Mind - Anticipation and Chaos
by Mihai Nadin

Minds as Configurations: Intelligence is Process

Many people would
sooner die than think.
In fact, they do.

Bertrand Russell

Minds exist only in relation to other minds.

This identification of minds as having only a relational existence is critical insofar as it suggests transcending the model that describes the operations of the mind according to its distinct functions and adopting a model based on dynamic relations. We can learn about the mind only by considering the interaction among minds. In an even more pointed formulation, this becomes: To know the mind means to know how minds interact.

We can easily identify the progression of major explanatory systems that attempt to deal with issues concerning the mind. Sometimes they are called "philosophies", or, for those with a propensity for European culture, Weltanschauung, and embody broader historical trends as they are constituted in the human being's practical activity. It is no surprise that the information-processing model is but the most recent in this series; but it is a surprise that previous explanations (some going back to the oldest known cultures - Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, etc.) are often simply translated into information processing terms, or rediscovered in new explanations given in one of the dialects of contemporary information science language, or in "computerese". Like the "big bang" notion of the beginning of the universe, the language of the mind (lingua mentis) is a rather old notion revived in the context in which sciences and humanities become more and more computational disciplines. Obviously, attempts to produce computational models of the mind (algorithmic or connectionist) are the order of the day.

People have tried to duplicate traits of the mind for centuries. Current interest relies on a great deal of work done by scientists, physicians, biologists, chemists, philosophers, even artists and writers of the past. Some of the most successful computer programs, as well as some of the most convincing neural networks, displaying that particular quality of the mind called "intelligence" are based on explanations and descriptions going back to a time when technology could not support more than mechanical activity. This is mentioned here not to discredit the value of current research accomplishments, but to suggest that man's obsession with the mind resulted in an impressive accumulation of observations, data, hypotheses, theories, and even designs of mind machines.

The difficulty is not that we do not have enough research on which to base our work, but that the history of the subject is so loaded that the main effort should be to discard the useless, the insignificant, and the misleading. This is easier said than done, I fear, because what we really do not have is an understanding of why we want to know the mind and what we want to do with this knowledge.

Among the many reasons for wanting to know about the mind, the most characteristic of this moment is the hope that once we know better how minds work, we will be able to better understand intelligence and creativity, and from this point to find out what might be done with such knowledge. Definitely, man will not only build various artifacts displaying features that can be qualified as "intelligent", but also infer from the knowledge of the mind to all aspects of life in which minds are involved. All this requires that we take a closer look at the various levels at which our perception and understanding of minds take place.

Levels of the mind

There are several levels at which we can learn something about minds. One is the level of the individual: How does my mind work? Immediately a question arises: When? Because there is no such thing as the work of minds in general. Minds are circumstantial, and we know, either from systematic observation or from anecdotal evidence, that great minds, identified as such in their creative capacity, have been known to fail in handling trivial issues. And there are minds never suspected of any creative contribution that handle extreme cases at peak performance. Since to know one's individual mind means to comprehend how each of us, as an individual, relates to others, it follows that such extreme instances correspond to a particular situation when what is available (human potential) and what is necessary (at a given time) correspond. The reality of our existence-at the biological, social, or cultural level-and the dynamics of our experience are brought to expression in human praxis. We know who we are, that is, we know our minds by virtue of our awareness of what we do.

A second level is represented by our interaction with others. This means understanding that no matter how much we would like to find a universal human mind, we shall always find minds-individual minds-to be various and irreducible to one another. The abstraction of the mind, which people try to reach by elaborate analysis of what is common to various interacting minds, results from ignoring the specific nature of contexts as determining the functioning of human minds. I define the mind as the sense (sixth sense) of context. Minds can be understood only within their dynamic reality. A mind stalled at a given instance of its interaction with other minds ceases to be a mind. The underlying reality of mind constitution and interaction is that of a process.

The third level corresponds to the categories of the mind. As we have seen, these categories result from the circumstances of human life and work, and can be defined with the help of the broader concept of experience. Categories of the mind are categories of distinguishable experiences and can be expressed through distinctive forms of intelligence, as displayed by human beings in their practical life (cf. Gardner).
The variety of human praxis and its inherent rational dimension reflect foremost our own variety. We realize only now that the assumption of a common denominator-intelligence-was rather naive.

