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A Relationship With The World

in A Place For Thought, Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Humanism, Images, Logic, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

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.

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An anatomy of the idea

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Art, Belief, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Logic, Psychology, Science, Sleep, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

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.

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Society

in Broken Postcard, Cities, Consciousness, Fear, Frailty, Humanism, Philosophy, Psychology, Stories, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

“Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.” George Bernard Shaw

Madness, the very idea of insanity, it is itself a term that is worth checking. It’s use has not remained consistent throughout history. Clinical definitions of insanity tend to be statistical, that is they are normative; if you don’t fit into the normal population then you’re not sane. Of course that’s not complete; some self harm, some are unhappy and some really wouldn’t cope in ‘this’ world without some intervention. However, few have stopped to check the ’sanity’ of society; the society that for the most part chooses who’s in and who’s out of the clinic.

The system we have works for most of us most of the time. But it is a system, and that means it’s going to miss something out. It doesn’t always work for all of us all of the time. Some groups have historically been more likely to be admitted as hysterical.

Study after study has confirmed that, but nothing is done. How would you feel if your depression wasn’t just neuro-chemical; how would you feel if a part of how you felt, part of what you experienced in your unhappiness was your brain’s reaction to the world you live in? It’s not improbable, in fact it’s more than likely. It’s well known that people in different cultures have different prevalence rates for mental illness. It’s also known that relapse rates are lower in other cultures for mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Self harm has a cultural orientation as does anorexia, why can’t we see the mind in part as an expression of the world it lives in, expressing itself in part as a reflection to the context in operates in?

That is, to what extent is our own mental health a reflection of our societies sanity? Social factors do have an influence; isolation in Western cultures is thought to be one causes of depressive symptoms (it’s not for nothing that there are higher rates of mental illness in poorer inner city communities, and amongst them women have the highest rates – men drink more).

In early societies there is no doubt that life was hard. There is less doubt that people’s lives were shorter, more was expected of them and the consequences of not submitting to the group was, without doubt, severe. There is no question that the freedoms we have in the modern world are wonderful when we have them. Within cities that are worlds unto themselves live and breath forests of people, all interwoven, disconnected and striving for survival within the forest.

Most definitions of sanity have the terms ’soundness of mind’, again, a normative definition. I wonder though, is it so wonderfully normal? In a society so wealthy we can’t care for our poor except by charity. That seems neither equitable nor sane when we are richer than we’ve ever been.

In the world we created from the forests, we haven’t lost the struggle, just the forest. Our virtues are not defined by our humanity nor our community.

The footsteps found in Africa are still walked, but they walk fragmented realities. We live in cities of millions, and by necessity. However, that same necessity has brought with it a ferocity en-mass. The faces of strangers are not the faces of people, and so we can laugh with cruelty.

But, a suffering person is still a person suffering. In a blind drive to ease our own suffering further we escape the banality and ennui of existence in entertainment. And it seems quite justified; life is hard after all. Worse than that is that by our own standards we are far from neutral. It is not just as Jonathan Glover puts it so well in his book ‘Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century’ that psychological distancing is part and parcel of the greatest evils of our time, but, as Hannah Arendt also makes the point, distancing is done by us, in the banality of our own normal society and in a guilty cover for truth we are capable of every rationalization.

This post is not an indictment. It is a question. In our quest for happiness the conditions of the best and most pervasive happiness must be considered. And a signifiacnt part of that is, are we in our own society happy despite the comforts of what we know..

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Resonance and Recognition

in A Place For Thought, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Humanism, Psychology, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 2 comments

“Living for ones own pursuits, surrounded by others doing the same is not community”

Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil

I don’t know at what age we become conscious of ourselves as agents in the world. I remember being a child passively. Things happened, and somehow, even if I was the cause of something happening I had no sense of agency. The world happened around me and I was a part of it, but I don’t remember thinking that I played any part in what was happening.

Somehow as you get older however, there’s a time, maybe a moment when that changes. As adults we not only become conscious that choices we’ve had in the past are antecedent to where we are now, we have a responsibility for the consequences. But worst of all, the harder I think the more I can draw lines dating to a time where I was still unaware of the responsibility I would feel now.

These thoughts can weigh heavily on most of us. I doubt that many of us can attest to complete satisfaction with everything in our lives. And by no means do I mean the house we live in or the job we have. Life is just a bit more than that for us. Who we are, the confidence we feel and the power that we feel we have over the future seem intrinsically linked to our past in much the same way.

