#2 Basic Systems of Primary Thought

THE MIND'S JOB

The mind works to regulate our activities by letting us think about them by making them conscious. The mind must somehow reconstruct the objects and events on the plane of mental activity that we have directly experienced . Thought is the reconstruction of direct activity on objects at the level of representation so that the mind can re-present objects and events in the absence of direct contact with objects and physical interaction with them. Representative thought works by developing a system that can construct a presentation of the object to the mind. We ‘see’ things we are thinking about in our minds. Behind this ‘seeing’ is the cognitive system that generates the seeing. The cognitive system is unseen. What it produces is the ‘seen’ part. Every act of knowing has something we ‘see’ and something we ‘see’ with.


DEVELOPMENT

The problem for the new human is that neither the mind nor external objects exist for it at birth. There is no system that constructs something to be ‘seen’ even in direct contact with the object. But by generating activity, any sensory motor activity including perceptual activity, from hereditary schemes such as moving arms, sucking, reflexes, it encounters objects and adapts the activity it can generate to the objects so that both its method of generating activity, its schemes of repeatable actions, and the outside things to which the activity progressively adapt and adjusts itself to, both develop.

So what causes the development of the internal schemes for generating activity and the adaptations to particular objects? The sources of development is not due to external information coming from the object since initially there is no awareness of the object and no adaptation distinguishable from the activity as due to the object. There is no transmission of information from the object or even an object per se. The source of development is not due to the mind organizing activity and things due to objects since there is no mind at this point, only innate schemes that do not contain knowledge of objects, only initial tendencies to repeat themselves as actions and responses without awareness. Development does not come from other humans since people are no different from objects, neither exist. There is no social interaction since the new human has no mind and no social awareness of someone else. All that exist are some innate schemes that encounter external resistances and acceptances when carried out. But they are enough to create the beginnings of adjustments of activity to the outside world. At birth the baby cannot respond to the breast except as the instinct to turn the face toward a touch on the cheek generates this innate scheme. In a matter of hours, this scheme refines itself as it interacts with the breast. The grasping reflex initially operates merely as an instinctive activity generated at random or as an innate response to a touch on the palm. But the grasping reflex quickly refines its methods of grasping depending on the kind of object.


GROUPING INTO SYSTEMS

But development isn’t merely refinement of instinctive activities. Otherwise humans would never rise above instinctive activity. The remarkable thing that occurs to produce development, that is, a qualitative change in the form of the activity, is that two activities become grouped together. In the beginning, the baby cries—an instinctive response to hunger. The mother appears to disturb the visual field and perhaps utters sounds—more innate responses by the baby already modified and adapted to visual changes by the perceptual system. The mouth is touched and the baby sucks—another innate response already somewhat modified and adapted. But soon these individual schemes are preserved and repeated, they tend to hook together, to form a simple coupling between them. Crying hooks to the presence of the mother. The visual field of the mother hooks to kinesthetic sensations of touch and the tough on the mouth. The touch on the mouth gets hooked up with sucking and its hunger satiation. An ordered set of schemes becomes fitted to the feeding event. Mother can even utter sounds and baby will anticipate feeding and so quiet the crying as baby anticipates the next scheme.

Now let’s skip ahead to the point in development when the baby has more active control over the schemes. In the case of the image of an object, the baby’s perceptual activity now follows an outline, an order of the little pieces of a boundary to group them together. This grouping of a series of centrations or pieces to follow them and hook them together creates a boundary or outline that can be followed. Or the baby outlines a small part of mommy’s face, her eyes, to trace around each one but also to run into a separation such that moving perceptual focus from one eye to the other requires a jump. The disconnected nature of the two eyes forms two parts of the face. The boundary of the face includes the eyes inside. The mouth can be traced. The sensory motor activity of perception is generating more refined coordinations in following the outlines and parts of objects as it is forced to adapt its activities of tracing and centrations on what the object, the mommy’s face, actually presents. Perceptual activity cannot operate without an object to trace and center on but it can constantly regulate its perceptual movement so they follow the object and don’t leap off into space. We have a grouping of spatial elements in which each centration on a point on the boundary of the face hooks up with the next point around the boundary. This perceptual ability to follow a continuous boundary forms a seriation of ordered points around the outside line of the face that is the boundary. The image of the face comes out of the accommodation of these coordinated perceptual activities to the particular face being examines. But when the object leaves, the image disappears. Perceptual activity cannot generate an image if there is no object present and nothing to follow.

But perceptual activity has a life of its own. It is repeatable, and after long refinements and adjustments in responding to objects, it begins to repeat itself without all parts of the face being present. Eventually the child can reconstruct the image of the face by reproducing the complex coordinated perceptual activities that have been refined and grouped together. The image of thought is a reconstruction. When we ask children to draw mommy in her absence, the first image they can reconstruct is the boundary that encloses the two eyes and mouth. They can follow arms as they extend away from the mommy and not have an enclosure, only a line. Their first drawings after the scribbling stage are the newt figures of a round enclosure, two smaller round objects that are eyes, a line for a mouth, and lines for arms and legs sticking out of the head.

What is remarkable is these coordinated sensory motor activities are reconstructed at the plane of the activity of activity of thought. Thought reconstructs the object not just as an image but as a concept out of the coordinations of schemes that were hooked together in strings of seriations and nestings of parts and wholes in the sensory motor adaptations to objects. Now these orderings and part/whole relationships are gradually reflected and reconstructed at the level of cognitive activity. But they have to start over to initially draw out parts of the schemes, just two elements put into a seriation rather than a whole series and just isolated parts and wholes. Cognitive activity must regulate its attempts to reconstruct objects on the plane of thought and attempt to fit them to objects as they experience the objects. Thought attempts to use its schemes to operate on the object, and when it doesn't fit to the object, the regulations in activity attempt to adjust it so the object no longer presents a problem and it can continue its activity to preserve its form.


THREE BASIC FORMS OF A MENTAL SYSTEM

In the case of mental activity, thought can organize collections of activities into larger wholes or system in three ways, it can either order them together into seriations such as a line or boundary; it can group parts into wholes, or it can do both simultaneously as with number and measurement. To number objects is to group objects together into a set and then to seriate them in an order of counting so that there is a first, second, third and so on. But to classify is simply to group parts into wholes, sub classes into inclusive classes. And to seriate objects is to seriate the differences among them such as their size. Thus, whatever the object is that the child is attempting to reconstruct in thought so as to represent it to himself, he can only form concepts, relations, or number and metrical units of measure. To construct the spatial aspects of objects relies on putting spatial elements in a series to creates lines or to put separated parts together to form a whole that includes them. To put together the physical properties of an object means to order differences applied to some property or to conceive of the whole of the property as made up of parts. To put together number can only be done by organizing subsets and sets while at the same time ordering the elements to produce the cardinal and ordinal aspects of number.

When we study the cognitive development of children, we attempt to examine something the child can represent such as number or cows and animals to see which of the three systems or combinations of the systems the child is using to form the representation and the level of development of the system. It is the level of development of the system that determines what the child can see and represent. Showing and representing to the child doesn’t help him much. He must operate on objects to classify, order, and enumerate them if he is to know them.