Mind: Anticipation and Chaos. By Mihai Nadin. Stuttgart and Zurich: Belser Press, 1991. Reviewed bv Philip L. Smith, Ohio State University

There is an ancient Chinese curse, much quoted these days, where a person says to his enemy, "May you live in interesting times." Our times are nothing if not interesting. "Change is the only constant we have to live with" has become a platitude of this century. The most ambitious and talented, as well as the most despairing, of our immediate ancestors reveled in this state, thinking of the new opportunities that were presented to them. But by our century's end, seeing both their failures and our own, we have learned to be less sanguine about managing our affairs. As change has kicked into hyperdrive, we have become, in almost every area of culture, the victims as well as the benefactors of a loss of higher authority. This loss has been interpreted in intellectual fields to mean that instead of searching for the truth with a capital "T" we need to figure out, how or, indeed, if we can get along without a single set of standards as our guide.

Mind, Anticipation and Chaos, Mihai Nadin's richly textured book (which includes an English and German text in the same volume) addresses the lack of generalizable standards. He maintains that even in philosophy and in the hardest of sciences there is no escaping the conclusion that reality emerges through interpretation and debate from a network of contingent, mostly social, relationships. Some might regard this contention as old news. Hasn’t our culture—the culture of the West—embraced this attitude, for better or worse, at least since the Enlightenment? We have adopted a preference for democratic politics, a capitalistic economy, and a philosophy of radical individualism. Intellectually we have divided the stuff of mind and nature into discrete disciplines, each with its own methods and province of control. Nadin prefers examining our intellectual traditions to critiquing our political and social conventions.

While addressing the topics of computer-generated intelligence and the requirements of a good education, Nadin's book is not, in the current fashion, political nor driven by a program of professional or social reform. The book embraces a pragmatic conception of mind that has nearly become orthodoxy among leading contemporary philosophers. On the very first page we are told, "to know the mind means to know how minds interact." The rest of the book attempts to draw out and explain the significance of this claim.

Mind as Dynamic System

In an aside, Nadin tells us that he asked Benoit B. Mandelbrot for permission to paraphrase the title of his well-praised essay The Fractal Geometry of Nature by substituting "mind" for "nature" (p. 116). After talking about it, the two men decided that Nadin would be better off coining his own metaphor for mind. Nevertheless, fractals provide us with a suggestive image for what Nadin wants to say. He envisions the mind as a nonlinear dynamic system, consisting of endlessly embedded and continually evolving configurations (p. 116). In other words, minds exist only in the plural, in a network of mostly social relations that constitute our life experience (p. 6). There can be no mind except in association with other minds (pp. 140, 158).

Viewing the mind in this way has three advantages. First, it frees us from the obsession that mind stems from certain basic elements, like sensa or innate ideas, and ultimately must be explained in these terms. Instead, we can see the mind as an unbounded process that displays the properties of nonregularity and fragmentation. Second, we can more easily recognize the subjective nature of any attempt to capture and measure mind. Except as a fractal dimension applied as a computable parameter for the design of "intelligent" machines, attempts to represent the regularity and connectivity of mind are revealed on the model of fractals to be functions of our contextually determined purposes. Third, we can understand the mind's most distinguishing capacity is that it can anticipate, not just react to, problems. Future projections are more significant for the mind, as defined by its context of interaction, than are adjustments to an unstable present or an irrelevant past (p. 124).

A person with a mind understands things and events not by storing, retrieving, and matching information, but by "throwing various nets" onto experience in anticipation of questions, situations, and decisions to be faced (p. 44). To think of these nets in the traditional way is to envision them as constituting the source of our pre-understanding, or intentionality, and as determining the conditions under which we acknowledge things to exist (p. 48). Nadin prefers to think of these nets as mechanisms that simultaneously form the mind, that is, define its essence and allow it, vis-a-vis communication, to relate to human experience. By their nature and by the parameters of their existence, these mechanisms control all our reflective powers, including our awareness and ability to reason in theoretical and practical ways (p. 44).

