April 17 Hello, friend. Thanks for coming by for a look. There are several flaws I might acknowledge in this draft as it stands. The general claims, I hope, still work, with the occassional nip and tuck I'll enter shortly. But there is also an error of style. I was reading mostly Shaftesbury as I wrote this, and long sentences with several subordinate clauses are not the polite way to put things before a modern audience. Apologies.Then again, having forced the vocabulary turns out to have been the right thing to do, in terms of development, before heading off to Tucson. In the course of a quite delightful conference, I was both immersed in more contemporary scientific styles of explication, and refreshed on some bases for these arguments (particularly in Kosslyn's work) that got left out of the draft below. So in some few days you should see here a radically simpler version of the central claim, with a handful of schematic diagrams to help you see what it's about (which is after all something of the point). Meanwhile, for that minority of those who I've invited here who might actually enjoy the present style and density, this page remains. There's a place for comments at prospectance.org, if you'll be kind enough to leave any.
As we swim in consciousness, its qualities are often as transparently invisible to us as water to a fish, or the lens to a healthy eye. Nonetheless, a fish will actively prefer the best waters. This may largely be handled by instinct. If we might prefer the best consciousness, and wonder even whether consciously entertained ideas regarding consciousness can affect this quest -- adding or subtracting to the efficacy of instinct -- then we leave the mainstream of consciousness studies today. Still, to assume no such differences can be made would be irresponsible -- especially within the field from which new ideas regarding consciousness may spread to the general culture. If consciousness should turn out to be ineffective or epiphenomenal, of course, it will not have mattered which perspectives on itself it entertained. But that is the last thing we should be sure of at the beginning of our investigations, especially after a century's lessons in science's unintended consequences.
Here follows a candidate example of how a set of ideas in consciousness -- regarding consciousness itself -- may make measurable differences in mind's personal and social optimization. It is hardly meant to exhaust the set of possible examples, although it could be an existence proof for its kind. Neither, if it fails, does it disprove its kind.
The example at hand concerns a shift in perspective which, in the attempt at objective triangulation, should be considered from both sides of the shift (or however many sides may be discovered). I will be assuming that the typical reader shares a cultural background with me in which one perspective, somewhat in the character of a Kuhnian paradigm, reigns. The counter perspective under examination, which I hope to show clearly enough for the reader to find a way into it, is hardly foreign to Western culture. Work consonant with this perspective can be found from Aristotle's Ethics to Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens, with notable surfacings in between. That said, these waters are best known by jumping in.
From here forward, I will speak from within the counter perspective. My initial aim is to show its viability, rather than disprove the viability of what might, in contrast to it, appear as the standard model. Once both perspectives are clear before us, we might inquire into their relative pragmatic value, consider their esthetic differences, and attempt to design tests that might show one truer to the underlying phenomena than the other -- or might, for that matter, show them to be, like wave and particle descriptions of electrons, complimentary. They may even, in Hegelian fashion, merge as thesis and antithesis into a synthesis. None of this should be prejudged. However the shift, like a figure-ground reversal in an optical illusion, is best discussed after it is experienced. And so, rather than attempt a stepping-stone path from the standard vantage to the proposed alternative (such intermediate stepping stones, as with a figure-ground reversal, may not even be available), our approach will be as to a new language, by immersion.
Enough hemming and hawing, now into it.
Background
A central activity of mind, whose fruits consciousness both receives and polishes, might go by the name 'prospectance.' The fruits might go by the name 'prospections.' With them, we provision for the day's journeys. My proposal here is that these prospections are Aristotle's telos or 'ends' -- or, if this meaning was not his authorial intent, that his text reads well under the interpretation. (Those unhappy with this attribution of meaning to Aristotle might flatter me by thinking of them as 'Whit's ends.')
Bringing Aristotle into a discussion is always a risk because of prolonged intellectual counter-reaction to a previous adherence to certain dogmas derived from his writings, which was enforced, at threat of fine, as recently as three centuries ago at Oxford. The problem may not adhere so much in his work, as in how it has come down to us -- preserved and studied largely by theologians, interpreted through beliefs foreign to fourth century Athens, and revered like scriptural revelation. Thus, where the old father of science has been largely rejected by his modern child, the rejection in part may be motivated by a misreading of him as closer cousin to a dogmatic theologian than to an inquiring scientist. In the spirit of science we had best look at his efforts to see whether they were uniquely well begun, rather than well finished. It may be that we now, in our explosion of knowledge and investigative technique, can go farther on the paths whose beginnings he marked, if we but look beneath the dogmatic graffiti and read his milestones fresh.
At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics:
Every craft and every investigation, and likewise every action and decision, seems to aim at some good; hence the good has been well described as that at which everything aims.
However, there is an apparent difference among the ends aimed at. For the end is sometimes the activity, sometimes a product beyond the activity; and when there is an end beyond the action, the product is by nature better than the activity. (1094a)
This has become known as Aristotle's 'teleological' view. Like modern scientists, he would find a general principle and see how widely he could apply it. In this case, his application of this idea in physics has famously failed: the explanation that gravity works because a stone's 'natural end' is to lie on the ground archaic and laughable. As psychology, though, there is a common-sensical way in which this perspective is simply true: We act in large part with ends in view. Common sense can be wrong -- I will be recommending a specific application of Descartes' method of doubt towards at least one common sense opinion later -- but that does not mean our goal should be to entirely do without it.
Our conscious minds are greatly concerned with prospective ends: dreams, goals, fears, possibilities come before and occupy our attentions constantly. An area where modern psychology goes far beyond Aristotle's writings is in our acknowledgement of how much of our conscious focus and content arises from largely unconscious processes. From this awareness, we can make conjectures regarding the origin and constitution of intentions, temptations, dreams and goals that are beyond the scope of his discussion. A close reading of the Ethics even shows how careful he was not to carry his discussion of ends too far beyond premises and ideas he could rationally support. This very open-endedness was later sealed off by theological assimilation which presumed that his 'ends' were finally some ultimate goal, namely getting into heaven. In reading him as scientist rather than theologian, we should focus on the garden variety rather than the ideal (after all he specifically rejected Plato's idealism). We should explore the psychological reality of the more pragmatic ends we universally concern ourselves with in the course of a day, regardless of religion. Then we might look at the fit if we combine his premises and discussion with our best current knowledge of mind's underlying reality. The fit is more than good; the conjunction suggests new areas to explore.
