An Illustration of MonistConstructivism.
A presentation by Jennifer Dana Stoll, University of Liverpool.
In the first part of this presentation, an evolutionary perspective on cognitive development will be given. The common theme between all different cultures are explanatory principles, particularly transcending the explanatory principles of souls and gods. In a second part, several quotes of Lev Vygotsky, the father of social constructivism will be discussed. In part three, a cognitive model of monist constructivism will be developed, including views on paradigms, epistemology, and identity.
Transcending Souls
Animism vs. Enlightenment
A quest for science is always a quest to challenge coarse explanatory principles. In the early stages of human cognitive evolution, myths were used to described the operation of the world. The coarser one’s understanding of environmental phenomena is, for example, if atoms and fine structure of neural networks are far from being discovered yet, the more difficult it is to find reasonable models for complex behaviour of living beings or cognition (Bateson 1987). If one’s model consists of the Chinese five elements or Galen’s (n.d.) four humours, then combinations of these parts do not yield explanations for the contingent behaviour of living beings. This lack of reason leads to supernatural and mythical explanations for all complex phenomena of the world. There are two realms to which the mythical attribution can be made: the outside world, as animate matter, and the inside world, as animate ideas. Animate ideas within individual persons are typically combined into concepts of souls (Papateros, 2012).
This dichotomy between explained and supernatural phenomena, or material and phenomenal world is also known as dualism. As you might have noticed, there are several forms of dualism: Between subject and object, body and soul, matter and spirit, and many more (Stoll, 2014). Proper definitions are therefore necessary when discussing dualism.On this slide, the “I” concept of a person is displayed as a yellow box around the sense organs and thoughts.The line is dashed for the concept of inanimate ideas, because in this case the sense of I becomes a mere convention for communication. These methods, as we will see, portray a different concept of I.The process of challenging mythical explanations is also called enlightenment, or Aufklärung. It is one of the most common misconceptions that Eastern methods of enlightenment lead to spiritual mystification. Gautama Shakhamuni’s intention was rather the opposite: to challenge and abolish the myths of the Vedas (Enlightenment in Buddhism, n.d.).
When challenging mythical explanations, there are two possibilities. One can either challenge the animism of external phenomena. This is the path the Ionian thinkers have taken and that led to modern science. Or, one can challenge the animism of internal phenomena, the vitalism and concepts of souls. This route has been taken by eastern philosophers and led to introspective sciences (Burley, 2006). In the West, the new methods started out in Ionia with Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander. Methods called philosophy (in the original meaning of the word), logic, geometry and nowadays science opposed Greek mythos. In the East, Yoga, Taoism and Buddhism set out to challenge the ancient tradition of ritual Vedanta. The profound difference between these methods will be discussed on the following pages.
Noteworthy, today science still leads a fight against religious myths. The world as a whole still did not manage to transcend religious beliefs and work towards a global, epistemological consent based on scientific methods. During human development, each individual has to construct the knowledge necessary to transcend between epistemological boundaries of myths and science. These differences will be covered in depth in the third part of this presentation.Goal of all enlightenment is the abolishment for animist explanations of souls for both external and internal phenomena. Once this goal has been established, the resulting theory may be called a monist theory.
Disclaimer: This view is over-generalising. In Eastern and Western cultures, there have been schools and thinkers of both kinds. The bias of these slides focusses on the image, that currently is predominantly focused on in Western societies, and meant only exemplary. It therefore illegally reduces the richness of thinking of the subsumed cultures, for example, the mathematical richness of early Chinese and Indian cultures.
External Elaboration: Western Enlightenment
This slide discusses the concept of God within the path of Western enlightenment.In a first step, the causal principle is introduced to the external world. As the ultimate origin of phenomena cannot yet be inferred, one can only examine the dynamics of the outside world. One method is to infer from many observations to generalised laws, also called paradigmatic. A second method is called inductive, and tries to infer from the basic principles which are already known to all related phenomena. Using these methods, the god who animates everything is reduced to a creator god who initiates a causal chain that subsequently runs by itself. However, the god may retain the right to change the rules and remains as an explanatory principle for inexplicable phenomena. This boundary, at any point in time, contains phenomena that science has no explanation for yet, for example unexplainable changes in the seasons, waves of disease, and other black swan events that disrupt our perceptive continuity. With the advance of science towards the completeness of the known universe, theories like the Big Bang and evolution may challenge this creator principle. God is still behind all internal phenomena and the complex phenomenon life itself.