For me personally it is for exactly these reasons that I value my education and the achievements I’ve made in life. Whatever can and will be taken away from me the past can never be removed. But I value even these things because I know that they are valuable, not just to me but to the people who have recognized them. As far as that is the case I am reminded that my achievements don’t always stand on their own. They also stand in relation to the people who have made me feel that they are achievement.

What am I getting at? A good question indeed.

That one can value one’s achievements is an achievement in life. There are many of us who continue to fail to recognize the value in ourselves. Worries of adequacy as ridiculous as they may be are also all to human. And that is in effect the point. Irvin Yalom once wrote the wonderfully acute observation that falling in love was akin to death. Better to stand in love with another, to stand in a relationship of partnership through life that bring each-other down with a suffocating fall. That relation of support through life I don’t think stands only for a couple, it stands for each of us and is an exquisite metaphor for the relation of support and recognition that each of us aspires to within our community. Despite my achievements, despite my personal confidence in the existence of my own humanity I seek to have that humanity seen in a community of friends. Why? Because it is in the reflection of their eyes that I can see myself.

Looking around the world it is clear that it is the reciprocity of affection, the recognition of being and substance in us all that bears significance as a species. We are born, it is true, into a world of strangers. The world and all it’s competition manages to strangle the essence of humanity through its mechanism. However, like many unanswered questions it also ought to be remembered that there are many things that we have in common as people that are more fundamental than our differences. It is in that respect that the gesture recognition is a significant force in all our endeavors.

The world as it is will continue to arm us. That is natural enough. However, when one thinks about all of the characters that have managed to unite people through conflict it is the men and women who have seen past transient and insignificant differences and found resonance across the divide who continue to inspire our values beyond cynicism and constraint. It seems to me that to aim for the same values, as unattainable as they may prove to be is a good starting place for all of us individually.

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Homo Poeta & The Idenity Of Thought

in Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Embodied, Humanism, Logic, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 2 comments

“What if language closely related to poetic diction were indispensable for a science of man…?” Medard Boss, 1954

“The intuitionist mathematician proposes to do mathematics as a free vital activity of thought. For him mathematics is a production of the human mind. He uses language,…only for communicating thoughts…Such a linguistic accompaniment is not a representation of mathematics; still less is it mathematics itself” Arend Heyting, 1964

“To think is the same as the thought that it is” Parmenides, approx 520-450 BC

Thought is thought to be identical with the brain. All mental processes and therefore the contents of consciousness, are brain processes. That is called identity theory.

Identity theory doesn’t appear to pose any real problems. In fact if anything it appears to solve a few. Unlike Berkeley's reduction of all categories to mind, identity theories pose hope for increasing our understanding of the mind through a materialist research program of the brain. Consciousness, the fundamental ’stuff’ that philosophers and scientists have tried to understand appears to be no less and no more than a distributed property of the brain or its activity, possibly an epiphenomenon, a mere consequence. In that sense the only understanding left to understanding the mind is understanding the brain.

The truth is not so convenient.  The contents of consciousness don’t just include tables and chairs. Consciousness includes parts of society and culture; however one wishes to understand either society and culture, one must appreciate its existence at least. Furthermore we all respond to what we are conscious of in society. That act of appreciation requires cognizance of what it is that is appreciated. It therefore falls within the mind and a part of either is therefore contained within the contents of consciousness.

If that is true it is then true that parts of society can be explained through brain processes. Therefore, in understanding the mind a part of the phenomenology we ought to be concerned to understand includes the meaning of the world that we derive in relation to it. If we therefore want to understand our place in the world we cannot exclude from our understanding the world that is contained in experience.

However, if we do try to understand the mind only through the brain we will be in danger of excluding from understanding a large portion of what needs explanation. Formalizing the science of the mind in such a way that it is paradigmatic that the ‘meaning’ (and ‘identity’) we achieve from the world  is eliminated from understanding by the act of reduction to the brain leaves out a component part of humanity: the act of formalization ossifies in our minds a paradigm that can only reinforce itself. A paradigm used to explain and understand phenomena has a certain shape (some might say a logical structure) and that shape determines legitimate and illegitimate forms of explanation (including the language that can be used to do the explaining). In identity theory the only legitimate explanations for mentality are brain processes.

The danger is that truth about the world   becomes relative to the formalization. Social reality for centuries in our culture, and in every other extant culture too, has been a component part of personal identity. People just are conscious of the milieu in which they exist.