For a current neuroscience perspective, few authors come more commended than Antonio Damasio. I would like to use his recent book, The Feeling of What Happens (1999) not so much for its foreground concern (specified in the subtitle, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness) as for its representation of the currently plausible background as presented by this foremost practitioner of that art. In the book he repeatedly refers to "images form[ed] in the varied sensory modalities -- vision, hearing, touch -- . . . in the perspective of [an] organism" (p. 118), "the capacity . . . to hold in mind different images in different sensory modalities, a capacity enabled by working memory and essential for extended consciousness" (p. 120), and "the frontal higher-order cortices (higher-order cortices are those not exclusively dedicated to one sensory modality but rather to supramodal integration of signals related to early sensory cortices)" (p. 157). Further, he states "We have a considerable, though incomplete, understanding of how sensory representations in the main sensory modalities (e.g., vision, hearing, touch) are related to signals arising in peripheral sensory organs, such as the eye or the inner ear, and how those signals are relayed to the respective primary sensory regions of the cerebral cortex by means of subcortical nuclei such as those in the thalamus" (p. 159). Also, "Associative agnosia occurs with respect to the main sensory modalities, e.g., there are cases of visual agnosia, auditory agnosia, and tactile agnosia" (p. 162), where agnosia is an inability to conceive of an object in the terms of that sense -- this illustrates how mind is still organized by sensory modality in regions above primary sensory input, despite the supramodality he notes at the highest levels. However, "Early sensory structures are involved in processing separate aspects of objects, and thus the disabling of one of those structures, even if extensive, does not affect consciousness in general" (p. 271). He goes on to discuss "the world of imagination (the world in which images of different modalities can be combined to produce novel images of situation that have not yet happened)" (p. 303), explaining later that "By the term images I mean mental patterns with a structure built with the tokens of each of the sensory modalities -- visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and somatosensory. . . . The word image does not refer to 'visual' image alone, and there is nothing static about images either" (p. 318).
One more claim from Damasio to ground us in his perspective, and we'll be ready to return profitably to Aristotle's concerns:
The language explanation of consciousness is improbable and we need to go behind the mask of language to find a more plausible alternative. Curiously, the very nature of language argues against it having a primary role in consciousness. Words and sentences denote entities, actions, events, and relationships. Words and sentences translate concepts, and concepts consist of the nonlanguage idea of what things, actions, events, and relationships are. Of necessity, concepts precede words and sentences in both the evolution fo the species and the daily experience of each and every one of us. The words and sentences of healthy and sane humans do not come out of nowhere, cannot be the de novo translation of nothing before them. (pp. 185-186)
Damasio's claim here may not be the most commonly received wisdom, but finds a remarkable foreshadowing in Saint Augustine: "I venture over the lawns and spacious structures of memory, where treasures are stored -- all the images conveyed there by any of our senses, and, moreover, all the ideas derived by expanding, contracting or otherwise manipulating the images. . ." (in Wills, 1999).
While in this introductory mode I would like to toss in a few more reference frames here. Since the reader may fear I am being hopelessly interdisciplinary, let me point out that this was Aristotle's own method: Overlay diverse credible opinions, see what is revealed in the result, extend from there. Since Damasio is chairing a panel at a conference on "The Unity of Knowledge" this June, I gather he also concurs with this principle of approach.
First, we will join John Searle in mid-argument in his popular book, Mind, Language and Society (1998):
Intentional causation is absolutely crucial in understanding the explanation of human behavior. . . . Human behavior, where rational, functions on the basis of reasons, but the reasons explain the behavior only if the relation between the reason and the behavior is both logical and causal. . . . For example, suppose we explain Hitler's invasion of Russia by saying he wanted Lebensraum in the East. . . .
. . . Typically when I reason from my desires and beliefs as to what I should do, there is a gap between the causes of my decision in the form of beliefs and desires and the actual decision, and there is another gap between the decision and the performance of the action. The reason for these gaps is that the intentionalistic causes of behavior are not sufficient to determine the behavior. Some exceptions to this are cases of addiction, obsession, overwhelming passion, and other forms of pathology. . . . The name usually given to this gap is "the freedom of the will." It remains an unsolved problem in philosophy how there can be freedom of the will, given that there are no corresponding gaps in the brain. (pp. 106-7)
Overlook the cute flourish he finishes with, and notice how close the initial premise is to Aristotle's: human behavior is explicable only with reference to its ends, which we are in 'intentional' relationships to. For the reader not familiar with the peculiar philosophic use of 'intentional,' it means something broader than in its common use regarding intent, being applied to the wider class of relations between a person and objects in the world where one has attitudes towards those objects. This comes from the root of the word, which refers to a pull or 'tent' between two things, as if they were strung together. The same root is in the word 'temptation,' the difference between 'temptation' and 'intention' being which end we conceive of as doing more of the pulling. The concept recurs in the metaphor behind the term 'emotion' -- what moves us. Intentionality moves us because it ties us metaphorically with the object. The use of the word 'intentionality' for this is generally credited to Bretano a century ago. Aristotle's 'ends' seems better, if one prefers the clarity of brief words, which linguistics teaches us often express the concepts we use most clearly (dog and cat as compared to dalmation and carnivore). Nonetheless, yielding to the Latinate craze, and wishing to emphasize the propositionality of this item, I persist in reviving the obsolete English term 'prospection,' and foisting the neologism 'prospectance' for the activity of giving rise to one. Justification may follow.
For the next reference frame, I am indebted to David Bromwich for mention that (in Bromwich's summary) ". . . for the original believers in the moral sense, both words would have been stressed. Francis Hutcheson supposed it the nature of the senses, when not warped by custom or tyranny, to grow increasingly complex and refine themselves towards an embrace of the beautiful and good" (1998), and his later kind correspondence on this issue. Compare this to Damasio's capacity to hold in mind different images in different sensory modalities, and the higher-order cortices where the images of the various sensory modalities combine. Hutcheson, when updated to Damasio's terminology, was proposing something which has serious current neurological support, namely that what we recognize as ethical behavior emerges from the higher-order functions of consciousness, which involves the integration of the sensory modalities, which as we now know from neuroscience takes place with particular and extensive involvement of cortices in the forebrain, whose damage occasions obviously psychopathic behavior (Damasio, 1994). Hutcheson's contribution to the current conversation is the suggestion that custom or cultural practices may be able to compromise the functions of supramodal mind so as to produce ethical deficits comparable to those neuroscience has show follow from actual brain damage.