The fourth level is that of identity, i.e., of the actual interaction of minds. It reflects the relational condition of our minds in the sense that minds are media for interaction and exchange of information related to human experience. Logical relations describe how various entities (of the same or of a different nature) relate to each other. By extension, relations describe the nature of whatever unites or alienates our minds. The logic of relations, and not formal or symbolic logic (more appropriate to describe functions of our minds), is an appropriate means to describe the nature of interaction of minds. Nevertheless, before describing something, we have to understand it.

This is the second time that the notion of understanding has been brought into discussion, and the second time that I feel compelled to emphasize the dangers inherent in previous explanatory mechanisms. In both cases, the danger lies in the concept of representation so well installed in Western thought, and the implicit philosophy it is based on (basically Descartes' dualism), which serves as the foundation for almost the entire contemporary effort to duplicate the mind. Are minds representational? Do minds work on representations? Do minds generate representations?

First of all, the concept of representation as such might be misleading if we do not establish a definition we can agree upon. I tend to look at representation as the act of re-presenting, i.e., presenting something again with the understanding that this presentation might be totally different from what it represents, but that nevertheless can be understood as related to it in some way. In order to take advantage of the results that representation made possible - from pictorial signs to mathematical formalism - I do not want to totally discard the notion; but I have to redefine it in order to avoid its intrinsic limitations (especially dualism and the reductionist method it introduces as a universal principle).

Representation implies an act of recognition: the presenter (e.g., a name, a picture, an accent) as related to what it represents (someone who has that name, looks like the picture, speaks with an accent), and as such is a relation. Representations can have different functions: evocation, stimulation, information, association, among others not always under the total control of the encoder and not always transparent to those involved in decoding a representation.
In this capacity, representations are functional devices, which constitute the underlying mechanism of behaviorism. A good systematic typology of representations was given by Charles Sanders Peirce, who distinguished among representations based on direct interaction between the represented and the representamen (called "indexical representation" and exemplified by fingerprints, wind direction, or pointing as a sense of movement); on likeness (called "iconic representation" and exemplified by a photograph or drawing of someone, or a graph); and on conventions agreed upon, called "symbols".

Minds are adept at processing each of these various kinds of representation, but human minds, identified in the context of culture, are especially good in processing symbols. This brings about the immediate necessary distinction that symbols are not arbitrary conventions; they are constituted and submitted by minds in their interaction and are dynamic representations. Indeed, indexical signs are quite stable and result from inductions (observations over time). Iconic representations, although affected by time, preserve a series of correspondences between the represented and the actual representation. They result from comparisons, i.e., through deduction. Symbols come about as abduction (hypotheses), when, in the interaction among minds, a critical mass is reached.

Representation as the model of the mind leads to behaviorism and finds justification in a behavioral evaluation. In short, behaviorism ascertains that something is a realization of a description (in this case, the representational theory of the mind) if it behaves as though it had this description. The circularity of the realization argument affects the significance of the argument. It projects a concept of the mind based on discrete mental representations corresponding to a rather static world. In a future section, I shall address my criticism to this specific issue.

The critical mass

The relation among minds becomes constitutive for each of the minds when a critical mass is reached. Minds are thus identified in the physical world, social environment, spiritual realm, and cultural context (defined as artificial, i.e., products of human art in the broadest sense of the term). This is the macro-level of our minds.

The critical mass can be defined only in respect to circumstances of interaction, which explains why I define minds as the sense of context. I am not speaking about numbers (how many minds make for this critical mass). I do not have simple addition in mind nor some length measure (such as lengths of minds in a string).