With advancing science and understanding of the human body and brain, particularly the complex nature of our central nervous system, more and more of the internal and idea complexity can be explained by causality. The rise of holism, system’s theory, cybernetics, and chaos science provided new explanations where complexity can arise from simple rules by amplification of small differences, also known as butterfly effect.At this point, god becomes a god of the gaps that is pushed back to the final frontier also known as “hard problem”. God may remain as a mythical explanation for everybody who is not content with the view that explanatory principles are merely unknown areas that have yet to be discovered in a continuous process of pushing back the frontier of the unknown. (Sperry, 1980)
The unknown does not need to be attributed to Gods. In the most cases, the illusion of Gods arise from questions that may be asked with words, but do not make sense or have a corresponding reality. Let me give some examples. To ask, what was before the universe, is an illegitimate question. The question asks for a point or span in time. Time, however, is a measure of change within the universe. Time is not defined outside the universe. It is thus a nonsensical question to ask what was before the universe. Likewise, the question what will be after death is illegitimate. Being, in this case, refers to the realm of personal experience. This personal experience is only present when there is consciousness. Consciousness is likely an emergent property of synchronous electrical activity in the central nervous system. If this synchronous activity is diminished, for example by anaesthetics, deep sleep, or death, then the experience of being ceases. So, to put it bluntly, in the scientific view there is no after death, and also nothing to worry about. Life is defined as the opposite of death, and the concept of an afterlife a nonsensical combination of concepts like asking for the shape of a colour.
Unlike concepts of gods following the Vedic cultures, the Abrahamitic notion of god arises from two driving forces: the will to live eternally, and the social pressures of leaders who use the fear of a God as a method to control people. Unfortunately, the early scientific heritage of the Ionian, Greek, and Punic culture, as well as Vedic remainders in the Celtic cultures became suppressed during the Roman Empire. First, the library at Carthago was destroyed by Roman general Scipio during the third Punic war. The war was inspired by senator Cato the Elder with his famous phrase “Ceterumcenseocarthaginemessedelendam”. Under Roman leadership, Carthago subsequently became a centre of Christian influence. Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as a religion of state, superseding earlier Roman mythology, suppressing leftover Egyptian cults, and degrading science below religious doctrine. After the fall of the Roman empire, dark ages began during which mythical biblical explanations ruled the Western world, until in the 16th century figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Johannes Kepler gave rise to a new wave of scientific thinking.
Following the mechanist understanding of his time, Rene Descartes still described the body as a machine that is operated by a soul. He introduced the certainty principle and paved the way for modern science. As long as ideas are innate, they may be thought of as unchangeable or predetermined. John Locke refused this idea. Locke proposed the mind starts from a blank slate at birth, a tabula rasa. Thus, ideas need to emerge and be learned, instead of being inborn or owing to attributions of being originally sinful. Following Locke’s ideas, the mind necessarily must contain emergent properties and he thus paved the way for modern developmental theories.
Internal Elaboration: Eastern Enlightenment
Opposed to the Western scientific route, some ancient Eastern paths are known for a phenomenological stance and tried to explain the coming into being of the world from an internal perspective. Consequently, when discussing disciplines like Yoga and Buddhism, one must keep in mind that the underlying causal principle is inverted.In some philosophies like Buddhism the world comes into being from the view of the observer, and the observer’s actions, or ultimately consciousness and its ripples cause the phenomena of the world including the observer. Others, like the Samkhya philosophy that Yoga adopted and Vedanta, use principles from the Upanishads, BaghavadGhita, and Brahmasutra that superseded Vedic ritualistic texts.
Whereas the physical momentum in the material world of Western science drives outside phenomena and produces being, the karmic momentum drives consciousness and its emergent phenomena. From an epistemological point of view, there are many early occurrences of emergent thinking in classical Eastern philosophies. In difference to the good and bad principle of Abrahamitic texts, like kosher or halal, the Samkhya model knows three gunas: tamas, rajas, and sattva. The tamasic property stands for the phlegm, the inert mass property of phenomena. The rajasic principle stands for their energy and motion. The sattvic principle represents the properties of the mind and intellect (Burley, 2006). Likewise, the Chinese yin-yang may be seen as a dynamic recurring alternation between two phases rather than a categorical dichotomy. In a discrete model, yin and yang are elaborated into a model of 64 binary combinations in the I-Jing. Similarly, the Five Element model (or better five phase model) discusses two opposing closed loop forces through five phases, crystallizing four basic triangles of direct and indirect effects (Van Nghi, N. & Recours-Nguyen, C., 1997).
