[This picture may be called “big,” but the sky is far bigger.]
There is no theory of everything without the big MA: Mind-Awareness. There simply isn’t. Some would add Consciousness (& refer to “the big MAC“), a redundancy to the degree awareness & consciousness refer essentially to the same phenomenon, the most basic inner experience of “sentience.” The more general “mind,” on the other hand, may be used in reference to a somewhat broader spectrum of inner experience, some more like dream, hallucination &/or phantasmagorical mish-mash than conscious experience, even the more or less mechanical action of selective membranes responding to variations in internal & external conditions, one of mind’s most basic features being the recognition & processing of differences.
Many aspects indicative of mind, yet pre-conscious, are still active in a person under anesthesia. Some sense of being remains, even when awareness of that sense does not. As the anesthesia wear off, some sense of awareness returns, more or less level by level. A full return to consciousness restores not just immediate situational awareness, but longer term memory (though usually not much, if anything, from unconscious periods). While some primitive memory takes place at a smaller scale than an organism is consciously aware of, e.g., in a systemic recognition that speeds up responses based on prior experience, there are also higher levels of memory that require for retention not just consciousness but intent.
That reminds us that there are both pre-conscious levels of the mind & levels that are all the more conscious for being post- (or beyond) what we consider that basic awareness associated with fundamental consciousness, being aware of one’s sense of being aware. Learning & doing math may be considered an obvious example, a use of the mind for many levels & varieties of learned operations. Most human learning & all fields of study are based on just such “areas of expanded awareness,” each with bodies of knowledge (expressions of group memory) that include many specific operations, whether purely conceptual or also involving physical manipulations.
Before assuming that these learned operational uses of the mind are necessarily “more advanced” than the more purely perception-based sensory awareness, we should note that what develops as conscious & intentional focus can become more & more intuitive, absorbed & pre-conscious with experience. Consider learning to play a sport. The mind that guides the practiced focus transfers parts of what’s learned from mental focus to muscle memory with & through experience, for example.
Although sentient creatures tend to have some sense of the sentience of others (sometimes called “theory of mind”), including self-relevant attitudes & intents, the range tends to be rather limited to the scale or order of magnitude of the entity’s own awareness. For a complex organism like a human being, billions of cells might be actively involved in generating even a single thought, feeling, impression or perception, yet we have essentially no awareness whatsoever of what individual cells themselves are experiencing. The same principle applies whether we’re talking about neurons, muscle cells or more or less cooperative independent cells making up part of our “biome.”
Cells are not simply mechanical constructs. They presumably have feelings, i.e., sentience. We tend to have a much clearer sense of what’s happening with individual & group minds at our own scales (individual & group) only, with very little awareness at smaller & larger scales. Meanwhile, whatever else the universe might be, there’s no theory of it without a mind (individual & collective) to do the theorizing, interpreting, & testing…..
Naturally, we tend to think our own minds most special of all, yours & yours crudely’s especially, yet some mistake their own for the only mind around. A developing “theory of mind” begina to recognize that one’s own is not the only mind around, and puts this awareness to work, to good use, whether for selfish, mutual or transcendental intentions.
Whether used to anticipate, get a jump on, guide or otherwise benefit, awareness of other minds in action provides distinct advantages. Mind is not as entity bound as generally assumed, however. From the beginning, it is also something shared–more a we than a me. The orbits of we-ness can radiate out from embryo & mother to family, team, troupe, band, culture, community, linguistic group, clan, country, value-system, cosmos.
On the one hand, the individual organism turns out to host &/or be a community; on the other, individuals are parts of relations shaped by the larger wholes in which they operate–from partnerships to paradise, i.e., all jointly experienced sources of joy, meaning, pleasure & purpose, including ideals & campaigns, companions & activities.
We should note that bigness expands in various interacting directions & dimensions, even into the smallest realms so far imagined or imaginable. As awareness reflects the shape of its surroundings, bigness reflects the scale probed, & is dependent on scale & proximity of the observer. Change the scale of the measuring rod, and the length of coastline changes.
Yet the map is not the territory–& the thought is not the mind having it. Not even the data stored is the mind, whether aware of it or not. While a description of mind requires a mind to make it, the representation stands in for rather than re-presents, being a translation in another mode at least once removed from the original reality, though potentially correlated in meaning, the differences potentially made.
When we use terms like mind, observer, or witness &/or speak of such things as data input, information, algorithms, or information processing, it may seem as if we’re describing entities & processes in the same realm, one equally applicable to living organisms like us & to our ever smarter machines. Indeed, the mind can be described in mechanical terms, in terms of the functions performed by sub-mechanisms with more or less known instruments & by more or less identified dynamics.
But this is not all there is to the mind we actually know, whether as humans or living creatures in general, nor the most basic part of the mind as life-forms seem to experience it–which is by feeling. It’s the feeling-mind that we know with greatest immediacy, seemingly the same for microbes, however different the details, levels & states directly experienced….
[to be continued… 2019-05-01]