At precisely this point, Nadin's book takes on other than purely philosophical dimensions. He contends that when the constitutive and communicative levels of mind are ignored in favor of an exclusive emphasis upon the rules and functions of representation, the mind develops as a complete and closed system (p. 60). To explain this contention Nadin uses the example of bees. No matter how elaborately organized in a hive, they operate with a limited number of options. They respond with a fixed repertory to cues they are given. Except as an element in a process of cause and effect, the behavior of a particular bee can neither change nor influence the behavior of other bees. Their interaction precludes the imaginative construction of alternatives.

Lacking this capacity, bees also lack the capacity for transaction, which is interaction at the highest level. Transaction is behavior that has the potential to alter more than the behavior of other individuals. Deliberately or not, it can alter their very nature, that is, transform them. Without using the word transaction, Nadin employs the concept as a requirement for the serious education of mindful beings. Indeed, he sees it as a necessary condition for the emergence of mind. Whether "having a mind" is a necessary condition for transactional behavior is for Nadin an irrelevant question. That bees are limited in the quality of their interaction is, Nadin would say, both a cause and an effect of their not having minds. Bees can neither create structurally new alternatives for themselves nor expand their set of choices beyond the logic of their native endowment. They are condemned to operate instinctually within a framework over which they have no control and from which they cannot escape, except by biological accident.

Nadin points out, and will not let us forget, that all our machines (mechanical, pneumatic, and electric), because they are our constructs, are, like the beehive, complete and closed systems. They differ from the beehive, and from all other natural systems, because they are not necessarily affected by changes in the material environment. In their essence, machines exist abstractly, as products of our minds. To think of them as a network of concepts gives them a Platonic-like immutability and, therefore, a kind of independence that cannot be matched by natural svstems.

"Are minds more like natural svstems that create machines, or more like machines (with varying degrees of feedback potential) that, when they work well, influence nature?" Philosophers have argued over this question in one form or another at least since Descartes, with almost no definitive answers. Perhaps this is why Nadin suggests instead that both attitudes are probably valid. He would prefer to ask, "Should we view the mind as a complete and closed system or not?" His answer is that although the mind can develop as a self-contained and self-referential structure, where mental processing occurs in a machine-like fashion, this is neither inevitable nor desirable. The mind should, and often does, show a tendency toward diversity and experimentation with constantly evolving "nets" that anticipate and reconfigure both individual and group experience (p. 52). In other words, the mind can envision new possibilities for its environment and for itself. Despite the risks involved, this is good.

Creativity and Maturity

In the last two chapters, Nadin tries to illustrate how we can encourage the mind's inventive qualities without undermining its prospects for maturity and wisdom. He dubs these attempts "practical implications of [his model of] mind" (p. 126). This terminology is somewhat unfortunate, for he also tells us that his model is "based on an understanding . . . of the dynamics of human practical life." Therefore, we must treat his model -as indeed, he wants it to be treated- as an implication of a deep understanding of practice (p. 126). Nadin might be regarded as a reluctant pragmatist (as some regard Kant). But he is a pragmatist nonetheless. He holds the view, similar to Dewey's that whenever a conflict arises between our actual encounters with the realities of everyday life and the models, or nets, we use to structure our experience, we should give more authority to the former, no matter what trepidations this may feel.

This admonition should not be read to imply that our understanding can be based on our perceptions alone. We need to interpret our ex-perience, and sometimes correct it, by imposing the categories that we as a culture invent. In adopting this attitude, Nadin has no wish to rekindle the traditional dispute between rationalism and empiricism (i.e., which comes first in the knowledge process, ideas or material sensations?). As a pragmatist, he regards this distinction as contextual, and thus largely irrelevant for philosophy. If we are to understand ourselves and our environment, we must combine ideas and sensations in intelligent ways. Where we start matters little, except for pedagogical purposes. Rationalists and empiricists, reflecting the conditions of the culture around them, typically have been insensitive to the relative, if not arbitrary, nature of this divide. Nadin sometimes sounds like a committed rationalist, as Dewey sounds sometimes like a committed empiricist. Each wants to protest against specific excesses of the opposing attitude. But there should be no doubt that for both men the traditional dispute of reason versus experience has proven to be a waste of time. Those who indulge in this dispute take for granted a bifurcated philosophy and a fragmented culture, and thereby offer no prospects for dealing wisely with the problems that generated the dispute in the first place.

