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Consciousness and the Origins of Art Thames&Hudson 2004 |
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The brain/mind problem Some common, frequently used words are extraordinarily difficult to define. We have noted the problem of defining 'art' 'Consciousness' is another such word. We all know what it means ‑ until someone asks us to define it. One of the sources of this difficulty is that consciousness is a historically situated selection and evaluation of mental states from a wide range of potential states. It is not a universal, timeless 'given'. As before in this book, I side‑step the tedious task of attempting to define the slippery word in a formal way. Instead, I allow an understanding of the word to emerge from a series of observations. Two things we do know are, one, that the brain/mind evolved, and two, that consciousness (as distinct from brain) is a notion, or sensation, created by electro-chemical activity in the'wiring' of the brain. These two observations guide much of the following discussion. Enlarging on the first of these points, we can say that the brain/mind did not suddenly appear ex nihilo. The origins of the human brain/mind must lie deep in the past. Moreover, the beginnings of the brain/mind must have been shaped by conditions of survival that, in our modern Western society, no longer exist. That being so, we need to turn to Darwin and his insights into the mutability of species and the effects of natural selection - and, of course, also to more recent evolutionary theory that builds on Darwin's well-laid foundation. The second observation is rather different and requires more comment. If we are speaking of evolution, we are speaking - essentially - of the human body, our physical, material make-up of bones, blood, tissue, brain matter. By contrast, mind is a projection, an abstraction; it cannot be placed on a table and dissected as can a brain. Nor, it seems, can mind be placed on a philosophical table and defined and described. Indeed, the age-old mind/body problem continues to niggle despite the ingenuity of generations of philosophers. The issue is most famously associated with René Descartes (1596-1650), a French‑born thinker who lived most of his life in Holland. In view of the issues I discuss later, it is worth noting that Descartes said that he derived his ambition of designing a new philosophical and scientific system not from rational, lucid thought but from a series of dreams. That contradiction derived from the duality of his thinking. On the one hand, he developed philosophical and scientific theories that were rooted in rigid mathematics and the material world. On the other, his system was posited on the existence of a divine, benevolent creator. Out of this contradiction grew his well-known 'Cartesian dualism' that proposes the existence of two radically different kinds of substance: material substance (rocks, trees, animals and the human body) and 'thinking substance' (the human mind, thoughts, desires). That said, we have to admit that, despite the current plethora of studies of human consciousness, we still do not know how the functioning of the brain produces human consciousness. We do have a much better understanding of what happens in the brain than we did 20 years ago, even though, as Ian Glynn points out in his elegant and erudite book, An Anatomy of Thought, much remains mysterious. More pessimistically, there are those who argue that the problem will never be solved. For them, consciousness is like religion: if you have it, you cannot study it. Put another way, our cognitive abilities do not allow us to understand our cognitive abilities. It may be true that, if you have religion, you cannot study it, but it is a false analogy to go on to argue that our consciousness prevents us from understanding our consciousness. The fascinating issues of consciousness, self-awareness, introspection, insight and foresight remain, but, like other fields of great interest to which I have referred, they are not the destination of our present enquiry. Fortunately, we can circumnavigate them and examine the debate that surrounds relationships between brain, mind and the earliest art.
He proposes four mental modules: For instance, anatomically archaic people (who did not have generalized intelligence) could learn multi‑stage procedures for making stone artefacts (technical intelligence), but this degree of complexity could not spill over into elaborate kinds of social relations (social intelligence). Indeed, he argues that there was little interaction, or accessibility, between intelligence modoles prior to the Transition. The minds of archaic people were like Swiss army knives: they comprised a set of gadgets each dedicated to a specific task. To illustrate an extension of this point, Mithen invokes a second beguiling metaphor, that of a cathedral (Fig. 24).
