A Thought For Pause…
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In this post I’d like to show my own exploring of my identity through sound and vision. I put these short videos together in 2009 as an experiment, trying aesthetically express my sensibilities. Each of the three depicts a different aspect of me. As usual I am always grateful for peoples views and ideas.
Association Framework from Alex Crockett on Vimeo.
Water from Alex Crockett on Vimeo.
FIN from Alex Crockett on Vimeo.
Tags: anxiety, associations, Belief, black and white, culture, Death, Design, drawing, Experience, happiness, Ideas, Images, Life, mind, picture, Poetry, sketches, Video
A tantalizing part of experience is the noise we don’t experience; both the visual and auditory noise in the environment is immense. The environment is an almost chaos. Light, shapes and sounds; all varied and complex. It is natural to think of shapes as formed, ready made for minds to acquiesce. We see ‘a table’ or ‘chair’ or ‘face’, and that is it. From the chaos we see an ordered world. That is amazing.
Furthermore within the order we can navigate, making sense of the fauna and flora of our environments. There is a degree to which the impressionists had it right however, there is a a sense in which their paintings are closer to the reality of perception than our very own eyes. After all we are closer to light than to objects (physically speaking).
Color perception offers a simple illustration. When we see a series of different colors the colors remain constant despite variability in environmental conditions such as luminance. This is known as color constancy and this is thought to be achieved because the brain reads the ratios of difference between the wavebands of light from one surface to the next. As wavelengths vary between the surfaces we are looking at, the brain ‘reads’ the ratio differences between light from surfaces (which stays the same irrespective of light variations) allowing the colors we see to remain constant. In other words the brain computes color properties from ratios which, when we think about the brain as fleshy stuff is just amazing.
We don’t just perceive and navigate, we order the world too. How many of us, moving into a new home hang up pictures ‘where they belong’? The world is not just a thing we receive, it is something we act on and try to control. Our brains, human brains that is, are immense in their ability to both make inferences from the available data and and then structure the world according to our needs. We are the only species known to use tools to make tools. That too is amazing.
Within evolutionary theory there is a not insignificant idea that the more variable a trait is the less likely it is to have adaptive value. The argument goes that truly adaptive changes quickly loose their variability as the remaining population have acquired them, thus leaving previously adaptive traits fully absorbed by a species; they become a part of the total makeup of the species. Although the assumption has been contested the overarching principle has held as a rule.
The point is that there is a base level at which we all operate on the world with the same bodies. Each an agent coming to the world ready to make something meaningful of it with the same demands. It was Darwin who noticed that across cultures facial reactions to emotions have an invariance. To the extent that we as a species have invariant demands, we too have structured responses. In short, we see and act on a world we see that is, in part at least, not just composed of the world, but of our response to it. In as much as that is the case, the world in which we live is our construction.
For me personally, it is not just that we are conscious that is amazing, it is that we are conscious agents with a bid to our futures. We live in reciprocity with the environment in such a way that the environment serves a function in an almost Hegelian dialectic, but rather than being an historical and transcendental metphysic, the relations are immediate and physical. Rather than being governed by an end point that is teleological in some as yet unperceived way, it is itself evolving between the myriad minds that people the world, somehow finding solutions to life as it emerges. In all its detail, that is magical.
Tags: analytical, History, Ideas, Life, Living, Logic, mind, musings, People, Psychology, time, world
Living day to day we sometimes forget the significance of our brain are with respect to the ideas that make up our worlds. In our brain are a considerable number of neurons with significantly more connections. Odd as it may sound, there is nothing like the world in the brain, nor are there any clear ideas, just some gray and white mushy stuff. How your brain and my brain know a table is a table or an idea is an ideas is therefore puzzling.
Of course as science has progressed the questions have been framed differently. The way in which the questions have been framed has become and index for understanding how we relate to meaning in the world; understanding thought and the relationships ideas have to each other is important if we want to understand how we relate to our cultural environment. Knowing how our brains work will help us to frame ourselves in the conceptual world of memes and archetypes.
A good place to start to think about our dreams. In our dreams our experiences bear little resemblance to the actual world. But when we dream we are as good as conscience. For all intents and purposes we see, move and exist in a world, albeit a dream world. The question is how? A lot of work has gone into trying to explain ‘how matter becomes imagination’ (to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite scientists).
To start to understand we must return to when we are awake; there is distribution of activity going on in our heads. Memories encoded across regions of the brain are activated, not just to explicitly remember something, but to relate what we hear to the bank of information already encoded in our brains. Those semantic networks that become active reciprocally influence the way in which we encode the environment, we thus further perceive the world and our relation to it in relation to the memeories already banked up in our brains.
Priming offers a rather good illustration. If we are asked to study a list of words, and we are then given syllables and asked to complete them we are more likely to complete the syllables as the words that were in the list we studied. On a semantic level, if we are ‘primed’ with a word like doctor, we would be more likely to think ‘nurse’ than say ‘telephone’, why, because they are semantically related. Similarly, researchers have found that ‘priming’ people with aggressively related stimuli will get people to interpret others behavior during competitive games as more aggressive and will similarly trigger a more aggressive response than one would otherwise have seen.
