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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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Thoughts On Nature, Man, Teleology & The Future

in Art, Consciousness, Death, Design, Humanism, Images, Philosophy, Poetry, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

GoodMorningGroove2.mp3

This was a moment in time. The second the shutter captured the light, even before that the moment ended. Lens cap on feet trod on through the mud toward another spot in the forest. Sun shining, the light foaming through the atmosphere the freshness betrayed a deeper truth to the scene. Ants, birds, flowers and vine crawling through in a world with a hidden complexity, every crack a cranny of life; each and every colour not by accident passing the lens of my eye, transforming at each moment from the electrons that make them up to the empty space between, life buzzed with energy. Even the epiphenomena served their purpose as they come to do in nature, much like human consciousness purpose, function, the very raison_d’être a teleology by human standards. As nature would have it every new phenomena become as much a part of the whole as all preceding mutations served their purpose to all their temporal descendants. And through of the present, the minute transformation of life of which my camera only captured a instant I stood there on a Sunday afternoon overhwlemed by the present. This symmetry is no accident, it is by nature that this picture could be taken, it is by evolution that the image can be carried forward, for your eyes to see, for your mind to comprehend, and in all of this; in both the natural world and in technology we are left intrisically embedded in nature.
Birth, growth, decay; year by year, month by month as much in the forest as anywhere else. The cosmic struggle to survive goes beyond this image and at times leaves a sense of almost futile apathy. Without even noticing the cycle of creation and decay exist as much for the universe as it does for an ant in the wood, like a universal principle guiding the whole of what exists existence itself turns on its head. One day our galaxy will collide with Andromeda and the likely result will be the total annihilation of the woodland in this image along with what we think to be our solar system, and with total entropy the universe that can sustain life in any system will itself dissipitate and a darkness will loom over whatever it is that existence is.
The harmony in this picture is almost a cliché. Yet that very harmony is also the seat of our anxieties; we are commited not just to life but to certainty, yet the certainty that we have made our commitment to is a fleeting irrelevance beyond the boundries of our minds. It is not for nothing that the truth Sisyphus imparted to the humans from the gods was his own punishment and it is not for nothing that the answer to our own survival lies in his own punsishment, not to struggle but to live each breath and take in each moment of majesty that nature has allowed us to acquiesce in. It is the struggle for life that defines us, but it is the majesty of living that makes us. And that seems to be the irony of this image, it is only through the reflection we can achieve away from the immediacy of life that life as a whole begins to bear meaning.
From unity with nature to disunity from it; the duality of man and nature and of man have encouraged a new system in which we are the progenitors of our own destruction through nature, and yet with an almost poetic twist we are forced not just to face nature, we are forced to face ourselves within the natural world. We are the creators of a future that is now embedded in a world we have created, and the poetry is that we have now come into closer proximity with the very nature that the industrial age and the enlightenment sought to surpass.
Madness seems to me to be a subjective word. There are plenty of definitions, and many of them go out of flavour. However, there is a degree of insanity to our predicament, and a healthy one. Our rationalism has in part caused the conditions of our fate and it is the same rationalism that will navigate us through the twisted strands of fate. It is to the woods that we must find our reflection in order to regain the remnants of sanity we seek, and it is in unison with them that we must also look to the future.

This was a moment in time. The second the shutter captured the light, even before that the moment ended. Lens cap on feet trod on through the mud toward another spot in the forest. Sun shining, the light foaming through the atmosphere the freshness betrayed a deeper truth to the scene. Ants, birds, flowers and vine crawling through in a world with a hidden complexity, every crack a cranny of life; each and every colour not by accident passing the lens of my eye, transforming at each moment from the electrons that make them up to the empty space between, life buzzed with energy. Even the epiphenomena served their purpose as they come to do in nature, much like human consciousness, purpose, function, the very raison d’être a teleology by any human standard. As nature would have it every new phenomena becomes as much a part of the whole as all preceding mutations served their purpose to all their temporal descendants. And through of the present, the minute transformation of life of which my camera only captured an instant I stood there on a Sunday afternoon overhwlemed by the present.

This symmetry is no accident, it is by nature that this picture could be taken; it is by evolution that the image can be carried forward for your eyes to see, for your mind to comprehend, and in all of this for the whole to be as much a physical as a mental reality; in both the natural world and in technology we are left intrisically embedded in nature.

Birth, growth, decay; year by year, month by month as much in the forest as anywhere else. The cosmic struggle to survive goes beyond this image and at times leaves a sense of almost futile apathy. Without even noticing, the cycle of creation and decay exist as much for the universe as it does for an ant in the wood. Like a universal principle guiding the whole of what exists, existence itself turns on its head. One day our galaxy will collide with Andromeda and the likely result will be the total annihilation of the woodland in this image along with what we think to be our solar system, and with total entropy further on in the future the universe that can sustain life in any system we know will itself dissipitate and a darkness will loom over whatever it is that existence is.