Let me pause the theory flow for a moment to mention that Hutcheson may have been the most influential, and least credited, philosopher in history. His An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue was the source for America's founding fathers -- the notions of human rights in the Declaration of Independence were openly cribbed by Jefferson from it. Adam Smith succeeded him to his chair after studying under him, and derived his notion of individual interests serving community ends from his concepts. Thus the modern world owes its most successful models of both government and ecomony in large part to Hutcheson's influence. In America, the Unitarian Church, and its most prominent preacher, our best known nineteenth century philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, also followed in his wake. Fashion being fickle, Hutcheson was ignored for most of our barbaric twentieth century, while his ideas, as strong ideas will, washed the farthest shores of the world as tyrannies receded. Still, these historical claims are not the point here, but rather what further wealth me may extract from his motherload.
It is an interesting emerging fact about the brain that the modular separation corresponding to the sensory modalities extends fairly high. See Robert Logie's Visuo-Spatial Working Memory (1995) for an excellent summary of several decades of research showing that the visuo-spatial and the verbal, for instance, are handled in largely separate areas. Much of the research consists of demonstrations that tasks which distract one of the areas for the most part do not impede tasks dependent on the other. Supporting evidence, as for Damasio's work, also comes from studies of subjects suffering functional brain damage. Logie and Alan Baddeley, in a more recent article (1999), also mention:
One particularly illuminating recent finding on the role of the prefrontal cortex in executive function is that performing a language task (i.e., semantic judgment) and a visuospatial task (i.e., mental rotation) simultaneously may require the contribution of the additional area of the brain -- the prefrontal cortex -- that is not necessarily implicated in the performance of individual component tasks (D'Esposito et al., 1995)."
The emphasis I would draw from this here is that these are conscious tasks being tested, yet the prefrontal cortex, the suprasensory region which Damasio (1994) has linked with ethical behavior, is relatively uninvolved when a task can be performed in the workspace of a single sensory modality. [I have since drafting this been cautioned that the same region is linked with OCD. It is not my thesis -- nor do I think Damasio's -- that this particular area is the 'seat of conscience' -- but rather that it is likely involved in that set of areas that supports higher-order, supra-sensory mentation, and that such mentation has some correlation to well-seen, well-felt, well-thought, and thus on average more ethical behavior.] This again would tend to confirm Hutcheson's supposition regarding the 'moral sense' as arising with the higher-order combination of the senses. In the next section of this paper I will try to present an independent argument for why this should be so, one I derived under Paul Grice's tutelage on Aristotle while ignorant of both neuroscience and Hutcheson's legacy.
First though, let me emphasize that in Hutcheson's view "this moral Sense has no relation to innate Ideas" (1726, p. xvi). He credits Shaftesbury (1699) with the genesis of the concept, and like Shaftesbury, he was explicitly and emphatically not a Platonist supposing that ideal concepts are inborn, but a follower of he whom Shaftesbury called "the Master," Aristotle. I bring this out particularly because several modern right-wing zealots have pretended to revive the idea of a moral sense, and misrepresented this aspect of the concept, confusing it with a theological notion of conscience which is closer to Plato, and farther from our neuroscientific evidence. Additionally, while Hutcheson for convenience sake referred to the 'moral sense' as 'internal,' he clarified it thus:
It is of no consequence whether we call these Ideas of Beauty and Harmony Perceptions of the External Senses of Seeing and Hearing, or not. I should rather chuse to call our Power of perceiving these Ideas, an INTERNAL SENSE, were it only for the Convenience of distinguishing them from other Sensations of Seeing and Hearing, which men may have without Perception of Beauty and Harmony. (1726, sec. 1, para. X)
Here he echoes Shaftesbury, who rather than calling it 'inner' refers to knowledge of right and wrong being arrived at via a "reflected sense . . . various parts of life, being in several scense represented to the Mind . . . it proves afterwards a new work for the Affection. . . . (1699, Book I, sect. II, pp. 27-28).
From this it should be clear that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson were with some explicitness considering a higher-order, common sense space (this sense of 'common sense' as being a higher-order commons for the specific senses was commonplace in Scottish philosophy of their period) in which, they were claiming, it is our nature to chose the more beautiful and virtuous of the courses before us. It should also be noted that they were specifically arguing against the contemporary Humean notion that morality is merely a matter of following social opinion. Hume, of course, had the greater influence in London, where such a jaundiced view played well at court, and is still regarded favorably among modern marxists and others who regard ethics as entirely the ideological cover for social power plays. The modest suggestion here is that neuroscience's evidence simply proves them wrong (we should miss that cynicism?), while showing that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had the advantage of reporting from first-person experience with particularly healthy and active, thus ethical, higher-order minds.
Shaftesbury mocked Hume in a passage of dialog in which he gave a fool these lines:
"There can be no such thing as real valuableness or worth; nothing in itself estimable or amiable, odious or shameful. All is opinion. It is opinion which makes beauty and unmakes it. The graceful or ungraceful in things, the decorum and its contrary, the amiable and unamiable, vice, virtue, honor, shame, all this is founded in opinion only. Opinion is the law and measure. Nor has opinion any rule besides mere chance, which varies it as custom varies and makes now this, now that, to be thought worthy, according to the reign of fashion and the ascendant power of education." (1711, 1999, pp. 327-8)
This provides a telling segue back to "the Master." Aristotle, being a keen observer of nature (the enterprise of natural science itself having been in large part founded from his example of careful observation), discusses two types of persons who arrive at virtuous action, the enkrates and the sophron, commonly translated as the temperate and the continent. The segue is that the continent person arrives at ethical action through containing himself (alas, he wasn't considering lasses) according to received opinions. The temperate, presented as a clearly contrasted personality type, arrives at ethical action through a more natural balance between ends. Thus the sophron, in Aristotle's description, is always caught between the perils of incontinence on the one hand, and faulty opinions on the other, while the enkrates finds virtue easier. From the perspective of the enkrates -- Socrates is presented as an example -- incontinence is hardly conceivable. Yet, if we are to gauge from the space given to the description of each, the sophron even in Aristotle's time was the more prominent type -- a type, incidentally, whom Hume would recognize, while no doubt discounting, as has been the general practice, the remarkable observation of an alternate type, and the question of what difference in the circumstances or practice of personality accounts for it. While Aristotle does not directly address this latter question, he leaves some clues consonant with the perspective we are considering, that the enkrates derives his more effortlessly natural ethics by utilizing precisely the higher-order capacities recommended by Hutcheson and noted by Damasio.