The critical mass - a metaphor borrowed from nuclear physics - corresponds to the nature and complexity of the relations established among minds. The critical mass leading to the relations through which minds identify themselves depends on the nature of the interaction, the characteristics of the interacting subjects, and the nature of the relations established. It is a dynamic coefficient resulting from the shared world of minds interacting. This shared world integrates, but is not reducible to, the space of physical co-presence (if any), time as interval of interaction, or any shared convention making up the symbolic system. Physical co-presence does not result in the identification and expression of minds. Moreover, under precise circumstances, physical co-presence might even preclude the dynamic constitution of the mind. Think about all those mass demonstrations (in Hitler's Third Reich, in Red Square, during and after Stalin, in the '60s on college campuses around the world, in any ritual of hatred, overzealousness, and fanaticism in today's world of opportunistic activism) that have never constituted more than the expression of instinct, irrationality, and dogmatism. But negative examples, except for allowing for a fast lesson in the meaning of some events, do not constitute theory, although they can become arguments for one.

To turn from negative examples to acquired positive experience, we know that a critical mass is reached in education (obviously not represented by a packed auditorium in which the teacher is replaced by some sophisticated video installation), in forming a community (of shared religious, political, and cultural values), in establishing a family. Socrates was convinced that education is a one-to-one relation, the only one through which minds are formed. Plato thought that he knew the optimal size of the ideal state and the optimal form of government in which interrelations would be constituted for the good of everybody. Utopias are built on the assumption that there is a general rule for achieving and maintaining the critical mass. I, for one, would like to avoid a formalization for establishing the critical mass, but not without saying that the reason is not the lack of confidence in formal representations.

The macro-level at which the critical mass is reached (or not) is related to the micro-level (that of the brain). As we shall see, the complexity of the brain is partially reflected in the number of its components and the network of interactions among them. It is a set of high cardinality (the numbers of members is exceptionally high), and accordingly the members (in this case, neurons and synapses) lose identity. Nevertheless, the map of connections reflects what we shall define as individual experience (learning, in particular). Chances of reaching the critical mass increase when minds interact against the background of shared experiences. The relation between the macro-level and the micro-level can be defined through what is actually processed by our minds once they are established in the interaction through which the critical mass is reached.

What is wrong with the paradigm of representation?

"We know more than we can tell"

Michael Polanyi

This brings back the issue of representation, a critical matter not only because we build machines to process representations - the assumption is that a good representation of a problem is already a solution to it - but also because some believe that if we understand representations, we understand the mind. How much representation can be involved in the attempt of a mind to know itself? Is the mind part of the mind it desires to know, or does it undergo some kind of splitting, such as a copy (representation) of itself projected into virtual reality and the original looking at the copy and making some inferences? Or, to continue the main argument (which is the existence of the mind only in interaction with other minds), is that interaction a representation or a reality? (Obviously, representations constitute a reality of their own, even as virtual realities.) The series of questions can be continued, although a certain odor of speculation starts permeating the space of our doubts.

Peirce defined intuition as a "cognition not determined by a previous cognition", i.e., nonrepresentational. He also stated that our notion of ourselves is the result of an inference. Since it is not based on previous knowledge, this inference must result from something else - precisely, from instantiating, i.e., being representations of ourselves before we externalize them, before we share them with others, before they become our language or any of the sign systems (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.) we use. The process is one of self-constitution performed by our minds as we interact when we project ourselves upon the reality of our physical existence. The micro-level of the mind is the level of this self-constitution, non-representational but experiential, with a pattern of self-similarity and the condition of a dynamic configuration. In other words, there is no inherent logical structure, only a projection of what is inherent in the environment of our existence. This existence has the nature of a continuum, which requires that we be, that we embody, our representations.

All of these elements will be described with even more detail. Let me start with the anticipatory character of our minds. The physical reality of the human being (our body, in short) is much more stable than the reality of the mind. It took thousands and thousands of years before we noticed changes of height, anatomy, and physiology, and concomitant changes of functions. It takes a very short time to notice changes of mind. One can say that the "hardware" (the body) is relatively invariable. Nonetheless, our relation to the world takes place at various levels, one being the level of the body. There are direct interactions, such as those manifest in the pace of our movement when we climb a hill or walk on an icy surface. And there are mediated relations, such as the ones we establish with other human beings or with tools (material or spiritual). Tools are defined here as the artifacts we use in our practical experience, whether this experience is in the biophysical environment of our existence or in the conceptual environment of our spiritual existence. In both types mentioned, our mind is present as the medium of our continuous self-constitution. We project ourselves in the understanding of circumstances: whether we ask ourselves "Why do I slow my pace when climbing a hill" or simply do it; whether we take time to understand what others tell us; whether we reflect upon the nature of the tools we use or simply make use of them to achieve some goal. We embody both direct interactions and the interpretation of mediated relations, thus projecting our sense of continuity against the background of changing contexts. Each instantiation comes into existence in a domain of infinite possibilities characterized in terms of the potential relations through which minds are constituted and identified.