One other important things about sleeping is that when we sleep our minds have a chance to encode and rehearse information that was important during the day, that is as well as process things that may have been on our minds. The same semantic networks that are active during the day are active in our sleep minus the real world to order them. Of course this is a rather simple account. But it’s the principle that’s important. The principle is that the world that we experience is related to active constellations of information in our brains, formed by the activity between neurons that structure and encode that information. That activity has an impact on how we act on the world, and of course that has an impact on our experiences, which further influences the world that influences us.
As human beings, as minds a significant part of that activity is ideational. A significant portion of our experience is formed through ideas, concepts and semantic activity. Things mean things (if I am permitted a circularity).
And that is the significance of meaning. The meaning we find in things drives us. We relate to meaning of things. Jung in his book The Science of Mythology drew this point out (albeit psychoanalytically), and if we think of the way in which we use representational mediums, like deserted islands (Deleuze), or the significance of a Brand in the modern world, we come close to understanding the significance of ideas in our lives. But they run deeper.
The concept of a schema is important in understanding the same point. Schema, or patterns that represent some part of the world don’t come in-built like the ability to recognize faces (or like the structures that contain the schemata). The concept of the archetype is of this form as is the concept of the meme. They share enough similarities to be synonyms for each other. That is they are both referents for ideas.
Combining all of the elements in this picture we can begin to form an understanding of our relationship with the world of ideas. Ideas, represented often as objects, have significance by virtue of our relation to them. The relationship between the objects we encounter, the ideas that we form them and the ideas we get learn in society act as referents, providing the environment with a sense of significance. That significance drives our relationship with our environment: pressing forward en-mass the development of ideas contained in that environment shape a shematic of ideational content pressing us with meaning. Thankfully this is a partial picture. One I hope develops the importance of ideas in the world as factors in our relationship with it. One that can help us better conceptualize why some ideas work and some don’t as we creativity develop an image of the world we’re in.
Tags: analytical, associations, Belief, culture, Experience, Ideas, Logic, mind, musings, People, Psychology, Science, time, world
From the eyes
It is a wonderful life. It is a wonderful life because we can feel it. Time passes for all of us, each day to stop and reflect, each day that has passed. Never to be lived again. Because it is wonderful.
Each second is unique. Each mind experiences it’s own fragment as time moves forward through us; passing back into a horizon that we’ve passed. Friends, love, laughs, they swell into an abyss of memory, only to be mirrored by another event, itself passing. And it is wonderful. It hurts wonderfully to know that each one of these moments is an end; an end of time. And it is wonderful.
Sometimes love is so pervasive it can’t be shared. In a moment of refection, in a glance a ray of light burns through a leaf and time evaporates into a mist. Transported into the heart of another time once lived a smile crosses like it was the first, and then all of a sudden a noise and back to the ending present. and it is wonderful.
And as age correlates more and more with the passage of time the bank of imagery grows all consuming. Wistful reflection. Why? Because life is wonderful.
It is wonderful to be alive. "> »
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Tags: Experience, History, Ideas, Images, Living, mind, poem, Poetry, sketches, world, writing
“Any attempt to define what psychopathology is presupposes that we know what normality is. In view of this, any consideration of psychopathology requires an examination of the notions of mental health…..Throughout history, people’s understanding of psychopathology has constantly shifted; different cultures and historical periods have labeled ‘mad’ those whom other times and societies have regarded sane”
Alessandra Lemma in An Introduction to Psychopathology
It has to considered to what extent any one of us has what might be described as sanity and is ‘normal’. I am sure that more than one of us would describe ourselves as normal, other would quite happily demonstrate all the ways in which they are atypical. As a psychology student I remember quite clearly identifying myself with every kind of neurosis we were presented with in the lecture hall. Either way I’m not sure that ‘normality’ is a requisite of either sanity or health. The view to normality presupposes some kind of definition of what a person ought to be in a society to be like everybody else. It is certainly clear to me that this is a nonsense.
One thing is clear, in order that others, with no insight into ourselves regard us as ‘normal’ we are required to do what they do, behave as they behave and feel like they feel. I am confident that this is in no way dissimilar to the opening of almost every dystopian fiction written or realized.
Normality is no doubt useful. Social science uses what is called ‘the normal distribution’ as a means of testing for significance in research. The normal distribution is not a logical or mathematical ‘truth’, it is an empirical observation. It just so happens that when phenomena a measured they tend to fit, on a graph, what looks like a bell shaped curve. That curve also tends to have certain properties that make it identifiable as the normal distribution and, as a consequence it has become a useful constancy to test against for abnormality in a population.
In addition we rely heavily on our ability to predict what the world will be like. Constancy in our environment is an important part of our ability to navigate the environment and surprise can cause a certain anxiety. When the mold is broken, or someone doesn’t quite fit the mold, it is less the actual threat and more the perceived uncertainty that makes us weary. Society has to function, in order that it does we have to rely on the fact that it will do whatever we expect it to do at any given time. In that respect normality and stability are important for us.
