Music Matters chapter five

Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. These are responses to the discussion questions at the end of chapter five, which discusses personhood and music education.

Antonio Damasio - Descartes' Error

Why should music educators be concerned with the nature of personhood?

All forms of music, education and community music are personal. They involve social engagement, and emotions both personal and collective. Praxial music education considers the student as a holistic person, not just as a musician. Educative teaching aims for the flourishing of the whole person, not just supplying skills and knowledge. It is difficult to support the flourishing of persons without a clear idea of the nature of personhood.

An optimal learning environment is a community of mutual respect, where learners feel safe and taken care of. Personhood is as much about the body from the neck down as it is from the neck up. We can not expect students to behave as if they are brains in jars or computers to be programmed. Instead, we need to consider their physical, emotional and social needs.

What is the difference between criterialist and humanist accounts of personhood?

A criterialist definition uses a list of necessary components or abilities to qualify personhood: self-awareness, rationality, the ability to communicate, and so on. Humanists take a more holistic view: personhood encompasses an entire web of social relationships of other persons. This definition is a bit circular–you are a person if other persons consider you to be a person. Nevertheless, it is still preferable to criterialism, which creates the problem of ambiguous edge cases. For example, A severely disabled person, an Alzheimer’s sufferer or a baby might lack some of the necessary features of a person, but they still are embedded in a network of relationships (a “community of care” as per Alasdair MacIntyre), and that should be enough to establish their ethical personhood.

How do the concepts of “ethical idealization” and “a principle of charity” contribute to our understanding of personhood?

In our usual social lives, we treat others as persons and we expect the same in return. We behave self-consciously and ethically as a kind of caretaking of others, and we presume that others will extend the same caretaking to us. But when we confer personhood to a baby or dementia patient, we do not have the same expectations of reciprocal social caretaking. Instead, we extend to them an ethical idealization of personhood, a charitable social gift that we do not expect to be returned in kind. For young children, we hope that granting them ethical personhood helps teach them to fully inhabit the role as they grow up. For the disabled, we hope that we would be granted the same dignity if we were in the same circumstances.

What do scholars mean when they refer to the body?

In our everyday language, we draw a distinction between body and mind. We default to an implicit Cartesian dualism. Scholars recognize, however, that dualism misunderstands the nature of the body and mind, that they are in fact a single entity. The body is not a “thing” inhabited by the mind. The body is a complex system of systems of systems of processes. In The Value Of Science, Richard Feynman writes:

So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago — a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of my brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.

We could salvage part of Cartesian dualism by saying that the mind is a process generated by the body’s functions, but even that is too simple. Just as the body is not a stable physical object, but rather a flow of energy and chemicals, so too is the mind a stream of interactions between a brain, other body systems, and the entire rest of the world, particularly the other minds that it encounters, along with the memories of past encounters.

David Chalmers describes the “easy problem” of consciousness, and the “hard problem.” The easy problem is one that is rapidly being solved: which brain structures and processes give rise to emotions and sense perception? The hard problem is nowhere near being solved: how do those brain structures and processes give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness? Since music experience presupposes consciousness, that makes music experience a hard problem too.

What does it mean to say that this chapter recommends an embodied and enactive concept of personhood?

Personhood emerges out of a complex set of interactions between minds/bodies over time. We can never “freeze frame” and say definitively, this is a person. Personhood is always contextual, dependent on the state of the mind-body system it is attached to, and all the relationships it is part of, past and present. We are different people when we are with our families, our friends, our coworkers, with strangers, or when we are alone. We are different people at different ages, under different demands and stresses, faced with different opportunities. A person may disply stable patterns over time (what we conventionally call a “personality”) but there are far too many variables at play to be able to isolate that person from their moment-to-moment context.

How do embodied-enactive concepts differ from traditional notion of brain-head learning, music cognition, and musical-emotional experiences?

If Cartesian dualism is a truthful description of reality, then it is possible for the mind to live in a world of Platonic abstractions somehow removed from the everyday philosophical world. Traditional aesthetic notions hold that music exists in this Platonic world of the mind. Durkheim’s sense of the sacred and profane applies here: specific performances or recordings might be part of the profane world of the body, but the “real” music is in the sacred world of the mind. Music notation conveniently represents the “real” music in a form that we can study and contemplate without getting bogged down in the dirty world of particular musicians, listeners, social and political contexts, and other environmental factors. The aesthetic view also holds that you can understand music best by breaking it down to its “atoms” through, for example, Schenkerian analysis.

An embodied-enactive theory of mind implies an embodied-enactive theory of music making, learning, and cognition. Just as our personhood is a function of our bodily processes and social context, so too are our musical experiences. The practical consequences for music education are profound. Schools implicitly accept Cartesian dualism by asking children and teenagers to sit unnaturally still and unnaturally quietly for hours at a time. If learning is something happening in the mind, who cares what the body is doing? But when we view the mind as embodied and enactive, then we need to take care of students’ physical and social needs if we expect real learning to take place. That is especially true for music, given the neuroscientific evidence showing how much music cognition is performed by the motor cortex. If we unconsciously prepare ourselves to dance every time we hear music, not allowing dance forecloses a good part of the experience. If music is intrinsically social, then not allowing students to socialize will necessarily impoverish them.

Maybe we extend ethical embodiment not just to people, but to music as well. When we say “I love that song”, we imbue it with a lifelike quality. Music might arouse emotion in us because we invest it with a persona, either our own (“autobiographical listening”) or our imagined version of the performer/composer.

Why is the brain “imperfect”?

The brain is not a computer. It is an organ like the liver or pancreas. It evolved to support the survival needs of primates on the African savannah a million years ago. Evolved systems do not need to be perfect; they just need to be “good enough.” Ideally our breathing and eating tubes wouldn’t cross each other so we could do both at the same time without risk of choking to death. But since mammals have managed to successfully reproduce faster than they die from choking, our awkward throat layout persisted. So it is with many functions of the brain. Our brain needs to be good enough to get the next generation of children raised, and it has to do it within the constraints of our metabolism and development.

How does brain differ from mind?

The simplest answer is that the mind is what the brain does, in relation to other body systems and other minds. More precisely, the mind is the interaction of conscious and nonconscious brain and body systems (e.g. memory, spatial orientation, emotions, sense perception, etc), and the interaction of all of those interactions with other minds, and with the environment generally. While the details of the mind’s operation are only partially understood, the key point is that it is not a supernatural entity that resides in the body, but rather the emergent result of bodily processes.

How does empathy relate to an understanding of personhood?

We could define empathy as the ability to imagine the feelings of another person, and to feel some version of their feelings ourselves. Empathic arousal is a precursor to imagining the internal feelings of other people, and that in turn is a precursor to treating other people as full persons, the way we ourselves want to be treated.