The mathematical theory of dynamic systems introduces, among others, the term "configuration". In view of the meaning the same word has in current computer science - the structure of a system and the connections among parts - it seems to me that minds can be appropriately described as succeeding configurations, all in anticipation of events and occurrences, respecting patterns of similarity (which account for the notion of personality), and of scaling (which accounts for the notion of human types).
Minds are in anticipation of contingencies, of future contexts - another reason for my calling them "the human sense of context". The issue of self-similarity - how and to what extent minds perceive sameness - and its implications will be discussed in detail when the dimensions of the mind are approached. Before that, let me take the configurational aspect and its implications to a finer level of detail.

Strictly speaking, the micro-level of mind dynamics cannot be uncoupled from the biological reality of the human brain and body. But as the reader might have already noticed, my interest is focused on minds, not on brains or bodies, although I agree that for the understanding of human minds, knowledge of the brain and body is necessary. It is, however, too early in the line of thought I pursue to approach the biological level, especially because the physical reality of the brain and the complex functioning of the body (in particular the nervous system) are necessary but nevertheless insufficient conditions for the emergence of minds.

Even the attempt to explain the functioning of our bodies without accounting for the mind's role in the specific performance of the body cannot lead us farther than previous mechanistic views of the human being. The nature of the brain's biological processes and that of the body's functioning make our inferences from such processes to minds relevant only in the context of mind interaction (such as in learning, evaluation, planning, etc.). If there are laws governing the macro-level of mind relations, it is quite improbable, to say the least, that we would derive them from the micro-level, i.e., the laws of the biological micro- or macrostructure. I would go so far as to hypothesize (and later on to submit data from research) that minds drive the brain and body and determine the nature of acceptable, or unacceptable, biological processes.

This reflects the autopoietic nature of the entire human being, i.e., the self-constitutive character of our existence. We are not representations, but biological entities constituting their characteristics in the course of practical experience. Henceforth, it is quite irrelevant to regard the human being as a "machine" that produces representations unless we expand the notion of representation to include the projection of our own experience and constitution in the representing entity, and see representation as a continuum, i.e., as an analog, not digital, process. Thus, if we are part of our representations, and part of our interpretation of representations, we actually confer upon them the reality of our own existence. At the same time, we make the existence of the world dependent upon our self-constitution. Such representations are no longer relevant as individual entities, but as networks corresponding to the entirety of the context in which they are generated. These networks do not reflect the context as it appears, but as we anticipate it in view of our needs, desires, and strivings.

Minds are in anticipation of images, sounds, mythomagical occurrences, political ceremonies, legal principles, and symptoms (meteorological, medical, mechanical, etc.). The abstraction of a disease (a network of symptoms associated and labeled/categorized according to experience) and the typology of symptoms are products of mind configurations. They are prone to change once new practical experiences related to the biological imbalance, as well as to our attempts to correct it, justify such a change. There is no such thing as a disease; there is only the "fingerprint" of a biological imbalance, the interpretation of the imbalance as part of the constitution of the mind and the attempt to correct it by a controversial practical experience (known today as "medicine"), which thus becomes part of the mind interaction. Weather, to give another example, is not good or bad independent of the context within which we care to learn about it. This context can be practical (weather as it pertains to agriculture, to maritime transportation, to the launching of a satellite) or symbolic (how we associate emotions with storms or calm with a steady spring rain). A final example: Myths are constituted for practical purposes, and the magic becomes a dimension of our life when minds select, out of all anticipatory configurations, those relating the understood (again, a network of realizations) to an experience above and beyond the human being.

