explains a

break in continuity, and symbols constitute a reality of their

own kind in juxtaposition to the reality of signs. The human,

mental world is made up of symbols, facts that have only an

arbitrary connection to their referent in the material environ-

ment and have no necessary consequence for our biological

survival.

The primacy of symbols in human experience becomes im-

mediately apparent when one ponders the example of language,

our chief symbolic system. Words are symbols, that is, their

meaning is never absolute. They are the facts of a creative,

mental process and in every employment, our words must be

continually reinterpreted based on an ever-changing context.

Though this process is individual (i.e. language is always ma-

nipulated/symbols are always interpreted by one mind), words

most often are acquired from or given to other minds. No indi-

vidual is thought to be responsible for creating de novo all of

the words that they employ. Instead we use words and ideas

that are made available to us by our society and give them spe-

cific meaning by embedding them in the contexts of sentences

and scenes. It then follows through the example of language

that one can see Greenfeld’s second pivotal hypothesis about

the nature of human mind—it is a process made of up symbols

that are simultaneously individual and collective.

The symbolic mental process that is the mind is only active

in individuals but never exists in isolation from the common-

wealth of symbols that is shared across distances and genera-

tions. No mind is an island. The infant brain does not build a

mind from scratch relying solely on biological programming,

but instead develops with input from its particular symbolic

environment. We acquire our local language, are taught cus-

toms and slowly begin to participate in our uniquely human

ways of life whose variation across our species cannot be enu-

merated. The uniqueness of this process lies in the fact that,

unlike in any other species, it is indirect learning that occurs

when the younger members of our species individualize know-

ledge from the symbolic commonwealth. The symbolic nature

of the transmission of the human way of life therefore creates a

reality that is not possible in the world of signs; one in which

facts do not have to be experienced materially in order consti-

tute a reality for us.

Greenfeld insists that one must merely recognize the verity of

the mind’s existence (after all, she reminds us, it is the only certain

knowledge one can have) and then it can be operationalized as a

mental process governe d by the laws of symbol s. Greenfe ld states

that our mental reality is a uniquely human process made up of

symbols that, once externalized, become objective fact—i.e. they

exist. These facts are definable by the complex matrix of context

in which the symbol was e mployed. Like any dynamic biologi cal

process, the symbolic process is never static; despite this

dynamism, t he meaning of any symbol is di scoverable so long a s

there exists sufficient contextual evidence relevant to the subject

in question. This method of analysis can be imagined as analogous

to biological analysis on the cellular and molecular level. The

presence and effect of any particular cell or group of cells in a

biological system can only be detected and subsequently ex-

plained when sufficient contextual evidence about the subject is

empirically accessible in the system. Similar t o organic rea lity, the

number of forces that may be causal or effectual in the symbolic

environment is enormous and the discovery of new evidence

contributing to t he retroacti ve expl anation of a symbol i s alway s a

possibility. Therefore, in a manner parallel to that of the hard

sciences, authoritative explanations of facts in the symbolic

environment are the products of only the most logically consistent

and empirically supported chain of causality. One can consider the

analogy of Darwin’s finches as an even simpler example; the

distinct characteristics of a species’ beak become logically sig-

nificant only when analyzed in relationship to the finches’ en-

vironment, i.e. when analyzed in the framework of Darwin’s law.

When one accepts the reality of the mind as a symbolic process

and treats its phenomena as such, the facts of the mind (or, facts in

the symbolic reality) become subject to logical and empirical

analysis through the accumulation of circumstantia l evidence that

allows one to make hypotheses and refutations according to the

laws that govern the system. Symbols, as facts, can be explained

by discovering and analyzing the context that contributes to their

2For a detailed discussion on the distinction between symbols and signs, see

Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the hu-

man brain. W. W. Norton & Co. (1997).

252

M. SIMES

particular nature just as Darwin could explain the characteristics of

a particular finch’s beak i n the context of the envi ronment. Gree n-

feld, therefore, makes possible logical, scientific inquiry into the

human mind.

The Mind as an Emergent Phenomenon

Thus far, one might begin to think that Greenfeld has ne-

glected the brain and chosen only a part of the dichotomy in the

mind versus brain debate. This, however, is not the case. In

addition to her revolutionary conceptualization of the mind as a

symbolic process, Greenfeld has a logical solution for the con-

nection between mind and biology—to treat the mind as an

emergent phenomenon. To appreciate the nuance of this solu-

tion, it is helpful to consider the only other emergent pheno-

menon that we subject to logical and empirical analysis: Life as

defined by Charles Darwin.

