The Trinity at the turn of the millenium

Astonishingly, we’ve got to the end of the century with incredible advances in science and technology and with no real good model of the relation between the brain and the mind. (in spite of the fact that the former causes the latter) and of the relation between wealth and currency.

There are several motives that could support this lack of understanding, being the first a temptation on the very belief that the will is enough to explain abstract, mindful, events like thoughts and prices.

People think that they can direct his or her ideas – hence their behavior – by the simple touch of one’s will. At the same time, prices can be regarded – mainly if they refer to services – as willful products of one’s decision (in this case the owner’s decision). The relation of mind and money is straightforward and deserves a certain degree of analysis.

Economists are blamed for having made mistakes in their predictions during the last decades and the catastrophe-syndrome contains a very well-known fallacy. If what they had previously predicted doesn’t happen, they excuse themselves by saying the authorities took them seriously and managed to prevent the worse from happening. If, instead, things go wrong, and their predictions turn to be right, the golden medal of an appocaliptical view is theirs.

Mind and money, Psychiatry and Economics, share the same status of important and annedoctal disciplines, regarding their insertion in today’s world and their incapacity to offer good models of reality concerning, respectively, normality and health, from the psychic point of view, and on the other hand of equity and justice, from the public point of view.

Technically speaking, it is not an accident that we, humans, remain in total darkness (maybe a little less dark than before) concerning mind and money. We insist to consider mind as soul, and money too. (Money without ballast is the same as the verb that spreads abroad without physical impediments).

The Western economies’ crisis, recently sponsored by Asia’s markets and currencies fall, and the real "quasi-nuclear" danger, pos Cold War, of a generalized crash , causes perplexion and the need to reevaluate things and concepts, looking for a new world order.

The rising of chronic unemployment in developed countries, sided by the raise of wealth-concentration in underdeveloped economies poses an urgent dilemma regarding the future. Are we going to have time to solve environmental problems or are we going to be crossed over by the poor, the miserable, the unemployed, and the offspring of ethnic disputes that turned the danger of today’s world to the limits of the city, far from the paranoid years of a virtual battle between the two superpowers?

Everyday life became dangerous in great cities and old values like honesty and hardwork, let alone family and community, are now quickly substituted by an Internet’s driven mentality of a global integrated "kinship". It is easier to talk with and to interact with the virtual; be it the mind – the very stage of one’s sentiments – be it the money we carry in our pockets or the prices that we complain about which forever rise.

Money and mind are two products or side-effects of two known physical systems – the brain that causes the mind and wealth that supports currencies. But our gullible tendency of believing in witches and in tales makes us mistrust physical systems (besides Physics, but when advanced theories gently confort our believings that the belief in God’s existence is compatible with black holes and intrinsic indeterminacies), thinking that ideas can render things possible. It is enough to think about something to fairly believe on a certain future, and things – products of our imagination – will become true.

A certain excess of gullibility is what renders possible to dissociate minds from brains, money from wealth, allowing the soul to crowd our private lives and social immorality to crowd the market.

Let us examine for an instant the common roots of these misunderstandings and the possible solutions which could prevent money and mind to be taken at face value without taken into consideration the physical mechanisms that made them possible to emerge.

Physics is a counterintuitive realm because, as a scientific branch, it deals with models and not with beliefs. Empirical verifications and mostly important, refutations, are distant from everyday share of convictions and of prejudices. Imagination, more than a tool to establish thought experiments and to tests theoretical models, is a mental function that allows possible things to become probable, let alone trues. Physical systems, in spite of crowding our houses and offices are seen with a grain of suspicion, being the things of the soul those that really worth. Abstraction and generalization, the very core of the process of defining classes, is taken to be non-physical by the simple fact that theoretical concepts don’t have immediate physical representation. Money as an abstract concept has to have a certain relation with the process by which it is made, but instead the fetishism it exerts on us make it the more physical of the abstract concepts. Fetishism, regarding money, cloths and other intermediate objects fashion our values, weakening the possibility to separate the physical and the abstract . If money is independent of ballast, and at the same time, being absolutely physical, in its own and in its capacity to buy physical and abstract thing (services and people), maybe it is a good candidate to be evaluated as one of the ambiguous signs of our times. But the mind is also candidate, because it endorses a quasi-total independence of the brain (except when one id in come or suffers a stroke or is beaten in the head), being able to manipulate linguistic facts like sentences, saying and, worse, believing that the very content of the linguistic propositions are trues, when they are sometimes only meaningful. The confusion between truth and meaning supported by the very ability of the mind to deal with linguistic structures that are meaningful in spite of being true or false is what makes the mind to a defendant in a search for what is going wrong at the end of the century, considering the fact that we have conquered knowledge but not justice.

If the dichotomy of knowledge and justice is to be taken as one of the signs that must be examined if one seeks the ambiguities of the end of the millenium, morals and ethics have to be examined because they tend to be defendants in our view about the triune nature of the dilemma that we must face hereafter.