Those who are accustomed to interpreting everything as a representation of something else, and not as a constituted human experience that we interpret by becoming part of the experience, pursue the practice of asking how appropriate the representation is, instead of continuing the experience. Minds as configurations are in anticipation of every image or text in the sense that minds appropriate them and make them part of the dynamics of our own experience.

Minds are never neutral in respect to the anticipated. They might constitute desires, goals, expectations, biases, or anything else involved in the way we bridge from present to future states. This present can be confirmed, or it can lead to new configurations, such as those corresponding to worst-case scenarios: "Be prepared for...." I assume that when Heraclitus (as quoted by Diogenes) said, "Much learning does not teach understanding," he might have had in mind that it is not by storing, retrieving, and matching knowledge that we understand things or events, but by "throwing various nets" in anticipation of questions, situations, and decisions to be made.

It is probably necessary to insist on the significance of this criticism of representation. I suggest that our theory of representation should be founded on the idea that representations reflect only a small part of our experience and that, for a better understanding of our own nature and the parameters of our existence, we need to consider not only reflective mechanisms, but also constitutive and communicative mechanisms as they relate to human experience.

These three aspects are connected and correspond to the relational condition of our integrated existence. Our practical life, whether physical or spiritual, always involves a triadic basic relation: the elements related (a and b, such as two individuals, groups, or larger entities), and the relation in its concrete determination. Accordingly, we cannot limit ourselves to interpretations of representations (adequacy, in principle), but we have to consider our own projection into the interpretation (projection of our biological, social, cultural, etc. reality), as well as the communication involved. In other words, representations (especially minds) are not solely containers of information or knowledge about other things or events; they are completed through our participation in the interpretation of those representations and shared in successive acts of communication. This completion takes place in every concrete instance that our practical life requires, and results in projection of our own continuous change in a continuum of changing expectations, desires, and strivings.

Thus, each mind is in anticipation of representations in the sense that it is a perspective through which presentations are interpreted; and it is also an instance in bringing them together (which is their communication) for practical purposes. Minds also segment the continuum and define particular domains within which consistency and completeness can be achieved. This segmentation corresponds to practical requirements and also represents a form of anticipation. The particular resulting domains are configurations of a distinct nature, with a limited but nevertheless noticeable dynamics. Once constituted, they are kept in relation to the continuum of human practice and constitute a referential framework.

Minds facilitate understanding contexts in the sense that they embody pre-understanding (which can be called prejudice, if the negative connotation is removed), or intentionality, as well as the conditions of existence under which we acknowledge any given context. Minds search in the domain of the possible and allow us to choose, so that the possible becomes real for the instance of interaction among minds. Minds refer to actions and are the center of our activity, not only of our contemplative existence ("thinking", as Descartes called it). Therefore, minds have a practical nature, which is embodied in the anticipatory configurations through which they come into existence when people interact while projecting their own identity into the environment of their existence. Initiative, adaptability, and the human desire to know result from interaction with others and are supported by our biological endowment. But they come to expression in our being what we understand about each other.

In respect to my assertion that minds are in anticipation of actions and events in the world, not merely in reaction to them, two proving methodologies can be pursued:

1. analysis of data pertinent to the subject;

2. analysis of the processes of our continuous self-constitution and identification.

Both methodologies bring the brain into the picture. (The section Mind and brains is a more appropriate place for the presentation of the arguments supporting my assertions.)

As already mentioned, there is an important element of continuity (captured in Peirce's category of synechism) that integrates the various configurations making up our minds. Leibniz advanced a maxim which can be applied to understand how continuity of configurations is achieved: "Nature never makes leaps". The preparation phase that our minds maintain in their successive reconfigurations indeed eliminates leaps.