Before enumerating those clues, I will introduce some terms and ideas more of my own coinage, providing at the least some respite for those by now tired of these extensive quotations and derivative concerns.
Foreground
The three main sensory modalities are prominent in our culture's common-sense folk psychology, not just in terms of the plain reception of their visual, auditory and tactile sense data, but in terms of higher-order elaborations within the modes by which that data is elaborated and projected. When we speak of someone's vision, or thinking, or feeling as being extraordinary we expect the higher-order sense we are praising to include some of the other two, perhaps, but we also are signaling a particular strength of that person in terms of the specific modality. Similarly folk wisdom has warnings about getting lost in dreams, thinking too much, and getting carried away by feelings, describing a potential for dysfunctional imbalance among the modalities. This carries over into psychotherapeutic practice, in which Gendlin (1986) notes there are techniques specifically focused on each of these modes.
We have a good handful of names for each modality, with vision accruing the most. We foresee, envision, provision, prospect, expect -- all of which come from roots meaning 'to see before' -- and imagine and dream. 'Anticipation,' on the other hand, refers more to our feeling for possibilities, the individual instance of which is a 'presentiment' or 'apprehension.' When it comes to the audition of possibilities, our concepts are a bit foggier; but when we consider 'inspiration' or 'enthusiasm,' referring to motivation with reference to a spirit or god which has 'gotten into us,' this may be a candidate as a parallel, based in enaudited possibilities of speech, to the motivation that can accompany possibilities envisioned. Most commonly -- although there are wide individual differences in the connotations of this common word -- the workings of the auditory module are referred to as 'thinking.' Indeed, the prejudice among thinkers that this was the only significant mode of mentation was so strong through the twentieth century that only as recently as 1994 could Kosslyn and his allies finally claim victory in the "imagery debate" by proving to their academic colleagues the fundamental status of images in cognition. Coincidentally, Damasio's first book proving the status of emotion, released the same year, did much to subvert the parallel prejudice among academic thinkers against that other prominent human modality. A curious set of cultural blind spots, to be sure. Early in the century, Freud speculated that there may simply be cultural periods where everyone is 'neurotic.' This imbalance among cognitive modes among precisely those society counts on most for cognitive capability may go a ways towards proving his point -- but I anticipate my case.
We have a clear practical notion in our culture of what 'envisioning' is. I would like to suggest extending that notion in parallel to the other two primary sensory modalities. To this end, I ask forgiveness for providing the terms 'enauditing' and 'enfeeling.' Alternately, you might prefer 'foreseeing,' 'forefeeling,' and 'forehearing' (or, to borrow a word from Roger Zelazny, 1979, 'foretalk'). Or perhaps 'vision,' 'emotion,' and 'audition' is less jarring, for being each an existing term -- but they do not clearly flag the prospective nature, since they are also used in regards to present objects of the senses. As terms of art for the general sort of process these instantiate in their respective modes, and the general sort of product of this process, I will generalize to scope of two words based on the visual, the previously presented 'prospectance' and 'prospection.' 'Expectance' is a common word already generalized across the modalities in this way, but has come to connote something more in line with rote habit than proactive intelligence, and thus my variation on it to restore the original meaning of 'seeing before' which both ex-pect and pro-spect have.
See! Think! Feel! -- that seems good, even innocuous advice. There is a good, independent case for each of these. Who would not want to claim a desire for deep vision, thought and passion for life (although in embarrassed modesty one might remain quiet about these dreams)? Each can serve us well, and contribute its own kind of intelligence. They can also serve well in combination, supporting and balancing each other. As a first-person experiment try the following: envision yourself as an enfeeler, as an enauditor; enfeel yourself as an enauditor, as an envisioner; enaudit yourself as an enfeeler, as an envisioner. My supposition is that, once having generalized the concept of envisioning to the other modalities, these transmodal perspectives are each readily available to you. It works that way for me, but of course this is no substitute for more objective research on this issue.
There is a case to be made by which we have no knowledge at all apart from these higher-order senses, no simple and pure plain perception of a thing. It goes like this: to know a thing is necessarily to know something of its possibilities. Recognition requires at least memory (or instinctual knowledge, if we consider the evidence of Chomskian linguistics or developmental psycyhology) of something similar enough to make metaphoric sense of the present object of attention. Knowledge of a thing or being is demonstrated by way of showing we have reasonably accurate expectations of it -- when it turns out otherwise we say we really know it. This is at the level of folk wisdom, of course, but it is also the base of the vision of science as being proved by the accuracy of its predictions. At the more basic level of feature detection modules closer to the senses, it congruently appears to be case from recent research that what is most expected is the most readily sensed -- mind may be involved in prospectance all the way down.
By that case, envisioning is always involved with vision, just as our anticipations of what we may hear and feel next play their part in our appreciation of the present scene, the moment and space presenting itself presently to our senses, at their simpler and higher order. Yet prospectance often extends beyond the moment and beyond the walls, woods, or horizon of our current scene. There is what is immediately before us, and also what is farther ahead, present to us only prospectively. A sane person should want to keep these straight.
Yet in one of the prospective modalities we might suspect, in our culture, a common mistake. There is a fairly widespread opinion, feeling and image -- which I have often concurred with in myself, even after having come to doubt it -- that in addition to hearing speech and anticipating speech, we also have an actually present 'inner speech' in which we conduct the core of our higher thinking. This belief is so widespread that it may account for the academic blindspots regarding the other modalities noted above. Certainly, we anticipate the visual and kinethetic aspects of many activities we have prospections of. But if we say "I'm dancing inside," or "I'm seeing the leaves change color next fall inside," we well know we are being figurative, that there is no dancing, no leaves falling in the present moment, but only in prospectance. On the other hand, "I'm conducting an inner monolog" (or dialog) often corresponds with a notion that there are present acts of 'inner speech.'