However, there is a clear sense in which an absolute need for constancy is pathological. If one take people with neurotic dispositions for example, they may for all purposes live a normal life, however, the threat of ambiguity and uncertainty can be too much. Often times people with anxious personality types abhor what they do not know and are quite willing to impose on their environment their own versions of what is normal (and hence good). There is a clear sense in which dogmatism is an example of this.
The desire to fit the mold, to inhibit the passions in order that we are ‘normal’ is neurotic. It is a function of neurotic minds that the world is black and white according tot heir ideas. Once boundaries for understandable behavior are set they are in effect set in stone. But to what extent does this reflect real life?
I would like to take some time making the issue as unclear as possible. Not for any other reason than to show what lack of clarity the issues has for me en-route to maybe discovering some way of thinking about it.
What is clear is that normality and sanity are in effect synonymous on the one hand but, they in another sense they can quite clearly been seen to stand in opposition to each other. In as much ’sanity’ is concerned there is a synonymy with normal function. However, at the same time there is an equal discrepancy as far as the desire to be normal is manifest. In this latter sense, it is almost as if the very desire for normalcy is in and of itself a kind of insanity, a state of mind that constricts the very freedom of spirit and the individuality of expression that makes the human psyche what it is, a socially creative agent.
It is that sense that true insanity seems the most manifest. I found the following definition of a Lunatic online:
LUNATIC, persons. One who has had an understanding, but who, by disease, grief, or other accident, has lost the use of his reason. A lunatic is properly one who has had lucid intervals, sometimes enjoying his senses, and sometimes not.
I wonder however, to how many people who are not ‘lunatics’ this definition would apply. Personally I am prone to periods of dejection, dysthemia and depression. I have experienced pains in life and am sure that I will continue to experience pain and suffering during my life. However, I have also experienced wonderful highs and in no way do I feel abnormal in this. I don’t think there is anything atypical about the grief that I’ve had. What is more, I am quite sure that my senses have not always served me well. I continue to learn that I am prone to serious flaws in my reasoning but, at the same time would be loath to consider myself a lunatic.
It is worth noting that society as a whole has its own values regarding sanity and insanity. I don’t doubt that there is a regimentation to our own society that imposes restrictions on the limits to which free expression is possible. What those limits are and how they are defined is in my mind a serious question.
A typical response might be that if an individual finds it hard to cope in a society, if an individual is in fact suffering then they may qualify for treatment. This raises to parallel questions. The first is, to what extent is the individual responding to the way in which the society finds them, secondly, to what extent is a certain amount of suffering a prerequisite of life. The point I am making is not only the the world in which we live seems to make almost unreasonable demands on people and their capacity for happiness that I for one have never seen, but at the same time, to what extent are we really living in a kind of dystpopia of which we are in fact unaware?
Our virtues are not defined by our humanity in as much as they defined by our success. And by that success we are quite ready to bleed our humanity. what about our own society as whole? What about the whole of humanity? Is it sane? In early societies there is no doubt that life was hard. There is less doubt that peoples lives were shorter, more was expected of them and the consequences of not submitting to the group were, without any doubt severe. There is no question that the freedom we have to express ourselves in the modern world is a wonderful aspect of our lives today. Within cities that are worlds unto themselves live and breath forests of people, all interwoven, disconnected and striving for survival within the forest. Some people enjoy great freedom, however many also suffer great inequity. Most definitions of sanity have the terms ’soundness of mind’, again, a normative definition. I wonder though, is it so wonderfully normal?
There is little doubt that a society needs to function. In order that it functions it is clear that certain values for typical behavior are set. Anarchy, both of mind, people and a nation at large is in no way different to a state of perfect entropy. A state in which the informational, structural and functional value of the system in question is beyond use. However, at the same time there does seem a human danger that exists in the opposite direction. That danger is that we consolidate our horizons so narrowly that the essence of humanity and human creativity are inhibited to the extent that society ossifies.
There is ample evidence both in historical literature and in modern academic literature to suggest that we take for granted what we believe to be clear cut mental conditions. However there is also something about the very concept of sanity that is an anathema to freedom of mind and of spirit. And without suggesting a better alternative, I would at least like to pose a warning. That as a society of people mutually engaged in the single purpose of working towards a better future, we consider our relationship with the insane and welcome the prospect of difference, if not for the very reason that the minds that appear so different may be the reality that we need in our default to normalcy.
I worked in a psychiatric hospital after I left university. There was little doubt that the patients I worked with would not have been able to manage on their own in the world. However, one thing that struck the strongest cord with me. One that still sounds loud today is that in between the incoherence of that time, between the spoken lines I felt a clear reflection of truth. When the patients were upset they weren’t able to articulate they complaints in a way that made sense in relation to the physical world. But what they meant to say were truths that we as wardens in the hospital were certainly not prepared to accept.
Tags: anxiety, culture, Experience, Fear, happiness, Ideas, Life, Living, mind, musings, People, Science, society, world