The first illustration discussed by Nadin as a practical implication of his model of mind has to do with computers. It is fashionable to believe that this technology can serve as a substitute for mind, or at least that it can be used to explain mind. Nadin believes that this goes too far. He thinks that computers might be designed or programmed to plot a course of action, and in this manner emulate a specific mode of decision making. But this programming replicates intelligence, not mind (p. 68); and it works under the assumption that intelligence, in the strict sense, is the technical ability to operate deliberatively in the world as a source of power. The mind, as the agency for transaction, has as its most distinguishing quality, not intelligence, but openness to transformation, even of itself. Computers can aid mind in this regard. They cannot replicate it. According to Nadin, the way computers are to provide this service to mind is by functioning as an interactive communication technology—one medium among other media—that helps to engender new forms of human practice (p. 136). To fulfill this function requires that computers operate as more than high-powered copy machines, what Nadin calls "facilitators of imitations”" or "instruments for representation." He says,"Storing, checking for the integrity of information and matching are useful only when they do not become goals in themselves" (p. 134). We may be the creators of thepresent-day computer, but it remains a context-independent machine, the quintessential example of a closed system. We can afford to maintain the computer only so long as it is not allowed to distort or undermine the practical purpose it was meant to support. One cannot help but recall the sad case of Doctor Frankenstein. His creation became a monster, turning against the very people it was supposed to help and ending as an evil parody of a noble, albeit hubristic, dream.

The second practical field Nadin considers is education. In virtually every important respect his remarks are in accord with the progressive tradition in education, as portrayed by Dewey in Democracy and Education, his classic text published in 1916. Also worth noting is the striking similarity between Nadin’s view of education and the view espoused more than fifty years ago by Boyd H. Bode, arguably Dewey’s foremost disciple. Bode's book, How We Learn, published in 1940, is an examination of philosophical models of mind to show their impact on important educational concerns. All these models, save the Deweyan process model, turn out to be rooted in a representational logic. Bode makes an impassioned plea for this Deweyan model. To see the mind as a contingent quality spun from material and social relations and able, with the right kind of education, to avoid being imprisoned by its own experience, is what Bode saw as our best hope, however risky, for achieving a healthy democratic culture. His insights are impressive, but Nadin's run deeper. Nadin is concerned with effective and imaginative human performance more than with morality or politics per se. He suggests that if we attend to the former, the latter will take care of itself.

Education and Hypothesis Testing

Nadin defines education in the broad context as "the tendency to pass from the dissemination of declarative knowledge (of facts) to the dissemination of procedural knowledge (of skills, of how to perform an action" (p. 150). What this implies is that education is a practical fieid, and even if it must convey to the learner an appropriate understanding in the form of declarative knowledge, this is not where education should end. Somehow declarative knowledge must be translated into behavior that will enhance what people do, and enrich what they are as worldly creatures. When declarative knowledge assumes the primacy of a logic of representation, instead of a logic of anticipation or reconfiguration, thought is constrained, action is inhibited, and attempts to tie the two together are doomed to failure.

Nadin believes that this is how education works today. In his own words, "We educate people, along the lines of representation, as problem solvers and reductionists. They perform well if the problem does not deviate too much from the example they learned or if it can be reduced to some pre-established scheme. Their performance decreases alarmingly when we require creative effort from them, i.e., when reductions or permutations are not possible" (p. 150).