Surely something so widespread must be innocuous? Maybe not, maybe it is the difference between a neurotic culture and a healthier one, between a culture of continence and one of temperance. Perhaps in the conjunction of Damasio's and Aristotle's observations, surveyed above, we can even approach an answer to these queries. Consider: whatever the status in reality of 'inner speech,' we should still have a natural and healthy interest in prospects involving speech acts of various sorts, just as we have an interest in prospects in the visual and emotional domains. By what clue, then, should we distinguish actually present 'inner speech' from mere prospects that have occurred to us, present only imaginatively? How do we distinguish 'inner speech' that is within the present moment and horizon from prospections of speech well forward of us in space and time, or even in fantastical spaces outside of plausible reality? I cannot answer these challenges; there appears no principled way to do so. That it sounds like me does not count -- if I imagine walking into another room, that image looks like me. That I have a feeling for it does not count -- our feelings for prospects are why they motivate us. One can wave ones hand towards a presumed homunculus, and claim a privileged perception of when it really talks inside. But this still dodges the question: if such a thing were to speak, and we were to attend to and thus anticipate it, as we do when listening or attending to anything, by what principle do we discern the anticipation from the presumed actual inward hearing?
This is not at all to demote the importance, when much of our culture depends on speech acts, of prospectance of them. Rather it is to emphasize that importance, and question whether it is so well met if we are so open to confusing these prospections with an inner voice, particularly when it might only be a cultural fiction confused for reality to begin with. Nor is this to discount the metaphorical way in which all prospections are 'inner,' by way of being private to the individual and not, except through the various arts, projected out where others can share in the fantasies. In the same way that Hutcheson chose to call the higher-order conjunction of the senses 'inner,' there is an obvious sense and convenience to that. But that is not the same category of presence as someone really speaking to us inside, any more than an image of an elephant walking down the road is a real presence of an elephant inside. Yet -- and again this is something that should be better demonstrated by a systematic survey than my anectodatal observation -- our culture's common sense does not generally extend to clarity in this distinction.
The danger here can be simply illustrated, in the form of a sort of circuit that occurs in many domains, but which for the present purpose I will illustrate from electronics: a short circuit.
In the general case, our imagination of reality encounters resistance (a point Natika Newton, 1996, draws out quite well). In the case of a posited inner voice whose anticipation we mistake for the fact, the difference between imagination and the presumed evidence of the real just is not there -- which might make this, like a short circuit, a runaway loop and diversion of energy from the designed task, in this case the consideration and anticipation of actual prospects of speech.
If this might be the case, it invites first-person experimentation. At risk of offending Damasio should he read this, I will draw a model for this experiment from his claimed nemesis Descartes, from "Meditation One" of his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641, 1998). There he describe how, in undertaking to apply his method of doubt:
. . . I have today suitably freed my mind of all cares, secured for myself a period of leisurely tranquillity, and am withdrawing into solitude. At last I will apply myself earnestly and unreservedly to this general demolition of my opinions.
The angle of doubt I propose here is a bit different, focused instead at the way opinions are commonly held, as if embedded in a tape loop of the inner voice -- whereby we reinforce ourselves in the opinions we expect of ourselves due to having had certain feelings about those opinions when we appeared to experience those opinions coming from our inner voice in the past. (Incidentally, the clinical psychologist Aron Beck has had statistically significant success using approaches designed to challenge such tape loops in patients -- he finds it to be an aggravating factor, even when the presenting condition is one such as schizophrenia, not thought before his proof otherwise to be amenable to amelioration by cognitive or counselling approaches.) As Descartes well observed, deep matters of habit regarding adherence to opinion can take special effort to go beyond.
What is not in Descartes' text, but which may be suggested as pertinent, even obvious background on his method is that he was if anything more successful in geometry than philosophy. The ability he displayed in his method of doubt may have been facilitated by his extraordinary capabilities in visual imagination. Incidentally, he shared something with Shaftesbury (who was unconcerned with Descartes claims as a thinker): each had come from a highly verbal culture and then done his important conceptual work in Holland, where the cultural emphasis was differently balanced between verbal and visual, to the advantage of the latter. And the work each did -- Shaftesbury's link of ethics to esthetics as well as Descartes' geometric advances -- were accomplished in that visual climate. For an in-depth analysis of the difference in the relation of image and word in Dutch culture of that time see Svetlana Alpers' The Art of Describing, Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), particularly the ultimate chapter, "Looking at Words." What she illustrates there is how Dutch artists depicted words as objects seen among others, which was contrary to the prevailing Italianate practice of words, when they appear in a picture, being presented as if they depicted the animating spirit of the characters and action portrayed.
As an anecdote, the remaining ideas I will express here were worked out during a five-week stay in Holland some eleven years ago, in total ignorance of Alpers' claims for that culture, so I have a soft spot for this minor hypothesis on the influence of Dutch sensibility. Plus, back in the seventeenth century the Dutch were unparalled not just as painters, but as traders, map makers, and explorers -- they seized their prospects particularly well, even to the point of creating the first modern futures markets. Additionally, the present Dutch make convincing appearance of being among the sanest and most adaptable of Europeans. Their society is uniquely both open and tempered in its temptations. In his own time, Hutcheson cited common British admiration for the Dutch as a proof of human capacity for more than selfish, Humean preference for the well-being of ones own country. Here I may digress, but it also points towards the suggestion as to first-person experimentation I will make next:
To truly change the status of opinions entertained in mind, particularly regarding whether one takes them as an inner voice's product, with the possible negative consequences assayed above in terms of confusion of imagination and reality, and the sort of positive feedback loop that describes a short circuit, what makes the real difference may not be so much what opinion one subscribes to regarding the inner voice's putative reality, but rather how one sees and feels when regarding the ongoing rehearsal of opinion. Specifically, does one see it and feel towards its evidence as one does toward prospections of other things and events which are forward, not yet occurrent or beyond the present sensory horizon? Or does one see it as and feel towards it as one would if a key part of ones reality actually were a homunculus, resident in the brain pan? This distancing from opinions, seeing them as instances of possible speech entertained rather than the determined positions of an autocratic homunculus, is a gentler, less radical doubt perhaps than Descartes brought to his own opinions. It also allows a bit of distancing, a bit of irony, a bit of humor about the self -- there is something to recommend the attitude. On the other hand, if your mental ecology has been premised on the regular short-circuiting of an 'inner voice,' shifting this perspective on a long-term, rather than merely experimental basis on, as Descartes recommends, a day of leisure, may produce changes that are larger than anticipated. The safety net here is, in my experience, a tendency to fall back rather effortlessly to the old, more homuncular presumptions, and the sort of navigation through the day those support -- but there may be some real short-term danger in serious first-person exploration of this issue.
