How Minds Disclose Worlds (snippet from a philosophy book I'm writing)

[DocWatts]

So I thought I might share a snippet or two from the philosophy book I'm working on, which I'm describing as a 'guided tour' to how minds acquire valid knowledge about Reality. The basic aim of this book is to develop a phenomenological approach to epistemology, and to introduce both topics in a way that's accessible to non-specialists who don't speak philosophical jargon as a second language.

The book is entitled '7 Provisional Truths'. The work is grounded by a somatic, or embodied theory of mind, which explores how our lived experience of Reality is a consequence of the organizational structure provided by having living bodies with survival needs (whether you believe those bodies to be composed of matter-stuff or mind-stuff is irrelevant for our present purposes).

My overall approach for the book is to use an orienting metaphor for each of the seven themes of the book, which are tied to an easily relatable everyday context. The section below is a snippet from the a chapter on the first of the 7 Provisional Truths, which is all about how minds turn Reality into a home for us through a process that I'm calling world disclosure.

If there's any interest, I might post more snippets in future. I'd also welcome any feedback, since I'm also partly trying to gauge and adjust whether my writing style to be accessible as possible for the subject matter I'm exploring.

_______________________________________________________

THE 7 PROVISIONAL TRUTHS

1.) MINDS DISCLOSE WORLDS

2.) KNOWLEDGE IS MOSTLY SITUATED COPING

3.) CATEGORIES ARE ALWAYS CONTEXTUAL

4.) ALL PERSPECTIVES ARE PARTIAL

5.) INTELLECT SERVES INTUITION

6.) MOTIVATED REASONING IS THE NORM

7.) BELIEFS SERVE US BEST WHEN HELD LIGHTLY

_______________________________________________________

 

PROVISIONAL TRUTH #1: MINDS DISCLOSE WORLDS

(Orienting Metaphor: World disclosure is the mind’s way of constructing a home for us within Reality)

The orienting metaphor that we’ll be returning to throughout this section is that of a home, and our main premise is that a central part of what minds do is create homes for us within Reality.

And just like a house is constructed to be compatible with the lifestyle of human beings (houses aren’t built underwater, nor are their doorways accessed from the ceiling), minds construct a version of Reality for us to live within that comes prearranged in terms of our needs and capacities. The process by which minds turn Reality into a home for us to reside within is called world disclosure.

What a world refers to is a cumulative whole of meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships for a living Being. We can think of a world as what Reality is on an experiential level for an individual. To disclose is to reveal or uncover something. So world disclosure is the process of revealing a meaningful world within the whole of Reality.

And the meaningful aspect of world disclosure is the really important part. As conscious beings that experience and understand things, we do not and could not reside within a bare Reality; what we reside within is a meaningful world. Another way of referring to this meaningful world is as our lived Reality.

In our metaphor of home construction, houses of course don't build themselves, but are constructed with building materials that are actively put together through the labor of people. Likewise, minds disclose worlds in accordance with the opportunities and demands of a particular environment, through the structural organization that’s provided by a living body with survival needs.

So it is only through a living body that a mind has access to a world of people, places, and things; which is to say that minds are inherently embodied. So when we speak of a mind we’re also necessarily speaking of a living body as well, because the question of how a mind functions can’t be meaningfully answered without also considering the particulars of how that mind is embodied. The term somatic is used to describe ideas and practices that deal with our direct experience of the living body. The theory of mind which grounds the themes we’ll be exploring throughout this book is a somatic theory of mind.

Later on we’ll be considering some of the reasons why the importance of the living body to the mind is an area that has largely been neglected throughout Western philosophy (though with a handful of exceptions, which we’ll also be exploring). As we do so, we’ll also be articulating the challenge that this somatic view poses to disembodied conceptions of mind which stretch back to the European Enlightenment and are still influential to this day, despite how archaic these conceptions have become in the light of scientifically informed knowledge. For our present purposes, when we mention that minds are inherently embodied, what we are emphasizing is the importance of the structural organization that’s provided by a living body to what a mind is.

Importantly, minds do not  ‘invent’ worlds independently from the living body, nor does world disclosure take place in isolation from the totality of the shared Reality that you, I, and everyone else participates in. (In contrast, the idea that minds independently ‘create’ the whole of Reality and that nothing outside of one’s own mind exists is a philosophical hypothesis known as solipsism, which this book unambiguously rejects).