Huxley, in his “Coming of Age” address, noted the intellec-

tual opposition that Darwin’s Origin of Species faced after its

publication. This opposition was a result of the scientific cli-

mate of the time which could not incorporate the phenomenon of

Life into to a logical and empirical analysis. The problem that

Life posed to Darwin ’s contemporaries in many way s res embl es

the problem of mind for modern neuroscience; its explanation

was hindered by the dichotomy between the materialists and the

vitalists (i.e. matter vs spirit). The physicists, chemists and

naturalists of the time could not agree on the origins and the

nature of life itself. Debate took the position of either reducing

life to its material (physical-chemical) constituents or believing

in the intervention of a divine creative force. As such, Life

could not be defined and its nature and functional laws could

not be investigated and explained; that is, until Darwin’s Origin

of Species operationalized the scientific study of life by treating

it as an emergent phenomenon.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin laboriously demonstrated

his law by which all biological reality abides: evolution by

means of natural selection. What was revolutionary about Dar-

win’s approach, however, was that his law transcended, and yet

remained perfectly consistent with, the laws governing the

physical universe (i.e. physics and chemistry). Darwin de-

scribed Life as a process of evolution through natural selection

both autonomous from and logically consistent with the bound-

ary conditions of the material environment. This postulate nei-

ther reduced Life to its material constituents nor required em-

pirical knowledge of Life’s creation but rather took the organic

reality for granted and operationalized its functional character-

istics in a logical, scientific analysis. Darwin conceptualized

and described the phenomenon of Life as a reality of its own

kind, sui generis.

The illustration of Darwin’s epistemological advancement

was implied in Michael Polanyi’s 1968 Science article, “Life’s

Irreducible Structure”. In his article, Polanyi argued that DNA

is a structure whose informational significance only exists be-

cause its ordered, code-like structure is not “due to the forces of

potential energy”. Polanyi tells us that it is the indeterminate

nature of the base sequence that creates the informational es-

sence of DNA in juxtaposition to the physical-chemcial prob-

ability that joins inorganic molecules in complex and regular

arrangements throughout the physical universe. Thus, while the

DNA structure occurs within the physical-chemical boundary

conditions of its material constituents, the significance (both

functionally and an alytically) of any particular instance of DNA

is extraneous to the laws of physics and chemistry; it is rather

an informational structure in the process of life, determined not

by physical laws but rather by Darwin’s law—millennia of

evolution via natural selection (Polanyi, 1968).

By stepping back from the detailed, molecular and cellular

focus of modern biology, Polanyi reminds us that the biological

reality, as conceptualized by Darwin is a reality of its own kind

whose laws are extraneous to the physical-chemical boundary

conditions in which the process of life takes place. All organ-

isms, according to Polanyi, exist as systems of dual control in

which the structure of the organism is bound by the laws of

physics and chemistry while at the same time the developmen-

tal processes, or morphogenesis, of the organism will organize

its inanimate constituents in ways that both limits and defies the

probabilities of inorganic, physical-chemical interactions (Po-

lanyi, 1968). Life abides by its own organizing principle which

is irreducible to but perfectly consistent with the laws of inani-

mate matter (life’s boundary conditions); understanding life as

this autonomous and organizing principle was Darwin’s revolu-

tionary contribution to science.

Greenfeld proposes to deliver a parallel theoretical advance-

ment to human neuroscience by treating the mind as an emer-

gent phenomenon. The reductionism of evolutionary psychobi-

ology, according to Greenfeld, cannot explain the origins of the

human mind just as Polanyi points out that the reduction of

biological structure and function cannot explain the emergence

of the organic process. This is because the constituent elements

of both phenomena only become analytically significant when

they are already engaged in their respective processes. In both

cases, (the mind and the organic reality) it is not necessary to

explain an origin in order to operationalize a logical and em-

pirical analysis. Recognizing the independent and organizing

properties of the system, however, bestows significance upon

the data within system. For Polanyi it is the reality of the or-

ganic process that organizes the physical-chemical elements of

biological systems; for Greenfeld, it is the reality of the mind

that organizes the biological processes of our brains. Once we

recognize the mind as a real process of its own kind with its

own laws—the laws of symbolic reality—that exist independ-

ent from, but consistent with, the boundary conditions of our

biological brains, we then open the possibility of mapping the

principles of the mind onto the structural and functional or-

ganization of the human brain.

