2.2 The evolution of the mind: consciousness, creativity, psychological indeterminacy

If consciousness is accepted as real, it seems reasonable that one would allow for an active consciousness, for us to be aware of the experience of thinking and to engage in that experience. If we didn’t allow for engaged and active thought in consciousness, then consciousness would seem to be a passive “ghost in the machine” sort of consciousness. Siegel (2016) would appear to be in agreement with this notion insofar as he sees the mind as a conscious regulator of energy and information flow. But if we allow consciousness to be real in this manner, we allow the possibility of thoughts which exist for no reason other than “we” (the phenomenological “I” (Luijpen, 1969)) think them consciously and actively. The existence of such a thought does not itself break the principle of sufficient reason (Melamed and Lin, 2015), but the “I” thinking them might. That the “I” brings into being a conscious thought might be the terminus of a particular chain of causation. (Markey-Towler 2018, 8)

We call such thoughts to exist “genuinely creative thought”, they are thoughts which exist for no reason other than they are created by the phenomenological “I”. The capability to imagine new things is endowed by the conscious mind. This poses a difficulty for mathematical models which by their nature (consisting always of statements A ⇒ B) require the principle of sufficient reason to hold. Active conscious thought, insofar as it may be genuinely creative is indeterminate until it exists. However, that we might not be able to determine the existence of such thoughts before they are extant does not preclude us from representing them once their existence is determined. Koestler (1964) taught that all acts of creation are ultimately acts of “bisociation”, that is, of linking two things together in a manner hitherto not the case. Acts of creation, bisociations made by the conscious mind, are indeterminate before they exist, but once they exist they can be represented as relations R_hh’ between two objects of reality h,h’. We may think of such acts of creation as akin to the a priori synthetic statements of which Kant (1781) spoke. (Markey-Towler 2018, 8)

This is no matter of mere assertion. Roger Penrose (1989) holds, and it is difficult to dismiss him, that the famous theorems of Kurt Gödel imply something unique exists in the human consciousness. The human mind can “do” something no machine can. Gödel demonstrated that within certain logical systems there would be true statements which could not be so verified within the confines of the logical system but would require verification by the human consciousness. The consciousness realises connections — in this case truth-values — which cannot be realised by the machinations of mathematical logic alone. It creates. The human mind can therefore (since we have seen those connections made) create connections in the creation of mathematical systems irreducible to machination alone. There are certain connections which consciousness alone can make. (Markey-Towler 2018, 9)

The problem of conscious thought goes a little further though. New relations may be presented to the consciousness either by genuinely creative thought or otherwise, but they must be actually incorporated into the mind, R_hh’ ∈ g(H) ⊂ μ and take their place alongside others in the totality of thought g(H) ⊂ μ. Being a matter of conscious thought by the phenomenological “I”, the acceptance or rejection of such relations is something we cannot determine until the “I” has determined the matter. As Cardinal Newman demonstrated in his Grammar of Assent (1870), connections may be presented to the phenomenological “I”, but they are merely presented to the “I” and therefore inert until the “I” assents to them — accepts and incorporates them into that individual’s worldview. The question of assent to various connections presented to the “I” is an either/or question Newman recognises is ultimately free of the delimitations of reason and a matter for resolution by the “I” alone. (Markey-Towler 2018, 9)

There are thus two indeterminacies introduced to any psychological theory by the existence of consciousness:

1 Indeterminacy born of the possibility of imagining new relations R_hh’ in genuinely creative thought.
2 Indeterminacy born of the acceptance or rejection by conscious thought of any new relation R_hh’ and their incorporation or not into the mind μ ⊃ g(H). (Markey-Towler 2018, 9)

The reality of consciousness thus places a natural limit on the degree to which we can determine the processes of the mind, determine those thoughts which will exist prior to their existence. For psychology, this indeterminacy of future thought until its passage and observance is the (rough) equivalent of the indeterminacy introduced to the physical world by Heisenberg’s principle, the principle underlying the concept of the “wave function” upon which an indeterminate quantum mechanics operates (under certain interpretations (Kent, 2012; Popper, 1934, Ch.9)). (Markey-Towler 2018, 9-10)

2.3 Philosophical conclusions

We hold to the following philosophical notions in this work. The mind is that element of our being which experiences our place in the world and relation to it. We are conscious when we are aware of our place in and relation to the world. We hold to a mix of the “weak Artificial Intelligence” and mystic philosophies that mind is emergent from the brain and that mind, brain and body constitute the individual existing in a monist reality. The mind is a network structure μ = {H g(H)} expressing the connections g(H) the individual construes between the objects and events in the world H, an architecture within which and upon which the psychological process operates. The reality of consciousness introduces an indeterminacy into that architecture which imposes a limit on our ability to determine the psychological process. (Markey-Towler 2018, 10)

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My own philosophical views differ from the assumptions underlying Markey-Towler. To say that “mind is emergent from the brain and that mind, brain and body constitute the individual existing in a monist reality,” is essentially a form of physical monism that claims mind “emerged” from matter, which really explains nothing. If the universe (and humans) are merely mechanisms and mind is reducible to matter we would never be able to be aware of our place in and relation to the universe nor would there ever be two differing philosophical interpretations of our place in the universe. The hard problem (mind-brain question) in neuroscience remains a debated and unsettled question. There are serious philosophical weaknesses in mechanistic materialism as a philosophical position, as is discussed in Quantum Mechanics and Human Values (Stapp 2007 and 2017).