The emergence of these theories may be attributed to chance, for example, it is impossible to start dichotomous thinking when the model contains an odd number of basic constituents. In this situation, a model with emergent effects or trajectories is a necessary evolution of thinking. Likewise, the Yin-Yang appears to be a unit, rather than a combination, including the combined effect that the two produce and that transcends the opposites. From the point of view of Western science, this kind of thinking is astonishing given the early date of the theories. Emergent properties, trajectories, and systemic effects only reappeared in the 19th and 20th century in Western mathematical models. During the Ionian times, there was close cultural exchange along the silk route, bringing together Greek and Indian sages. Introducing stone statues to India, an era of Graeco-Buddhism emerged with several Greek names appearing as Buddhist abbots throughout India and Sri Lanka (Falser, 2015, Lloyd, 2013).
From a psychological perspective, the early Eastern models are highly interesting due to their high degree of experiential elaboration by introspection and meditation. During the 19th century, Yoga was introduced into the Western society. It subsequently influenced early psychologists like Freud and Jung. Freud, in one paper, called the equilibrium between creative and destructive drives, between his Eros and Thanatos, a state of nirvana. Jung, on the other hand, lectured in Kundalini Yoga. Noteworthy, Samkhya elaborates on the ego-sense, and thus frames identification as one of the basic operations of the human mind. Similarly, a differentiation between manas (mind) and citta (affect) arises, paving the way to combine thought and affect as an explanation for the experiential reality of abstract concepts. Also, the principle of forms emerging from sensual perception was known to both Samkhya and Buddhism (Burley, 2006).
In the Samkhya model, still two versions of dualism can be described: A substance dualism that separates material world with material cause, also called Prakriti, from the mental realm, with efficient cause, also called Purusha. At a second barrier, between individual soul and universal consciousness, an existence dualism emerges posing the question whether souls are individual experiences or rather part of one big continuum that only appears to be divided into individuals. Different schools find different answers to this question, but as there is only introspection available as a method, much of it remains a philosophical discussion. What can be learned from these theories is that human identification, if introspective skills are developed, may take on every form. Some people may identify even with their possessions, but it is also possible to subsequently dis-identify from body and thoughts until only the formless space remains in which all phenomena appear. The place of identification has profound systemic effects on human physiology (ibid.).
Ways to Monism
There are several well-known theories that managed to escape the dualist paradigm: Buddhism, Advaita-Vedanta and materialist constructivism. However, they base on different causal assumptions.
Buddhism is known as a monist philosophy. In its phenomenological view, unperturbed consciousness originally is mere potentiality of experience. From it, by karmic momentum that is driven by ignorance, mental formations arise that generate the names and forms that underlie the consciousness of the sense organs and mind. Via contact, they subsequently give rise to feelings, feeling leads to craving, craving to becoming, and becoming finally to rebirth and suffering. In difference to Western religions, Eastern spirituality did not strive for eternal life. As it assumes that undisturbed consciousness is the eternal principle, they rather want to end the cycle of rebirths that causes afflictions and suffering. The main enlightenment experience is thus that people are already conscious, thus they are already part of the one consciousness that makes up all phenomena. This inadvertently leads to a phenomenological monism that is most pronounced in Yogacara, Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Dzogchen and the Hindu school of Advaita-Vedanta (cf. Walshe, 1995, p 67ff).
The scientific way out of the materialist or determinist vs. constructivist dilemma is, in a most Eastern manner, to emphasize the method. In the West, the method is not introspection and the detailed examination of internal phenomena, but science, the detailed examination of perceived phenomena. It is similarly possible to create a causal chain that does not stop at the boundary of sense organs, but can also explain mental phenomena and consciousness. This can be achieved by combining the holistic, materialist approach with neurophenomenology or neuro-constructivism, where consciousness emerges from the synchronous operation of neural networks (Karmiloff-Smith, 2009, Varela, 1996, Wollstadt et al., 2017).
Psychology, as a discipline, faces the challenge to explore internal phenomena with the scientific method, and is thus heavily influenced by the neurosciences. As an early representative, Lev Vygotsky introduced a theory of social constructivism. Vygotsky proposed generalisation as the one constructive principle of the mind, from which all thoughts and meanings emerge. In this model, generalisation reduces arbitrariness. Thinking of behaviour, human behaviour initially is arbitrary at birth, limited by the physical properties of the human body and built in instincts and reflexes. The process of learning can be thought of as subsequent elimination of unwanted options of behaviour. The autopoiesis of the human body, where it continuously emerges in stages from earlier versions of itself, increases its internal entropy. Likewise, the reduction of options by generalisation in learning may be seen as continued entropy reduction in the brain’s network. Spanning all the range from beginning of the universe up to the explanation of conscious experience, materialist constructivism is also a monist theory.