As a dynamic functional reality, our minds might maintain what Pylyshyn called a "transducer", a "bridge from physical to symbolic". Accepting this suggestion, I submit that the transducer consists of, among other components, a hardwired relations component. In the process of continuous reconfiguration of our minds, the transducer keeps the cognitive clock synchronized with physical reality. In anticipation of the practical implications of the model of the mind that I suggest, I can say that phenomena of aging (of individuals, institutions, nations, etc.) can be seen as phenomena of desynchronization and of progressive loss of the ability to anticipate and reconfigure. Children (and all new forms of organization), on the other end of the spectrum, evolve to the condition of anticipation, i.e., learn interaction and thus "learn" their own minds, acquiring evaluation (and self-evaluation) as well as planning skills. [Nevertheless, these rather general assertions will have to be refined. omitted in book. p.52]

Coherence and integrity

Human coherence and integrity, which our minds seek, result from the dynamics of the succeeding configurations and from self-similarity. This human coherence and integrity is not homogeneously preserved in all our practical experiences. The experience involving visual contexts is quite different from language-based practice, from the experience of sounds, smells, etc. For instance - and I shall limit myself to the visual, in particular to colors - white camellias should be seen as blue, and yellow daffodils as green, when seen in the bluish light of dawn. But we see them as white and yellow, respectively, because our minds dilute the actual light with the light of complementary color. The coherence and integrity of visual perception is not based on the coherence and integrity of the physical world, but on the consistence of our experiences, and thus of our relational minds.

Experiences in language are the best proof of this. As Quine put it, sentences meet the test of experience "as a corporate body", not one by one. Thus language embodies the same relational mechanism and does not express, as some believe, functional states of the brain (such as desires, beliefs, etc.). Minds are relatively independent of the physical world, but dependent on the processes through which they are relationally identified.

This is even more evident when we consider dynamic events. An example frequently given is the approaching tennis ball. Indeed, minds (of players, spectators) are independent of the moving ball. But once the anticipation of the ball's movement is confirmed through sensory information, a remarkable performance of our minds allows the player to interact with the ball in a precise way, which is, again, anticipated by the viewers in many variations. (Viewers actually "play" their own game.) In the physical world, the closer the ball, the larger the image on the retina. But in their anticipatory configuration, minds control the "curvature" of the "lenses" and make possible a gradual convergence of the two eyes' axes. As a result, a phantom copy of the approaching ball is generated, shrunk in proportion to the proximity of the actual ball, and thus we see a ball of constant size. Accordingly, we are prepared for hitting it according to anticipated goals. The genius of a tennis player is the genius of anticipation, not reaction. The fact that, at the end of a game, the viewers are sometimes just as tired as the players corresponds to their involvement through their minds, i.e., their anticipatory configurations, as they not only passively register what is happening on the court, but "play" the game in its infinity of possibilities.

Indeed, minds are not cause-and-effect machines, are not deterministic devices, and, what is even more important in view of the current approach to emulating minds by machines, minds are not - or not only - problem solvers. Obsession with representation led us to believe that minds are activated by the problems people encounter and that the final proof of their performance resides in the way they handle problems. Minds actually generate problems insofar as they generate our conscious existence in a world of interactions that bring our identity to expression. Human interaction is not random. There is always an element of agreement, a reciprocal binding, which can be defined as commitment.
Minds participate in our reciprocal commitments, as evidenced in our practical life of physical or spiritual activity, making these commitments possible and, furthermore, even necessary, once they are perceived as characteristic of a systematic domain. In this universe of commitments, the interaction of our minds is actualized in the process of generating alternatives and expanding the set of choices. This is why I would not define the activity of a beehive as proof of bees' minds. They perform in a closed systematic domain. If minds were present, this domain would change and alternatives would be generated. As with any universe of anticipation, the universe of minds is incomplete and open. All our machines - mechanical, pneumatic, or electric - are, through their nature of being our constructs, complete and closed.

When the rule of representation, and accordingly the functioning based upon these rules, are the only ones considered (by ignoring the constitutive and communication levels), the system is reduced until it reaches completeness and can be closed.
Minds generate and support distinctions in language, behavior, or any form of human interaction.