There is yet more to taking what had formerly been the evidences of an inner voice as being more to the fore, as foresight is, and less as the sort of factual, organic internal reality demonstrated in the heart's pumping of blood. If one believes one is witnessing an inner voice, one will expect not just the continuation of the voice, but ones actions in the world to agree with that voice's opinions. In identifying with it, one runs a fair portion of ones motivation and self-control through it. One becomes contained by the voice's opinions, and thus the translation of Aristotle's term for this personality type as 'continent.' This is a case where the meaning was clarified by the translation -- the Greek work sophron does not have the root metaphor of a container in it. Likewise with 'temperate' -- the Greek enkrates does not have in its root metaphor the concept that the temperate person is tempered by the balance of pulls from a range of good prospects -- although it is evident from Aristotle's text that this comes close to his concept of the type.
Again, I intend no dogmatic reading of Aristotle. His interest for us is that a portion of his observations and reasoning is exceptionally keen -- but there are also the same stumbling and half-glimpsed or wrongly-interpreted ideas we find even among the best of our present day scientists. I am about to pull some clues a bit out of context, but that is just because, for present purposes, they are more telling than his total case.
If continence makes a person abide by any and every opinion, it is a bad thing; for example, if it makes him persist in a false opinion. And if incontinence makes a man abandon any and every opinion, incontinence will occasionally be morally good.... (1146a c. 15)
Socrates, for example, believed that it would be strange if, when a man possesses knowledge, something else should overpower it and drag it about like a slave. In fact, Socrates was completely opposed to the view, and did not believe incontinence exists. He claimed that no one acts contrary to what is best by conviction, but through ignorance.... Therefore, they say, an incontinent person does not have knowledge but opinion when he is overpowered by pleasures. (1145b c. 25 f.)
Intelligence is not the same as cleverness, though it requires it. Intelligence, this eye of consciousness.... For inferences about actions have an origin: 'Since the end and the best good is this sort of thing,' whatever it actually is -- let it be any old thing for the sake of argument. And this is apparent only to the good person; for vice perverts us and produces false views about the origins of actions. (1144a c. 30)
Hence Pericles and such people are the ones whom we regard as intelligent, because they are able to study what is good for themselves and for human beings.... This is also how we come to give temperance (sophrosune) its name, because we think it preserves intelligence (sozousan ten pronesin). (1140b c. 10)
However, good deliberation requires reason; hence the . . . possibility is that it belongs to thought. For thought is not yet assertion. For opinion is not inquiry, but already an assertion; but in deliberating, either well or badly, we inquire for something and rationally calculate about it. (1142b c. 15)
Hopefully the reader will now share with me some suspicion that the difference in between Aristotle's continent and temperate persons might be in part accounted for by a hypothesis that may be sketched out from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, read in light of current neuroscience, that runs something like this: The threshold of emergence of naturally moral intention is higher than the threshold of emergence to single-modality conscious space. Further, a difference in attitude towards opinions, wherein they are controlling rather than further opening prospects out for consideration, characterizes the more single-modal -- and thus less naturally moral -- psychology of the continent type, as compared to the greater intelligence regarding ends which extends beyond mere opinion to 'real knowledge,' and arises more easily when prospective speech acts take a place in the common field of prospective acts, as characterizes the naturally temperate, rather than assuming a special possession of the soul. Incidentally the temperate psychological type should show greater activity in the supramodal frontal cortices.
Underground
Common sense is mined, or should I say, therein dwells a snake who speaks with 'unaccented truth.' Having grown up in the American Midwest, where the common accent was that of our culture's newscasters and voice-over authorities, I was raised with a particularly strong illusion that there is a single voice, and single attitude, a single telling of truth which needs merely be internalized to allow one to share in its authority. Indeed in a continent society, where people are bound to their opinions -- to that take on 'common sense' rather than the take which relates it to the evidence which presents itself to our clear and open senses (though there is a healthy mix of that second attitude also in the Midwestern personality) -- the quest for an ideal, all-purpose yet single-voiced body of opinions has some real value. Many take this to be science's own project, although in practice science more fractures than converges as this ideal is pursued. Monoculture becomes too often concerned in practice with expelling its heretics than conjoining the truths of its perspectives.
The ethical shortcomings of this monocultural, univocal approach go beyond what would be immediately flagged by contemporary poly-cultural relativitists of a Humean bent -- although, that too. The shortcomings even go beyond, and in ways independent of, the hypothesis of measurable differences in cortical utilization suggested above. And as a bonus, we will arrive at a telling take on the foundational myth of Judeo-Christianity. On the way there, a brief session with one of the twentieth century's own foundational mythmakers provides several crucial clues.
From the protoscience of Aristotle, I now veer towards the possibility of true intellectual disaster: the pseudoscience of Freud. Let me say outright that the signal-to-noise ratio in Freud is quite a bit worse, and his intended ends seem at times -- as the historical research of Frederick Crews and others has shown -- to have been dishonest in ways that we would not even begin to suspect of Aristotle, let alone Damasio. But however much he fudged the case histories of his clients, he was an occasionally brilliant observer of his own neurosis, and in this capacity produced several claims and insights which may yet prove worthwhile to overlay here. I promise to be brief and selective.
