video
Topic Series
George Lakoff
Saleem Ali on Natural Laws and Human Life
Coming Soon: What is Philosophy of Scientific Breakthroughs?
Coming Soon: What are Scientific Breakthroughs in Biology?
What Are Scientific Breakthroughs In Physics?
Tim Palmer on Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change
Manil Suri on How to Build the Universe with Math
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- George, the so-called mind/body problem which has been around for centuries and philosophy still really has its power to…to give us a sense of awe about what we are as human beings. What is my mind? Is it just my body and brain, or is there something more? How do you approach the mind/body problem?
- George Lakoff
- Well first of all you ask what have we found out scientifically about it? And we found out a lot. We found out, for example, that you have to think with your brain, and we have a very good idea how neural computation works, for example, what that means. We have a very good idea of what kinds of things happen in different parts of the brain. We have an idea about what concepts are like, what their structures are, how things like metaphor, frames, etcetera, arise. We know lots and lots about the details of what the mind is like. Then given those details, those scientific details, then you ask the mind/body problem, only after that. You don't start with the mind/body problem. Well, the first thing you find out is that our conceptual system depends completely on properties of the brain. Many different properties of the brain. There are…the brain is a leased energy system like any physical system. It has what are called best-fit properties. Many of our concepts and the way concepts fit together depend upon this property of the brain. So that the mind is not just separate from the physical system, it's not separate from the way physics works and chemistry works. It depends upon the way physics and chemistry works to fit concepts together in the best way so that when you hear a sentence, you fit together the best ideas that you can, the best understanding you can, where best is understood in terms of exactly what a neural system…now a neural system works. And then the way that that changes in context also depends upon the way neural systems work. That's really important. The idea that we can have multiple understandings of the world, that we can have two different ways of living – Saturday night and Sunday morning, for example, or you know, you might believe religion in this sphere and science in this sphere, and they may never come together.</p>
- You know, this is Stephen J. Gould's idea. Well, the brain accommodates that. It's called mutual inhibition. You have two contradictory systems, but you can have them both where each inhibits the other when everyone is active, and they just don't happen to come together, maybe. Sometimes they do, and then you get problems. But the point is that our brains explain this about the mind, and that's the point. When you look empirically about how minds work, it turns out that the brain explains how minds work, which means that the minds are not just floating in air independent of the brain. That the properties of the brain and the body are giving rise to the details of concepts, to the details of metaphors for example, to the details of imagery and mental imagery. All of those things are coming out of the brain, they're not just floating somewhere in space. It's not like there's this separate thing in the mind that has nothing to do with the brain.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Are the categories of mind something real and independent of the brain even though they are caused by the brain?
- George Lakoff
- No, and that's the interesting thing. When you look at the categories of mind and you study their properties, their properties depend upon the properties of the brain. That is what is really interesting about this. And this is an empirical conclusion. You can study the categories of mind and look at them independently of looking at brains, and that's what we had to do for a long time. I've been working in cognitive science since the 1960s, right? We didn't know much about the brain back in those days, and most of what we've learned is we've learned in the past 10-20 years. Now, early studies we showed certain properties of mind. Lots of them came out, we were able to show it in great detail, study it in great detail, and so on. Then we started learning about the brain and we started learning that some of these theories fit the brain and some were not, and that the brain explained many of the things that were found, and many of the theories of mind turned out not to fit the brain at all. That what happens is that the brain… the brain tells you which of the theories of mind work, and then when you look at the actual properties of inferences, metaphors, frames, prototypes – they follow from the properties of the brain. That is what's remarkable.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Which kinds of properties of the brain will those categories follow?
- George Lakoff
- Let me give you an example. Let's take narrative, right? You understand your life in terms of the narratives that you live out. Well, narratives turn out to have small narratives that build up into bigger ones. We have a rags-to-riches narrative, we have, you know, a pull yourself up by your boot straps narrative. We have many different ones. We have a battle narrative where we defend ourselves and there are heroes and villains and so on. Many narratives. Those narratives fit together by…into complex narratives by what is called neural binding, and they fit together seamlessly. But narratives also have emotional content. If you have a hero/villain story where there's a villain, a victim, and a hero, and some villainous act, you have emotions that go with it. You have emotions like anger at the villainous act, fear about the battle, relief at victory, all right? Those emotions are there in your brain in different parts. Antonio Damasio has shown that there are things called somatic markers which are actual physical neural structures that link the emotional components to the parts of the brain that give you the narrative structure, the overall dramatic structure. And they fit together by neural binding seamlessly so that the narrative is emotional and is rational at the same time. And that's important because we know from Damasio's study that you can't be rational without being emotional, right? And we can also show the detailed structures of personal narratives, narratives that you live in your lives and their emotional content, and we can talk about, at least in initial form, how that works in terms of the brain and why they're there, and why certain previous views of narrative structure don't work and what parts of them are explained by the way brains are structured.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- What would seem to follow is that therefore mental categories are things that are directly caused by brain structure, and that what we used to think has some sort of an independent existence that has to be explained by the brain, rather the brain itself is what created those categories.
- George Lakoff
- Exactly. They… Mental categories are a result of both brain and body structure and the world, the interactions with the real world together. And when you put all that together, that's where you get an explanation of what the mental categories are.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So how do we then bring it back to the old mind/body problem?
- George Lakoff
- The old mind/body problem is solved in the following way. The mind is the body, but there are certain aspects of mind that we do not yet understand and may never understand, which is qualia and awareness, the quality of subjective experience, but that doesn't mean it's not caused by the body. And in fact, certain things about the relationships among qualities are explainable in terms of the body. So if you say what possible understandings/relations between the colors are there, that has to do with the neural physiology of color vision.