Minds do not distinguish in a pre-existent world, but constitute the distinctions as a "wireframe" model of the world. On this wireframe, minds project properties pertinent to human experience as related to the context. For someone who has never experienced tennis, the object approaching is not a ball, and the action it requires is not a volley or a backhand, but something related to the experience of avoiding a falling rock or a stone thrown by an enemy. Minds not only maintain the size of the ball, but also reconstitute it, while it is moving behind the net, as a three-dimensional object unobliterated by the patterns of the net. In fact, it is the achievement of the work of our minds that we perceive three-dimensional objects, for on our eyes, their image remains a two-dimensional projection. In view of the exceptional importance of the visual in interaction among minds, many have attributed mind qualities to our eyes, or considered them an extension of our brains.

The constitution and continuous reconfiguration of our minds take place as new experiences, which we are physically and spiritually part of, develop, and make "that which is at variance with itself agree with itself" (again, Heraclitus). That is, they not only engage the human being, but also become understood. Understanding, and the dynamics of understanding by our minds are what we call "intelligence". In the framework of representation, the understanding and solving of problems are related. Our entire experience with tools (anticipation of new practical circumstances, goals, and actions) results from understanding, which is the content of intelligence. In the paradigm of constitution, understanding is of our own nature and mind.

In communication, understanding is of what brings us together and allows for sharing. The dynamics of interaction of minds confers upon our intelligence the nature of processes, sometimes integrative, other times differentiating, and more often than not, synthesizing. The mathematics of branching (for example, the Galton-Watson process, the Markov process in Hausdorff spaces) and diffusion (as in Brownian motion) are probably the closest instruments of quantitative analysis for the processuality of our intelligence.

More relevant to the understanding of intelligence as process are the various practical forms of human experience, among which education is of exceptional importance. In anticipation of my concluding remarks, dedicated to the practical implications of these ideas, let me point out that an education focused on problem solving and that ignores the aspects of synthesis and communication is a sure avenue to neutralizing intelligence. Such an education ignores the significance of the configurational aspect of minds and the anticipatory character of the processes through which minds come to existence with the understanding (self-awareness) of their functioning.

The shift from the ancient Hebrew and Greek to the Roman civilization is probably succinctly expressed in the change of focus from logos to ratio. Thinking as language is quite different from thinking as rationalization. Understanding, whether logical (through the proper use of the formal rules of language), rational (through discovery of the ratio, the measure of things or events, and the inference drawn from it to functionality), or intuitive (not mediated by previous knowledge), takes place in time. In the course of the process of understanding, the mind continuously checks against the understandings of others (as expressed in language, rationality, or intuition). After all, understanding is the initial level of interpretation of everything pertinent to our life. It requires the cooperative activity of minds interacting, and embodies "the benefit of the doubt". (We settle for an understanding after discounting differences in the measures applied or in intuitions. Putnam calls this the "charity" in interpretation.) All this states is that intelligence and mind are not one and the same, and that intelligence is a prerequisite for future action. This makes intelligence a valid subject for the field called artificial intelligence, in contrast to the mind, which requires a different strategy of explanation.

To understand means to achieve abstract levels of explanations which make possible the instantiation of the concrete in our human practice. A level of abstraction is present, constitutive, in what we do, which explains why the emulation of the tools we use will never suffice for duplicating the same activity. Initiative is quite likely the most abstract of all the components of our practical life. Probably art epitomizes the process I refer to. The act of painting, dancing, or singing is highly abstract. The result - the particular image, dance, or song - is highly concrete and individual (substratum of originality). To own Picasso's brush, or to be able to manufacture brushes identical to his, does not turn an individual into a Picasso. The abstraction of each instance of his process of painting escapes even the most sophisticated explanation. Painting does not become a reproducible exercise of intelligence, but remains a form of projecting one's experience in the form of new experiences.

The infinity of the process of understanding (challenge to our intelligence) and interpretation results from the experiential condition of the product, not from its so-called "representational qualities". The same holds true for any other form of human practice. Art has been idealized in the tradition of romanticism, and the artist singled out as an existence of exception. Understanding the mind, however, means to also understand the variety of minds and the circumstances under which some might be considered more important or significant than others. This is also part of the process we call "intelligence."

Part II