First, to clear the pallatte, a metaphor commended by Searle. As an alternative to viewing consciousness as the sum assembly of component contents, Searle presents this image:
Instead of starting with my present state of fully aware alert consciousness, imagine that I gradually wake up in a dark soundless room. Suppose that I gradually reach a state in which I am fully awake but I have no perceptual experiences whatever. The room is in total darkness, and there is no sound. I can, if I concentrate my attention, focus on the weight of my body against the bed, and the proprioception of my various body parts. But aside from that, my consciousness consists in a conscious field filled only with a sequence of conscious thoughts. (1998, pp. 81)
Since I am catching a plane tomorrow to go to the conference where this draft will be presented, I quite expect that my own awakening sometime this week will be of the sort of "Where am I?" doubletake that most travellers -- sometimes just intense travellers in dreams -- have from time to time in the moment of awakening. This, in part, is what wakening is: registering oneself in a position in an imagined map of the near spatial and temporal prospects. The next thing after recognition of where I have woken is most often a quick assessment of the tasks of the day I have awoken to. Normally these follow on such quick succession that they are hardly noticed, our minds having worked smoothly and well. The second is most often prospicuous if we wake on a Saturday thinking we are still in the workweek, only to quickly recognize the discrepancy and quite instantly then remap for the day before us.
The deeper issue, I would like to suggest, is not one of continence -- not just one of occasionally getting out of the pen, thinking out of the box, or loosening up during leisure, though each of these has their place. The deeper issue, as Aristotle suggests, is about what can further the sort of intelligence by which we really conjure before our consideration the better sorts of ends, many to be pursued on their own terms and for their own sakes, as he also notes, while others are of most interest as means to ends beyond them. This is all water-to-fish stuff, as natural as rolling out of bed on most mornings, so close to us it is hard to back away to put it in perspective.
Freud often gets credit for an idea he did not originate, that of the unconscious. Without concurring in anything like the image of its workings Freud suggested in his popularization of it, which finally resulted in the classy movie line, "It's monsters from the Id!", theorists of mind quite widely assume that there is some sort of credible idea here: that at any time, much of the mind, even that's quite active, is outside our self-aware conscious field; that a whole range of things that do appear in consciousness, from shifts of our attention to aspects of our surroundings, to potential actions, even to solutions to intellectual puzzles, appear reasonably whole to consciousness, rather than being such things as are to be assembled by it, piece by piece in atomic fashion, within its constant scope. Even projects we consciously originate spend a bit of their time on the 'back burner', out of the immediate gaze of mind, only to be returned to later, simmered and stewed. Important decisions should be slept on. Some of our best inspirations, our best prospects, come to mind, as Mozart claimed for his symphonies, in one piece, whole and organic. This is not much a matter of having the right opinions or even being clever in manipulating them, as Aristotle also noted. There is something more going on.
Most to the point, relatively little (as William Blake noted) of the vast potential of awarenesses, images, ideas, feelings that could come over the threshold of consciousness from these unconscious stores and processes actually, at any particular time, does. There is a bit of a border there, and largely unconscious processes moderating what will come across, generally pursuing an evident strategy of balancing pertinence to the current preoccupation of the conscious field with intrinsic noteworthiness to the organism of the perceptions, whether of present or beyond-the-horizon prospects, which one might guess are queued there waiting their proper prioritization and timeliness. And things are passed both ways, as in the back burner example. So much is, on reflection, apparently handled by the unconscious that some intelligent theorists press the extreme argument that consciousness counts not at all, that it is an odd reflection rather than the real agent in anything. Some few others still hold to the opposite extreme, the naive notion that consciousness is doing it all. Each has some small attraction, even poetic truth to it; however each may suffer from an intuition of a degree of separateness between the conscious and unconscious that is not necessarily there -- or if it is, may be so for them largely as a contingent cultural artifact, rather than evidence of mind's necessary or true nature.
Recognizing something like a border, and an unconscious which, however much its form is hidden from our direct apprehension, still evidences both a bias towards our well-being and a respect for the pertinence of whatever is next passed by it across the threshold into the conscious field -- this data is enough from which to suggest that, as in any cross-border relation, there is an aspect of diplomacy, and as in other diplomatic situations common ends can be pursued in the context of a good reception.
Prospections, in their basic form, are neutral, neither intention nor temptation, except in the context of their reception in consciousness. The traction, the intentional pull between self and prospect, can be conceptualized from either end. Also, whether a particular item comes across as welcome traction or distraction depends on the current attitude of consciousness, and what is already before it. If you have got a strong attitude based on taking much of the verbal prospectance that comes across as an inner voice, a lot more of what could potentially come across becomes distractive. One is also faced with the puzzle Searle mentioned in the first quote towards the beginning of this paper: To take the first prospect that comes to mind with a self-like voice associated, and some minimal level of motivational feeling to accompany it, as ones given decision is rather to abdicate from fuller conscious involvement in deliberating on ones best ends. To have the self expectation from such an evidence quickly slide to embraced intention is not only to risk failure of intelligence, but also sets the bar higher for what a well-tuned unconscious should want to pass across the threshold, since whatever is passed is closer to being acted on without reflection when ones habit is continence to the expected inner voice, than when the current attitude is more contemplation, more open to diverse and novel prospects -- an old meaning of the term 'philosophical.'
Here is where we bring in Dr. Freud, who from his self-analysis claimed that the primary factor in allowing unconscious contents across into consciousness is a facility at bringing them into association with verbal representations. In terms of modern neuroscience, we should expect that we unconsciously have prospectance going on constantly, in every major and minor modality, from the simplest sensory interpretation ("What is this feature? What can it be?") to the sudden, full blown birth of a prospect that has come to us like the view of a new valley from the top of a mountain pass. From these vast prospective systems, very little will go across into consciousness in terms of what potentially could at any moment, if they all had access and attention at once. What does go across, is in accord with a principle, somehow realized, of pertinence, of fitting with the current conscious picture and priorities. When that current conscious picture concords with the fiction of an inner voice, this renders fresh visual and the emotional prospections increasingly irrelevant to conscious concerns, more likely to distract, to tempt in unwanted ways, to trigger anxiety and frustration, than to contribute to the sense of happiness or satisfaction with oneself which would seem to be part of the feedback the unconscious uses to tune its outputs. To complete this picture, Freud's 'ego' and 'super-ego' were both very much identified as inner voices. His very diagnosis of 'neurosis' referred to an estrangement from emotions and prospects, even especially by those whose prospects, objectively, should be quite good. So my hypothesis here is that Freud was quite right, that a facility for bringing visions and feelings into combination with verbal representations is critical to good conscious-unconscious balance, but that because he could not personally see beyond the conflicts of continence to the promises of temperance -- and because his own repressed feelings and imaginings made it too often into his theories in poorly considered and even monstrous forms -- this is why the overall record of his project is so flawed. As for the failure of the doctor to fully cure himself, I would point out that many an academic over the last century who could accept that consciousness was peculiarly verbal, that an egoic voice was the core of their own identity, has been equally mistaken, and most have brought far less of interest across from their unconscious wells of potential.
