But do the hidden links between the mind’s remembering and the brain’s storing need retrieving for the poet’s or the poem’s sake? What about us—the readers’ sake? How do we know what it is being retrieved—and for what reason? Neither mind nor brain are immune to playing tricks on us. Mind needs love, and brains want nourishment—just a friendly competition—or a difference in taste, as it is often called. Is poetic value, then, a function of the success of such retrieval—as stipulated by some or other rules of success—neurological, psychological, critical? If not, then the poet (however mind and brain work out, and whether or not “meanings” are entities to be retrieved) may not be necessary for the poetry—at all. (the modern scepticism).
Worrying this dichotomy—looking for poetic inspiration in the poet’s mind or probing for it in the brain—may be like the memories an old dog has of hunting when he is limited to chewing on an ancient bone. Some poets, however much they try to be buried in memory, are not dead-dogs in fact. Other poets are more accomodating and stay alive to join the nowadays. Then, writing-about and remembering-why, become unnecessary reaches for a talent looking for success. Focussing on the present, our new poet will brush aside retrieval, and say of the writing that it doesn’t have the inside track of Jones’s poems (Jones being a recent recipient of the “Most Promising Poet” award) but—as friends have pointed out—it has a better be-bop rhythm, and it uses more dirty words.
MIND AND BRAIN
The passage from brain to mind is metaphysically easy; the passage from mind to brain is politically easy. The second, in fact, may not need the visit of the first: Some brain champions would be happy with an excommunicated mind—get rid of all pretenders! But other champions—old afficionados of the mental—still care for their relatives who have come upon hard times. If we believe that continuing to probe the interplay between mind and brain is an issue that can lead to something other than the inconclusive skirmishes of our present border war—then we must rescue that some-time mind, now under threat of imprisonment (without sufficient reason) in the brain.
It (the mind) is these days the weaker of the two—but still feisty. We minders can say to the brainists that the duality need not be overcome—clear borders make for different languages (and practices). But these respective languages—mind-talk and brain-talk—do need a disinterested observer to give them some advice. Mind, at this point, should be asked to cede to brain the necessity of showing (before the fact) how thinking occurs. To this, a brainist might deny that mindists have indicated that they care about such things. In rebuttal: Mindists could say that brain-thinking is more concerned with concrete specifics than with open vistas, and in their turn, will demand probity for different questions—determinations of the subjective kind—of beauty, goodness, love, the meaning-of-life —to name a few. The disinterested observer, in his turn, will (surely) say that two distinct languages are better at reaching accord (or, at least, partition) than is the admonition to remain silent.
It can be noted, when we look at the controversy, that there are now many languages vying for attention in all sorts of places. Quine’s fabled “indeterminacy of translation” (and local interests) keep them safe from the parsimony of “adequate translation.” But even when we venture to the more formal levels of thinking, we find competing languages: Physics speaks differently than does Biology; the proposed reduction of the latter to the former (once a great project) is now too embarassing for, even, cocktail chat; Anthropology and Cultural History will not either become one-nation anytime soon. But in contrast, art-speak and psychoanalysis did develop some across-border trade—only to be jointly vilified.
By placing the mind solely within the physical realm—as the brainists would have it— is not any more a solution to the mysteries of human consciousness than is talking—in-tongues. But in rejecting such extremes, we face enlarging our notions of truth so that—as the mindists would argue —some notions are (provisionally) adequate to the problematics of consciousness, and the varieties of introspective experience. For this sense of “adequacy,” we need a reassessment of what we admit as “true” so that we can accept phenomena that derive from sources whose physicality is not (as yet—or in principle) determinate.
One benefit to this interregnum between mind and brain would be our right to say that the world is not only actual but logical. But we must also be able to say that the world is logical thanks to us. Following upon this, we should admit that (evolutionarily) we are logical because of the world’s “capacity” to develop a brain that contains a mind that understands itself as logical. But neither evolution (nor logic) have ended.
This can cause concern—a deep metaphysical anxiety for some—not the time for a quick fix. It would be fitting, and even necessary (to some) if the guru would say to us: Do not relegate “I think.” to the machine-that-thinks. Well, perhaps at this time we haven’t entirely, but soon we’ll have to face it—that mind and brain share an electronic face—that when it comes time to solving problems you did not think you had—until the machine showed you that you have ongoing lots of them—then, because you made the machine (more or less) in your own image, you must agree that they need solving. Then, you ask (program) the machine to solve them. When? Now—this morning—those bits and bytes don’t sleep! But the guru says the problems were there before the waning of the early days—and if you follow them back to when the old-ones simply fucked and hunted, and the brighter young-ones drew pictures on the cave-walls—the problems were there in other languages.
Can you now say that it doesn’t matter—that the need to know has always been there in the brain (somewhere-there) waiting (somehow) to be transferred to the machine—and then solutions down-loaded when we tell the machine what it is we (think we) want to know?
The computer shows the brain (in computer-speak) a conundrum that the brain must recognize: That the totality of thought transcends the possibility of both brain-talk and mind-talk to account for all that can be thought by conscious thinkers—of which the computer is not one. We (the disinterested observers) know that the capacity of the computer exceeds what is told it by all the brains and minds that feed (program) it—the consequences of logical systems move faster than we can think them. But the protocals of a computer are literally empty of anything that matters (to us). Whereas an empty head (brain or mind—take your pick) is a loaded metaphor for the advent of joy and dismay, love and hate, foreboding and hope—the computer takes no heed. It has no heed to take. That is something we have to think about.
Redirect your gaze: We admit that we are vessels containing mind and brain, and we know that our mind continues to think as long as our brain is alive and functional.
We need not think, however, that the search for a unitary description of the two is a form of progress—and that one should (now) be folded into the other. This is just a conceptual imperialism of our time. Yet, it is sobering for both sides to think that the world endures beyond our mind’s awareness of it—when our brain has died.
In the interim, we are use our minds to think about how it (the world) might be after we are dead—or after our brains have been reduced to demonstrating how one (recorded) thought fits with its (provisionally) designated neural action.
Are these blips that you show me (on your screen) epiphanies of love or early signs of periodontal disease? Do computers worry (they may now be sophisticated enough to do so) about the origins of their worries? Are the most advanced computors concerned about the absence, in their programs, of the mind-brain dichotomy?
POETIC TRUTH
To tell the truth, I have no idea
how it feels to tell the truth—
or to rejoicing over telling it.
Truth, as I suspect, is a shell game
that we use for quelling doubts
that you or I can tell the world
something,