KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA32 (Muller)

Commentary 22 (to R6)

( BRAIN AND CEREBRUNCULUM )
by Claude Rifat
31 January 2001, posted 13 March 2001

(from R6)

[Herbert FJ Muller]

Claude Rifat proposes a solution to the mind-brain relation with the help of an auxiliary concept which I discuss in the following. The paragraph numbers are those used in C5. My responses are in [brackets].

<1> examining the brain based only on exogenous methods cannot give a full understanding of how a brain works. As we inhabit a brain it is very useful to observe two different states of consciousness endogenously, namely the waking state of consciousness and the oneiric state of consciousness. "

[ "Inhabiting a brain" is a possible way of talking about the relationship between mind and brain. But it pre-supposes the brain as an ontological (ie, mind-independently structured and given as such) object, and this causes a problem, since "the brain" is on the contrary an entity which like all objects we build inside our experience. This MIR assumption leads to the insoluble question how to connect the immediately accessible experience (mind, consciousness) with a mind-independent (and thus mind-inaccessible) brain. The difference between waking and oneiric experience cannot help further with this. ]

[Claude Rifat]

I use the word "inhabit" because the "thoughscape" or "mentalscape" of endoreality is composed of a vast array of Selves of which the Claude, for example, is, merely, a subset.

"Memory" (if we presume that biological memories are analoguous to man-made memories in some ways) looks exactly like a coral and the many Selves inhabiting this Memory are analoguous to the polyps inhabiting a coral.

The waking state Claude is merely an expression of this vast assembly of polyps which, usually, do not express themselves in exoreality, except in cases of the so-called "multiple personalities" where oneiric Selves can be observed exogenously.

I see the problem of "mind-brain" as an artificial polarity construction arising from sequential, linearised, language which abstracts intertwined, interacting, "elements" of reality which cannot be separated and abstracted with words.

It is on the same order of polarity that the "particles" and "vacuum" concepts of physicists when, in fact, physicists should treat the reality they are discussing on as a non-polarised complex of (particles + vacuum) in equilibrium.

When one analyses reality in a spatial way, then polarities cease to exist as you perceive, then, intricacies of intertwined forms which cannot be reduced to abstract words.

Reality is made of spatiality, "intertwinity", forms and equilibria, all things which lose their hypercomplex structure once described into sequential structures of words.

[Herbert FJ Muller]

<2> [ The conceptual difficulty then leads CR to posit an auxiliary structure in the CNS of which the purpose is to control information flow from Memory to consciousness. The proposed function of mediating between "exogenous" brain (CNS, and apparently here also memory) and "endogenous" experience (mind, consciousness) is that of a homunculus, a psychological construct which has now been abandoned. Its postulated role in psychological theory was analogous to that of the aether concept in 19^th century physics, which had also been invented to deal with a conceptual problem, but was later discarded because it was neither supported nor needed. ]

[Claude Rifat]

Here, also, I am trying to express, in conventional abstractions, what is, in fact, impossible to abstract. Therefore, the reader cannot get a correct image, "icon", of the mind form which I can observe in my mindscape but cannot extract from this mindscape in order to share it with other mindscapes. As soon as I linearise, I distort the original mind objects of which I am talking about and this is inherent to our primitive verbal tools of communication: sequential, symbolic language.

The only way to approximate sharing is to **re-experience** homologuous experience.

One can write thousands of books about Love but they will never emcompass the lived experience because they are pale, abstracted and distorted descriptions of sensual experience.

[Herbert FJ Muller]

" The discovery of the attenuator had predictive scientific value as it implied that a major aspect of the serotoninergic system was to attenuate information transfer between Memory and consciousness. This was confirmed when it was observed that specific serotoninergic re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) had attenuating properties on recalls and that these attenuating properties led to a state of consciousness where the amount of thoughts per unit of time was drastically reduced, thus explaining the pseudo "anti-depressant" effects of SSRIs which are, in fact, conceptually, not "anti-depressant" effects but *thymoanaesthetic effects*. "

[ This, and the further remarks in CR's commentary, are an attempt to justify his auxiliary concept with the help of neuro-pharmacological mechanisms. Since CR talks about a CNS structure rather than a brain-inhabiting little observer, he might object that it is a cerebrunculum rather than a homunculus. But this does not change the conceptual aspect as described above. It is not possible to correct a conceptual error by experiment or other objective argumentation. In particular, the "transfer between memory and consciousness" is opaque, as mentioned.

[Claude Rifat]

This transfer is very difficult to express in words because memory and consciousness are not separated but constitute a system (memory + consciousness). The apparent conceptual error arises from a particular sequence of written words which should be "corrected" by another sequence of written words **intersecting**

here and there. I mean I would need to write not on a page, a plane, but in 3 dimensions, with sentences and patterns intersecting in 3 d when they are homologuous so that, progressively, the "spatial" reader can form his own image of what I attempt to communicate.

[Herbert FJ Muller]

Concepts must in principle intend the whole of experience, both interior (self) and external (environment, world), though each of both to varying degree. Neither naive or explicit ontological objectivity nor ontological solipsism are for this reason able to ask the proper question concerning the mind-brain relation. Both imply erroneously a primary subject-object split " (from TA32[50-52]). Such a primary (ontological) s/o split assumption is the underlying problem in CR's proposal, it seems to me. ]

[Claude Rifat]

I see no split in subject-object. However, sequential written language inevitably creates an appearance of split when, in fact, there is none as a mindscape cannot, obviously, be sequentialised onto a two dimensional page.

Therefore, in order to try to dissipate this appearance of split we need to discuss the same thoughtscape into many different and diverse, sequentialised, versions of it which will contain appearances of split and paradoxes but which, if correctly, integrated suppress these appearances.

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Claude Rifat