But enough of him, let that be his Lacanian ten-minute hour, and look a bit further on the ethical implications of these questions of how to achieve the more fruitful relations with the unconscious, such that the better ends arise for our choice. The reader who manages the simple (in principle) exercise of for a time entertaining all the verbal contents of conscious mind as prospects among other prospects may discover, as Damasio hints far above, that mind is not essentially a matter of language, but more one of making sense of our prospect and surroundings via the various sensory modalities, in a way which finally amounts to having a sort of live, not static, map of the day around us, its promises and our concerns. Associated with any course we might take there are various possibilities of speech -- as Freud noted, if we have an aversion to such vocal associations we can hardly bring something nonverbal to the supramodal region of consciousness, any more perhaps than we can bring up the words for something and not have at least some dim image and feeling for it. But once the verbal contents are taken on the same basis as the visual, for intelligent consideration moreso than as claimant for ones spiritual seat of agency, a much broader spectrum can be comfortably and revealingly entertained. The visual mapping, for one, becomes a space in which the verbal prospects can be distributed, much as a memory palace was utilized during the Renaissance to organize ones store of thoughts and images. One can, with this sense of extensive space, simply wake up to more prospects, more possibilities at once, and keep more simmering on the back burner, since they are then more easily handed off back and forth across consciousness' threshold. Or at least that is my image. I realize that I have strayed over into what can seem a recipe for 'spiritual' practice, even if it is one that seeks to avoid a neurotic self-possession by the phantasm of an egoic voice, and engage in the sort of nonattachment in which many voices, attitudes and prospects present themselves to inform and motivate our acts -- a nonattachment that can, without paradox, produce more a more thorough relationship with the world.
The thing that strikes me most, when I manage to go over fairly fully into this sense of live mapping, of accepting a center which is more respecting of the relative contributions that consciousness and unconsciousness can bring to sorting and creating prospects for action and attention within the scope of the day, is that in being less polarized towards the single, spoken-for goal (or small set of the like) I become more the embodiment of a larger community. The polarizating definition of intention and temptation, motive and distraction that comes from too-quickly accepting the identity of an inner voice by way of self possession, becomes instead a broader appreciation of the diversity of good ends in the world, both for myself and others. There is something profoundly social, less individually isolate here, although my tastes and personality if anything become more individual within the greater assurance this sense of social context affords.
For the past twenty-five years, my study and hobby has been to learn to switch between and appreciate the differences between the two views, to explore them in fact and not just in theory. Frankly, I have found more ways to get lost, or get stuck half-way between them, than to effectively and efficiently switch between these perspectives at will. But one thing I will stress is that in my experience, when I can creatively see more good ends ("whatever they be") I am more effectively productive both for myself and for those around me. It is easier to create common goals when people are flexible, and use each other's voices and visions within their own minds when dreaming them. This seems like a legitimate ethical issue.
Now, for that Eden myth. Recall that that slick-tongued snake has convinced folks living in a garden where nearly all prospects, all ends are good, to internalize a polarization of the tree of possibilities by which, through the favor of a single voice and branch, the rest will be rendered barren by the shadow of dispersion cast on them. We know this tree by its fruit, we know it too well.
As Hutcheson noted:
. . . if our moral Sense be suppos'd exceedingly weaken'd, and the selfish Passions grown strong, either thro some general Corruption of Nature, or inveterate Habits; if our Understanding be weak, and we be often in danger of being hurry'd by our Passions into precipitate and rash Judgments, that malicious Actions shall promote our Advantage more than Beneficence; in such a Case, if it be inquir'd what is necessary to engage Men in beneficent Actions, or to induce a steady Sense of an Obligation to act for the publick Good; then, no doubt, "A Law with Sanctions, given by a superior Being, of sufficient Power to make us happy or miserable, must be necessary to counter-ballance those apparent Motives of Interest, to calm our Passions, and give room for the recover of our moral Sense, or at least a just View of our Interest." (pp. 268-9)
I would make a further note here, of the stock heaven- and hell-like visions and promises which accompany the vocally short-circuited, continent dynamic in psychology, whether those are the images received from religion, or those derived from more secular dogmas such as marxism or even environmentalism (much as I even value that last perspective). If it is a fixed cardboard image of gloom or paradise, it is most likely the stage set for an inner vocal monologue, to be pointed to by that voice in lieu of the fresh workings of vision and emotion on more immediate, earthly promises and pitfalls. These serve as props for such a voice -- however worthy, carefully wrought, or venerable its opinions -- which operates without full cooperation of, and in partial opposition to, the unconscious, and as importantly without good utilization of two primarily sensory modalities to make present sense of life, which in this freezeup are largely submerged into unconsciousness.
Meanwhile, out here in the nonacademic regions of our culture, I can attest that the tendency of voice to lock one into continence is dealt with by many through leaning back the other way, adopting a popular anti-intellectual attitude towards well-spelled-out thought and focusing on appearances and emotions instead. On the one hand, this gives the culture some needed balance and a vital entertainment industry. On the other, it accounts for how much vapidity that industry puts out. As Wen Fu had it, "When the mind is caged and separate, the spirit wanders, and nothing is controlled."
The forward, prospectant take on mental contents, when extended from its normal and consistent use by us in the visual modality across the other modalities, especially that of audition, may bring the modalities into better commensurality and synchrony, giving them greater chance to enfold and infuse each other, rendering more transparent and fluid the barrier, the imbalance which can form between them when talk in mind, in particular, is given the inside track of a presumed more-real status. Consequently this should also bring better order and communication to the threshold between conscious and unconscious. If groups of subjects can be trained to this subjective perspective, it ought to be confirmable by brain scan differences between them and controls, as well as by various measures of well being and social adaptability.
References
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