The mind, the very core of this work is this double-faced object that harvests the above ambiguities. It is caused by the brain but it stands, alas, for sociability. In the middle of the axis that contains brains in one side and society in the other, stands the subject, a linguistic invention of the brain fed by culture and language. The subject that acts and thinks, that coordinates value and transfers meaning to currency, and that is, in principle, able to evaluate the difference between the being and the ought to be being, is the very fixed point (so weak the fixidity) that supports derivations that end to found Economy and Morals. Psychiatry, in a certain sense, is a discourse of different interrelated plans that begin with neurons and end with social hypocrisy and injustice.

The turn of the millenium deserves a lot of doubts, but the very essence of the danger that is in front of us is, my view, the ignorance about the way brains cause mind to emerge and minds cause cultural and social things to happen and to acquire meaning. The subject, a fantastic invention of the interface of brains and cultural environment is who supports the transition between the material realm of the brain to the ethereal world of meanings and beliefs, mind and money being their byproducts.

Physical systems like the brain stay at the very beginning of a long pilgrimage that can unveil the nature of the dilemmas that remain present, threating our future and our species. The confusion of physical systems with a certain naive sensation of "material" is what causes prejudices to blossom. Physics is an advanced scientific discipline and it is the prototype of a kind of discourse that remains distant from the layman. The core concept of physical system must be understood, not to solve equations but to deal with the double-faced reality built by our minds. The mind, itself, is the first point in the ambiguity-axis because it is physical, but it is not synonymous of brain.

Money and morals, two other core concepts and defendants of carrying so many potential mistakes regarding our world, have to be coined and examined through the lenses of a mindful perspective. But this mindful perspective has to be forged with physical-cerebral parts, if one wants to link the different related hierarchies that compose the subject of action.

The rational agent, the emotional agent, the moral agent, the volunteer agent and the conscient one, will have to remain linked by the glue that, thanks to the mind, allows all these aspects to emerge.

Discussing the nature of the trouble one might have in the turn of the millenium asserts that the mind is very point of inflexion that allows nature to become culture, brain to become subject, having the mind as the intermediate point.

The plan of this work is to present how the brain allowed the mind to emerge. Then in a certain continuum we will examine how economy and morals can be regarded as extensions of the same principle that renders possible the very emergence of an abstract-functional phenomenon like the mind to raise in a physical soil like the brain. Economy and Morals may be enriched with concepts that seem to hold in Biology, regarding the functional relevance of the mind in the H. sapiens and some other ideas regarding evolution and adaptation.

The aim of this work is not technical. I will not quote different sources and I will not spend much time in long debates about subtleties. On the contrary, my aim is to present a whole horizontal view of the mind, the very substratum of the subject, and the different plans where pathologies can happen, from the neuronal side till the social side. Psychiatry, and in a certain sense, Economy and Moral share the same ambiguities: there is a strict physical problem in play but at the same time, the abstract non-physical aspect is so determinant that predictions use to fail. The consequences to the failure of predictions, to the lack of models of behavior, be it individual, be it collective, is that a certain degree of relativism tend to be tolerant with mild mental disorders, mild terrible political and economical mistakes and with mild violations of a special moral, not special only in the sense of exquisite, but special in terms of the biological roots that our species – humans – furnish to a certain class of attitudes regarding the common good.

Unattendant information can reach our cosnciousness due to a double aspect of the attentional system. The central nervous system, briefly the brain, is not a naive organ nor a passive sheet io paper where experiency is written. On the contrary, the brain has a priory plans and models that are submitted to the world, confirming or disconforming. The brain, in a very shortcut is an organ that is able to have conscient non voluntary behavior during dream, plain of rpersentations and of phenomenological images, but, with the aid os the senses can correct its dellusional-oniric tendency, buildying reality and coeherence.

What a sort of volition and of control can be exerted with such an architecture that requires coorection by the senses to happen? The individual, free and able to choose, is an invention of culture, since the mechanism by which control and coehrence are exerted depend strongly on the environmental flux of information that corrects and adjusts prior expectations and plans and models.

I will not deny that a certain degree of indepnedence, control and volition rest on the subject, but I’ll try to show that if the subject is free, his or her brain is not so free or independent. If the brain causes de the mind and if physical systems like the brain are able to produce the meaning, the subject is a construction of the brain in contact with culture, being more a meaningfull proposition that a physical reality and hence the imputation of freedom to him or to her is a predication on a meaning object, not in material one.

It would be uninteresting the dichotomy between material-physical and meaningfull-mental, weren’t the fact that the mind and its realizatioins (including mental disroderes) and social and economic rules are derived from a meaning object, virtually connected to the material organ that endorse it – the brain in the case of the mind; the wealth in the case of money.

The pilgrimage will have to examine a sort of dichotomeis: meaning and truth;