Once again, the problem is that declarative knowledge, when rooted in a representational logic, is sanctioned by philosophy- and, therefore, by reason itself- to limit the learner to a prescribed set of options. Based solely on pedagogical considerations, if this logic is set aside, educators have two choices. They can introduce the learner to pre-established schemes and modes of response, as we typically go about teaching others how to play card games, such as bridge. Here, they would impose on the learner rules and strategies that are regarded as necessary in order to be effectively "in the game." Or they can present their subject matter as if it is an assemblage of interesting hypotheses, each of which needs to be tested and judged on its ability to enhance the learner’s actions in specific situations. Here, educators implicitly embrace the idea that truth is relative. There are risks either way. Accepting relativism suggests that truth at some fundamental level is a matter of opinion, and the learner might not take seriously what educators have to say, or might use what is learned for selfish and exploitative purposes. However, the first choice also carries a risk. Abstracted from its context, the subject matter of education has no general utility, with the exception that it defines for the learner what the learner dare not challenge.

What is at stake for Nadin, as for Dewey and Bode, is whether mind is to be allowed to emerge and operate in terms of its own interaction, and not just in terms of effective action or creative problem solving. Where mind develops on the basis of a representational logic, intelligence is neutralized as a motive force qualitatively to enhance performance. How can minds grow in such an environment? Human beings would be reduced to operators, which is tantamount to denying them an education that is worthy of the name (p. 150). Nadin believes that education today "has become a packaging or canning industry, a service," no more than "a training medium for skills" (pp. 154, 156). Education, he thinks, "is not in the position to constitute an environment for interaction such as is required for constituting minds" (p. 150).

What can be done about this? Politics aside, Nadin has a number of suggestions. He says it is fine for students to be exposed to "the commitments of traditional knowledge," to study the existing canon. For Nadin this attitude is softened by five qualifications. First and foremost, students should not be forced to work independently or in opposition to each other, since a critical mass is a necessary condition for each mind to emerge and develop. Second, the educational environment must display an adequate degree of structural mobility so as to stimulate mind reconfigurations. Third, a problem-generating attitude toward education should take precedence over a problem-solving attitude. Fourth, education should not be tied so tightly to purposes of social function that they obscure the aim of cultivating human minds. Fifth, the self-perpetuating tendencies of educational institutions, as institutions, should never go unchallenged when they perpetuate socially disputable functions (p. 152). Even if we regard the preservation and transmission of culture as education’s main purpose, and if we consider it too risky for without minds there can be no culture.

Whichever course be adopted, Nadin believes it is a serious mistake for educators to work exclusively for the attainment of ideals. Even in liberal quarters this breeds a kind of arrogance, a "we know, you don't" mentality. Whether it is arrogance or confidence that educators display in this regard, Nadin would insist that his concern is deeper. Working for the attainment of ideals, where the imperatives are not in doubt, makes it tempting to ignore education's most potent mode of learning-purposeful, practical experience (p. 156). Once we lose the connection between ideals and practice, we devalue anticipation and reconfiguration as educational aims, leaving only representation with any real status. There would be no choice in education except to see the mind as a mirror of nature. Plato understood this full well. Once reality is defined apart from our perceptions, experience is either an illusion or, at best, a mendacious witness to the truth.

One need not be a Platonist or any other kind of philosophical realist to adopt this attitude. Ironically, some of the very people who would insist that education be practical also believe that the learner should accommodate to the demands of society, regardless of individual experience or preferences. The self-proclaimed pragmatist is often an unrelenting objectivist who reifies the world of current fact and declares it to be a reality that cannot be changed. When education adopts this attitude, it disseminates "the impertinence of certitudeas it results from its limited training goals and service functions" instead of "the humility of knowledge and doubt" (p. 156).

Nadin's priorities are clear. If minds are to be nurtured, education should not be burdened by excessive emphasis on the actual conditions of society. There should be a shield of some kind between what happens in schools and the pressures and political surges of everyday life. "No doubt, education needs exchange with society, but a selective barrier will ensure proper conditions for mind constitution.... A balance between how we support representation-oriented functions (in particular, problem solving), constitutive functions (on which the creation of new values rests), and communication would allow education to play a role that goes beyond servicing needs" (p. 160). It would still provide for society's wants, but it would also attend to the demands of an inquisitive life, which for the individual is always the point.