And just in case the distinction between an environment and a world is still a bit unclear, when we mention an environment, what we are referring to are the physical and social spaces which exert evolutionary selection pressures on a life form. And when we refer to a world, what we're referring to are the meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships that a mind experiences over the course of its life. 

Worlds can also be thought of as what environments become through minds which are hardwired to experience meaningful things and situations. Or to return to our guiding metaphor for this chapter, the difference between an environment and a world can be likened to the difference between a house and a home. As all of us know, a home isn’t just a physical space, but a significant place which has been suffused with a rich tapestry of familiarity and meaning.

The upshot of all this is that minds aren’t passive spectators that are parachuted into a preexisting world with fixed features. Rather, minds play an active role in constructing the features of the worlds they come to inhabit. However, this is not to say that minds are free to inhabit just any type of world, nor are the specifics of world disclosure a ‘choice’ that an individual makes (consciously or otherwise). 

Instead, the specifics of world disclosure are in large part a consequence of the organizational structure that’s provided through a body which is subject to the evolutionary selection pressures of an environment. Which is to say that both body and environment predispose minds to different forms of world disclosure, and thus to different types of lived Realities. 

Among the more significant aspects of human physiology for the types of world disclosure experienced by human beings are highly expressive and communicative faces, a bipedal posture that’s oriented along a front-back axis, highly dexterous hands that are used to manipulate our surroundings, and forward facing eyesight that serves as our primary navigational sense. 

 

A WORLD OF AFFORDANCES

Crucially, these structurally significant aspects of our physiology (our bipedalism, our hands, and our eyesight, to name just a few) play a role in determining the types of affordances that our worlds contain. An affordance can be thought of as an invitation to interact with something in some particular way. For example, a chair offers affordances for sitting, while a hammer offers affordances for hammering. 

Importantly, affordances aren’t something that we’re consciously aware of most of the time; rather, they play a role in how objects show up for us in our lived experience. It’s simply obvious to us that chairs are for sitting and hammers are for hammering. Of course, that’s not to imply that objects invite us to interact with them in only one way. A hammer can be used to drive nails into wood, but it can also be used to cave in someone’s skull. The particulars of what any given affordance will be aimed at will largely depend on the demands of the situation that one is absorbed in.

While this situational aspect of affordances will be covered in depth in our next chapter which is all about situated coping, for the time being what’s worth noting about affordances is that they’re first and foremost flexible. More specifically, affordances assist minds in navigating the complexity of Reality by offering a flexible means for focusing in on what’s relevant for our needs and purposes within the situation we’re involved in. 

It’s precisely because affordances are so flexible that an experiential world structured in terms of affordances is a world that’s ripe for improvisation. And it’s largely this disclosive improvisational framework which allows minds to adapt to the wide variety of situations that a living being encounters throughout the course of its life. 

Edited July 5, 2023 by DocWatts

[Vibroverse]

I love it, i definitely wanna read the completed version of this. 

 

[DocWatts]

@Vibroverse Thanks!

[zurew]

Sounds good and interesting.

I will be particularly interested in this part:

"INTELLECT SERVES INTUITION" -- my intuition told me, that this is definitely correct .

 

[DocWatts]

22 hours ago, zurew said:

Sounds good and interesting.

I will be particularly interested in this part:

"INTELLECT SERVES INTUITION" -- my intuition told me, that this is definitely correct .

Thanks! Really looking forward to writing that section in particular, since intuition's relationship with reason via heuristics is a very interesting topic to explore.

Edited July 6, 2023 by DocWatts

[trenton]

@DocWatts this is badass! Great work! You were always the kind of person wise enough to create something like this!

[Ajax]

Great information.  Good start. I would add some constructive criticism that the idea of the home, in the way you presented it, is kind of abstract. A metaphor allows complex ideas to be connected to an image. While reading, I totally forgot about the metaphor, so there needs to be some adjusting and rearranging there.

Here is the first google search for metaphor. 

"A great metaphor recasts the familiar or mundane as something strikingly different yet truly parallel. It gives a startlingly vivid picture or brings a surprising insight. A bad metaphor fails to achieve the parallel, or the fresh insight, or both. The element of surprise is an important part of a great metaphor."

I could not relate or connect with your metaphor.

Again, I could be interested in buying your book, but I wanted to give some honest feedback. I think your book has potential.

LOVE

Edited July 6, 2023 by Ajax

[DocWatts]

@trenton @Ajax Thanks for the kind words, and for the constructive feedback.