Memory from the Top-Down?

As a thought experiment, let us consider what we already

know about memory and cortical organization through the lens

of this framework. We know that in the instance of long term

declarative memory the hippocampus is a necessary structure in

the consolidation and recall of complex matrices of data (Ei-

chenbaum, 2000). In any given life experience there is an enu-

merable amount of stimuli that are present and only a small

fraction of all possible stimuli enter into the conscious attention

of an individual and become the sensory pieces of a complex

long term memory. During this process the hippocampus coor-

dinates a wide network of disparate sensory modalities and

facilitates their association into a consolidated memory experi-

ence. It would be illogical to think of this neurological system

as creating memories because the existence of a memory is

predicated on a stimulus (a thing remembered); this is simply a

description of the neurological system which supports the phe-

M. SIMES

254

nomenon of memory in an organism, as such, this description is

entirely based on the biological laws of complex nervous sys-

tems responding to the signs of their material environment—it

is not yet human specific.

In the instance of human long-term declarative memory,

however, we do not merely store and recall interactions with

our material environment (signs). We store and recall interac-

tions with our symbolic environment. In fact, all of our seman-

tic memory is symbolic—and thus, I would argue, the vast ma-

jority of our episodic memory is symbolic too. When we rec-

ognize the reality of the mind as a symbolic process, it then

follows logically that our long-term declarative memories are

products of symbolic reality. Paris, France, is only Paris, France,

because members of our symbolic commonwealth have deemed

it so for hundreds of years. The interaction with this fact in both

the instances of indirect learning and conscious recall is an

interaction with symbolic reality supported by, and thus physi-

cally reflected in, the biological mechanisms of our brain.

At this point, let us remember one of the primary characteris-

tics of symbols: their meaning is never static but only deter-

mined by the context in which they appear. As such, we can

logically deduce the hypothesis that though the brain physically

reflects an interaction with this symbolic fact (i.e. that is, it is

real on the biological and mental level of analysis because the

mind cannot exist without its constitutive elements) there is no

specific and constant neurological representation of Paris nor a

“Paris cell” in the brains of individuals who learn, recall and

manipulate this symbolic fact. One may remember the piece of

information that Paris is the capital of France and one may also

remember a trip, a novel, or a life in Paris. In any case, the

mental experience and precise neurological manifestation of

recalling the symbolic fact of Paris will be different for each

individual—perhaps even different each time within an indi-

vidual—who is only able to understand the symbol based upon

the collection of symbols that one associates with Paris con-

tributing to its defining context at any given time. Symbols, as I

have pointed out, are associative by nature and, as such, our

declarative memories are too.

To assert that our declarative memories are associative seems

to be nothing new in the paradigm of neuroscience. We only

understand the mechanisms of memory through the associative

connections created by neurons that fire and wire together into

networks that are then associated with other networks via the

hippocampus constituting a rich memory. What is, in fact, dif-

ferent about the present assertion is that it has the explanatory

power to account for the neurological representation of memory

as a system that is associative according to the laws of symbolic

reality. This is juxtaposed with the traditional neuroscientific

approach which is logically incapable of describing the associa-

tive characteristics of memories by studying the neurological

structure and function of the brain. Put differently, while neural

networks do not constitute human memories, human memories

(the symbolic process that is the mind), in fact, organize neural

networks.

Ruminating on the normal instance of memory in light of

Greenfeld’s complex framework is a small thought experiment,

necessarily limited by the scope of this article, but thought ex-

periments of the kind are, in fact, the only means by which we

can perform the intellectual activity of science. If she is right in

her description of the structure and function of the human mind,

even the most sceptical in neuroscientist might begin duplicat-

ing such thought experiments in his or her own work, quietly

testing the possibility of a top down explanation in which the

unique human reality, defined by its symbolic nature, organizes

the structure and function of the human brain. This is because

new ideas, Greenfeld tells us, are the most powerful force in

our reality. Once a truly revolutionary idea is born, the idea

itself becomes irresistible and an undeniable fact to all that it

touches. As Huxley reminds us, however, new ideas are only

dangerous when they are approached with little reflection and

treated as either b l asphemous heresies or absolute dogma.

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