Abstract
As Harris’s philosophy of mind is fairly extensive, I confine my focus to only the central thread of his argument concerning efforts to naturalize subjectivity and knowledge. Towards this end, in Sect. 7.2, I clarify Harris’s anticipation of the autopoietic enactivism (AE) approach to consciousness. In this section I also establish a preliminary reformation of the hard problem to be elaborated in the following discussions. In Sect. 7.3, I assess Harris’s and Damasio’s respective appeals to Spinoza’s conception of ideatum as a model of mind and contrast these approaches with more recent arguments from embodied cognition. In Sect. 7.4 this line of thought is extended to Spinoza’s concept of conatus in order to clarify how Harris’s theory of self-awareness relates to corresponding views from embodied and embedded theses of mind.
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Notes
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Note that this point does not contradict Thompson’s (2007) proposal of neurophenomenology as cited in Sect. 2.3.2 because—as will become increasingly evident—Harris’s “isomorphism” is not a reductive identity of mind to behaviour or vice versa, nor does he imply some set of facts that can be read in one way or the other. Rather, in line with Bohm and ENM, both refer to one and the same phenomenon that is not captured by either mind or behaviour alone.
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Though they do not cite AE, Hollis et al. (2009) argue, “[i]f metabolism is the primary function of a nervous system, then an elegant theory would be one in which cognitive activity emerges out of metabolism. Such a theory would begin to bridge the chasm between laws of physical processes and cognition” (212).
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Harris (1965) describes the emergence of a psychical field with the case of awakening from a head injury in a way reminiscent of symmetry breaking: “The state of consciousness described is one of fogginess in which vague inhomogeneities gradually emerge, as the field of awareness becomes progressively organized. The first distinguishable elements are sensory, vaguely unpleasant (in this case) and emotionally coloured. Then the field becomes bipolar with a self distinguished from a not-self […] From the first there is some inhomogeneity and vague differences in sensory modalities are felt before the self is distinguished as the subject of the experience. The awakening consciousness is from the start an activity of organizing and distinguishing” (314). In a later chapter Harris clarifies that in these lowest stages of awareness “is the nearest approach to homogeneity in the psychical field that is ever experienced” (331). This again suggests that Harris recognized (on some level) despite his later writings, that to speak of a homogenous sensory field is contrary to his system.
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My reasons for excluding God from the discussions that follow are (i) I maintain that insofar as Harris’s logic relies upon Spinoza’s reasoning, it can be reduced to a NM without any loss to the force of his resulting system; (ii) much more argument is needed to conclude that the neutral Substance is Godly than either Spinoza or Harris provided; and (iii) space prohibits my sufficient consideration of this issue.
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This interpretation of Spinoza is corroborated by van Bunge et al. (2011), who explain that for Spinoza, “[a]ll knowledge of the human body (E2p19), the human mind (E3p23) and the external bodies (E2p26) begins with affections of the body” (145). What Spinoza called our confused and fragmentary knowledge of the first kind (E2 29).
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Note the connection between what is here considered the inadequacy of ideas and what has been discussed above as the MSE-PSE fallacy (MPF). See van Bunge et al. (282–83) regarding Spinoza’s conception of the passions.
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I fully appreciate how nuanced is the philosophical terrain concerning the nature of “self” and thus how drastic a leap I am making by moving forward in the discussion. Innumerable texts have been devoted to defining the concept and Harris certainly took pains to elucidate what he meant by self (e.g. 1965, 315–32; 1987, 83, 117, 238, 259; 2000 ff. 250; 2006, ff. 111). Unfortunately, this topic requires too deep a divergence into phenomenology and neurophenomenology than I currently have space to consider. Thus, the following section will have to suffice for my present purposes.
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For example, Niedenthal et al. (2014) have found “the body’s reproduction of parts of an emotional experience constitute conceptual content for emotion. The words “disgust” and “interest” are not mentally grounded by disembodied symbols but are grounded by parts of the bodily state that are re-enacted to support perception and thought” (247). See Colombetti (2013) for further details concerning affectivity, phenomenology, and AE; see Pessoa (2015) for an extensive discussion on the cognitive-emotional brain.
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In the context of memory, Bechtel (2009) contends that “information is often encoded in a very distributed fashion in which there is no single locus for the engram” (25). He goes on to explain that one consequence of this distributed representation scheme is that the representations or memories are “subject to catastrophic interference as the learning of new information alters the connections that maintained the previously learned information” (ibid.). Hence, even if we admit the term representation in philosophical discussion, it may not provide sufficient grounds for a correspondence theory, given how dynamic brains and worlds actually are.
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Unfortunately, I do not have space to elaborate the fascinating empirical evidence to this end, but the following summarizes two relevant lines of reasoning. In evolutionary neuroscience, Striedter (2005) has argued that the last significant burst of brain growth for Homo sapiens 100,000 years ago was not due to a change of diet or genetics alone, but “altercations with fellow humans” that spurred language and culture (ff. 318). In evolutionary psychology, Corballis (2007) maintains that there is a link between the FOXP2 gene mutation and the mirror system (Broca’s area), proposing that this mutation has provided a means to incorporate vocal control into (and thus depended upon) our abilities to mirror physical actions. “It provides further evidence that the FOXP2 mutation was the final stage in a series of adaptations that allowed speech to become autonomous” (585).
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Famous examples abound in social psychology of mal development resulting from severe neglect in children that has been shown to arrest moral and reasoning capacities associated with human consciousness (van der Horst and van der Veer 2008).
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Harvey et al. (2016) have maintained that interactivity reveals a shortcoming to the enactivist conception of operational closure: “where enactivism describes agent-environment relations in terms of in-the-moment coupling, we assume these relations play out on multiple heterogeneous timescales, such that in many cases—perhaps most—agency is fundamentally distributed” (235). Their worry appears to be satiated by considering Thompson’s (2007) appeal to generative phenomenology, which concerns the historical, social, and cultural becoming of human experience: “To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity—the process of becoming, of making and remaking, that occurs over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated” (36). Evidently Harris’s conception of historical cognition is in deep agreement with generative phenomenology (1988, ff 79).
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Schofield, J. (2021). Harris’s Reformation of the “Hard Problem”. In: A Phenomenological Revision of E. E. Harris's Dialectical Holism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65029-2_7
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