There are people in South America for example that believe their prayers hold the world in balance. They are conscious of the travails of modern life and the concomitant brutality of the modern world.  The belief is not implicit. It is explicit and shared, furthermore the discrepancy between their perceptions of the modern world and their values reinforces their beliefs.

One need not believe that global warming will be put off by these peoples prayers in order that one consider the importance that this belief is shared. It is significant that for them the belief is reality, just as much as it is a reality for us that democracy is the best form of government. It is the fact that beliefs can and are explicitly shared that makes them meaningful inter-personally. One just needs to consider cases in which they aren’t shared to understand the point. Shared beliefs are not just objects of consciousness, they areschema from which the world within which we operate is interpreted. For the most part when we don’t share beliefs with someone we are faced with either adjusting our beliefs or trying to adjust the world to fit them.

What I am in effect saying is that much of what frames our minds can be identified with the world outside of our bodies, not just brain processes. To ultimately understand aspects of the mind, society & culture through the brain, we will have to situate the brain in the world.  The mental world has to be seen in relation to the social world in which each persons’ mind has a stake on behalf of his or her organism. For that reason beliefs that are shared and the causes of those beliefs are important to the inquiry into the mind, it’s development and the nature of its experience.

We can quite easily conceptualize emotions, perceptions and our attention to the world through the brain without inferring the world. A description of brain processes is enough. That said, there are human concerns that are important to our understanding of consciousness. For that reason a science of human concern is needed in order to compliment the biological and physical sciences that dominate our academic biases. In effect we must understand consciousness as social and cultural too. We must shift consciousness into the world.

This would not be at all relevant if it was not for the division that Descartes made between Res Extensa and Res Cogitans. One, the physical stuff is extended and the other mental stuff has no extension according to Descartes. We still operate under this conceptual shadow today. We understand the world as that which is extended away from the mind, in front of the eyes. The mind, by being shifted to the brain is only hiding the true problem of consciousness under a blanket. By ignoring consciousness as a category that is centrally important to its own physical explanation we are paying lip service to Descartes dualism. The point has been made again and again that our conceptual framework needs to be able to include mind and brain together in order to understand both: In the words of Sayre (1976):

“If one thinks of the mind, with Descartes, as charachterized essentially by thought but as lacking extension, and thinks of the physical as thoughtless but essentially extended, then the two domains are rendered conceptually incommensurable”

This same point has been iterated several times (see Richard Rorty ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature‘, more recently Max Velmans has articulated a view that contrasts with the implicit dualism of contemporary western thought). It is only in the fringes that the water is beginning to leak through the walls of our conceptual framework. But not explicitly. Neuroscience as a discipline has linked cognition to movement and understanding the mind as essentially embodied signifies a paradigm shift that is centrally important.

If we do place the world in the mind and reciprocally, place the mind in the world, the implications for understanding a vast array of phenomena with what we already know will be immense. Phenomena as different as poetry and mathematics will have a home in the same vessel and in some sense be reducible to it. Poetry, an ancient form of human diction seen as an expression of the mind and mathematics seen as a vital language for describing the world are valid as categories of mental phenomena (albeit doing very different things). There are no ontological issues raised by seeing the entire world as conceived by our minds and relative to them.

When Wittgenstein remarked that if a lion could speak we could not understand him he made a serious point about the nature of communication. What we communicate is not only couched in language, it is created by minds to which the communication is relevant. That does not mean by any stretch that what is communicated is false. Measurement of the external world may be universal, and numbers may have different symbols on different planets, but the application of measurement is still transferable across species who use it. What concerns us here is the part that allows the measurement itself to be understood as relative to the species conducting the measurement.

In this vein of thought identity theory need not be considered false in order that it include consciousness. It’s contents as a unit relevant to its own explanation is not necessarily viciously circular. On one side of the equation may sit terms representing experienced phenomena (x) and on the other the language of materialism/physicalism (z).  In my own mind it is what happens in between that allows the equivalence of the two to be understood. That is the important question that ought to be raised.

What is significant to this maneuver however, is that each set of terms are understood as relevant to each other. For the identity to work it is not just the case that the entire world is reduced to the brain, the reciprocal relation between the brain and the world has to hold also. That makes the human mind a category of the world in which it is situated as something to be understood, understood that is, as a part of a larger system that includes the entirety of human experience as a category for explanation.

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