The central nave represents general intelligence. Ranged around the nave are four chapels, each dedicated to one of the four mental modules. Prior to the Transition, there was little or no traffic between the chapels, though the possible linking power of rudimentary language in the Middle Palaeolithic should be taken into account. At this time of neurological demolition, new mental abilities became viable. For instance, metaphorical thought became possible as a result of traffic between chapels. People could think of, say, social relations in terms of natural history intelligence - thus totemism was born: people could speak of human groups as if they were animal species. Similarly, anthropomorphism (the ascription of human characteristics to animals) was achieved by traffic from social intelligence through to the chapel of natural history: animals became like people. Then, too, for the comparatively complex subsistence strategies of the Upper Palaeolithic there had to be traffic between technical intelligence and natural history intelligence. Improved hunting equipment (technical intelligence) was of no use without integrating it with knowledge of the environment in which it was to be used and the behaviour of the animals to be hunted (natural history intelligence). All in all, human-environment interactions were transformed by this new mode of generalized intelligence. Ingeniously, Mithen uses cathedral vandalism to explain the appearance of not only better adaptations, but also art at the Transition. He begins by proposing four cognitive and physical processes (not to be confused with the four intelligence modules): Some reservations Evolutionary psychology as a sub-discipline has its critics. Unfortunately, there is a muddying of the waters with political correctness. Some critics find that the tenets of evolutionary psychology are uncomfortably close to freemarket economics, which they abhor. That observation has some support, but any scientific proposition must be accepted or rejected on rational grounds, not on its perceived social consequences. This is a point that I bear in mind as I briefly consider Mithen's evolutionary psychology explanation for the origin of the human mind and art: it is attractive, but I believe that it has weaknesses and that it leaves some important points outstanding. First, despite the considerable ingenuity of evolutionary psychologists, the explanation is heavily dependent on mental modules inferred, very largely, from animal and human behaviour. How can we be sure that pre-supiens hominids had the four intelligence modules that Mithen postulates? To what extent are these modules inferred by modern human minds from modern human behaviour? Indeed, is it possible to infer modules from behaviour? Secondly, we have no direct information on the possible modularity of ancient minds. As a result, evolutionary psychologists are free to invent historical trajectories that move repeatedly between modularity and access between modules for as much as 100 million years. These four reservations are sources of concern, but they do not entirely eliminate the possibility that intelligence may indeed be modular in some way. Either way, we can proceed with our enquiry because I argue that we need to go beyond intelligence, whether it is modular or not. My fifth reservation takes up this point. It concerns what I see as too exclusive an emphasis on intelligence. Intelligence is what researchers use when they study human origins and all the other puzzles of science. Whilst they allow intuition and unexplained flashes of insight a role in the solving of scientific problems, ideas so acquired must, they rightly insist, be subjected to rational evaluation. Conscioussess: neurological and social The problem here is that the emphasis on intelligence has marginalized the importance of the full range of human consciousness in human behaviour. Art and the ability to comprehend it are more dependent on kinds of mental imagery and the ability to manipulate mental images than on intelligence. What we have here is a case of our knowledge of the past being entrenched in present‑day values and practices. In this instance, the social constructivist position (Chapter 2) clearly has some merit. What constitutes consciousness for us at our particular position in history informs our investigation and knowledge of the past. Catherine Lutz identifies a number of features that are considered integral to our own Western, twenty-first-century consciousness. These features include an absence of emotion in problem-solving, objectivity, linear thought, and sustained attention spans:'Consciousness so construed is seen as fundamentally good and important." These features of consciousness as it is conceived in the West come out clearly in Lutz's review of the historical definitions of consciousness listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. But when she moves on to consider consciousness as it is conceived in nonWestern societies, the inadequacy of her method is exposed. She regards consciousness as something entirely constructed in social discourse and thus without neurological,'hardwired' foundations. In this, she (together with the many others who follow similar approaches) comes close to Descartes's separation of mind from body. Despite her wish to rise above the received norms of her own Western society, she falls prey to a current academic aversion to any reference to the neurological basis of consciousness or behaviour. Other components of consciousness, such as Descartes's dreams, are therefore considered aberrations and suppressed in formulations of what constitutes human consciousness. As we shall shortly see, consciousness is not entirely a construct. Rather, it derives from historically specific responses to and categorizations of a shifting neurological substrate. For an initial illustration of this dialectic between social construction and neurological foundations I turn to the medieval concept of consciousness. It was different from present‑day concepts, even though it had to make sense of the same neurological foundation. Medieval people valued dreams and visions as sources of knowledge vouchsafed by God. Hildegaard of Bingen (1098-1179), for example, believed that her visions revealed not just God's personal instructions to her but also the material structure of the universe: she did not distinguish between religious revelation and 'science'.
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