Flat Minds; Flattish Arguments

Flat Minds; Flattish Arguments

There’s a book out that I’m not going to read. It’s called “The Mind is Flat” and it’s by a psychologist, Nick Chater. Why am I repelled, as if by an opposite magnet? Well, there have been a couple of sniffy reviews, in The Guardian and Prospect. But the main reason is that the author has written a longish summary of his thesis in the former publication https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/01/revolution-in-our-sense-of-self-sunday-essay?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. I find it rather incoherent.

Chater’s proposition is that there is no depth to our minds- no hidden psyche; no emotional reserves, or pits. All is flatness. Any sense of depth is invented by our brain, which makes up what passes for our character and embedded self as it busks along.

Chater’s empirical starting point is the tricksiness of visual perception. Citing various well known experiments, he reminds the reader that the brain constructs visual experience from apparatus which is limited in its actual perceptual abilities. What “we” (a very loaded term) experience as a seamless visual field is actually a lot of selective and disjointed data confected into seamlessness by – tricks.

So far, one can stay with this. But now comes the great inference: as with perception, so with all other mental states. The brain makes them up, in a dazzling, constant process of improvisation.

Look beyond the conjuring tricks, and there’s nothing to see. Just as a fictional character (Anna Kerinina) has nothing to her beyond the few “facts” written in Tolstoy’s novel, so any real life AK, throwing herself under a train, would not have any more internal hinterland than her fictional counterpart.

The interpretation of real people is no different from the interpretation of fictional characters…No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain scanning can recover a person’s “true motives”, not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find.

….

We generate our beliefs, values and actions in the moment. Thoughts, like fiction, come into existence in the instant they are invented and not a moment before. The sense that behaviour is merely the surface of a vast sea, immeasurably deep and teeming with inner motives, beliefs and desires is a conjuring trick played by our own minds. The truth is not that the depths are empty, or even shallow, but that the mind is flat: the surface is all there is.

Compelling stuff? The evidence? None really; apart from the perceptual trickery. Just the assertion that there’s nothing there, apart from the frantically busking brain.

However – and it’s a very big However- the busking brain is not, in the theory, utterly free-form. It works from precedent; so previous improvisations influence subsequent ones, and so on.

New actions, skills and thoughts require building a rich, deep [note the scorned adjective] mental tradition.. Each of us is a unique tradition from which our new thoughts and actions are created.

Are we not a far cry, here, from equivalence between fictional and real characters? Is there not a crack in the theory?

Actually, there are two cracks. First whom or what is the brain trying to fool by its improvisations? Itself? A mind with certain tethered coherencies? And second, if the brain acts according to precedent, what is the difference between this scenario and one where a self has suffered trauma, love, anxiety and all the other debunked mysteries of psychology? After all, the templates for the busking brain are not only laid down by the busker but also by what happens. Chater’s article does not address experience. His brain seems to be just a jolly rambler on a cloudless day.

(One may also add: his theory highlights the danger of talking about mental/brain stuff with too much reliance on metaphor…)

April 2018.