The harmony in this picture is almost a cliché. Yet that very harmony is also the seat of our anxieties; we are commited not just to life but to certainty, yet the certainty that we have made our commitment to is a fleeting irrelevance beyond the boundries of our minds. It is not for nothing that the truth Sisyphus imparted to the humans from the gods was his own punishment and it is not for nothing that the answer to our own survival lies in his own punsishment, not to struggle but to live each breath and take in each moment of majesty that nature has allowed us to acquiesce in. It is the struggle for life that defines us, but it is the majesty of living that makes us. And that seems to be the irony of this image, it is only through the reflection we can achieve away from the immediacy of life that life as a whole begins to bear meaning.

From unity with nature to disunity from it; the duality of man and nature and of man have encouraged a new system in which we are the progenitors of our own destruction through nature, and yet with an almost poetic twist we are forced not just to face nature, we are forced to face ourselves within the natural world. We are the creators of a future that is now embedded in a world we have created, and the poetry is that we have now come into closer proximity with the very nature that the industrial age and the enlightenment sought to surpass.

Madness seems to me to be a subjective word. There are plenty of definitions, and many of them go out of flavour. However, there is a degree of insanity to our predicament, and a healthy one. Our rationalism has in part caused the conditions of our fate and it is the same rationalism that will navigate us through the twisted strands of fate. It is to the woods that we must find our reflection in order to regain the remnants of sanity we seek, and it is in unison with them that we must also look to the future.

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Roots: The Edge of Humanity

in Art, Belief, Broken Postcard, Cities, Consciousness, Death, Frailty, Humanism, Images, Love, Philosophy, Psychology, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

I don’t know what it means to be ‘human’. Humanism, and theories like humanistic psychology have their assumptions and a part of these exalt what it is that is typically human(e). But that begs the very question; what is it to be human and what is humanity?

It’s easy to be either overly cynical or optimistic about humanity, we are after all in danger of perpetuating our own extinction event on this planet. Yet we are also responsible for the development of societies and cultures unseen anywhere else we know about. There are many of us concerned to preserve humanity and its future. But what is it that is being preserved?

Of course, like all words, and especially descriptive terms with value laden connotations like ‘human’ and ‘humanity’ the assumptions are in the meaning. So, like all people using words like ‘human’ and ‘humanity’ I’ve got my own idea about what the words ought to mean, or at least how they ought to be understood. For me, when we’re not using the word ‘human’ in a derogatory sense it is our unique capacity for two things that compels me towards my own humanity. Those things are empathy and creativity.

I know that altruism is seen in other species, but I don’t mean altruism in quite the same way that behaviourists and scientists mean. I mean the capacity to identify and share a world with someone despite seeming disadvantages that can result from sharing a world. By creativity I mean more than sketching, I mean the ability to have a unique vision of the world, our place in it and to be able to express that vision in such a way that it can be shared by others. Ironically there are two striking examples of these things, neither of which were human in origin.

7000 years ago a group of hominids called the Cro-Magnons lived in Europe. They had fertility rituals, buried the dead and were responsible for the most significant cave art in Europe. Their form of art survived as it was for centuries, much longer than any one movement of art in our time.

If you visit their caves in Europe you would see that the art isn’t near the entrance to the caves, it is protected deep in the caverns; it is as if by its significance to them it was kept safe from the world. In a world protected from the uncertainties of the world outside; much the same as the inner sanctuaries of the Cathedrals we visit today.

Their decoration adorned rooms that were protected and it would be evident, looking at their work that it was the work of  minds capable of a view of the world in which they lived and fought to survive. And what is so compelling about the work, for those of us who see our own society as sophisticated and progresive, is that the compulsion to express, depict and render the world that lay outside the caves immediatly before them must have been as much of a necessity as our need is to find some mode by which to express and actualise ourselves.

The work on the walls of those caves was an expression of an existence and a connection to nature. As such it is as candid as it is profound for us to think about.

What is more interesting about the Cro-Magnon was they also sculpted and buried their dead. These are the ceremonies of a species who are self aware. For the remembrance of the dead, the and ritual toward afterlife carry a unique significance; that is our own concern for our own afterlife as well as the memory of those who have departed. However, what is more remarkable is that the Cro-Magnon carried out these ceremonies amidst an existence far harsher than our own and most likely with a greater occurrence of death than we on the whole are used to in the western world.

Creatures who are aware of themselves are also it would seem aware they are mortal, and at the risk of a truism; with mortality comes death. For creatures with such an awareness the finite duration of individual life becomes an ever present characterization of the every day.

Mortality matters and the meaning that life has while it flickers through our breath has a significance that we are still at odds with to this day. One need only consider the Myth of Sisyphus and the the multiplicity of roles it has played in our own culture to see that fact.

It is true, their lives were shorter than ours; it is only in a developed society that the older generations can be supported. But then doesn’t that just add weight to the sympathy we can muster for the Cro-Magnon, for despite the prevalence of death that we assume they were accustomed to, they still had enough reverence for life to respect and preserve their dead through burial.

For me it is in the example of the Cro-Magnon that I am reminded of something else; death is final and we bury our dead to remember them in the same way the early Cro-Magnon did. With them we share a vital appreciation of life and a fundamental fear of what happens to us when that life is lost.

For Daniel Dennett there is another point too. Death has a massive psychological impact on us. When anyone of us dies the whole frame within  which we live has to shift. No longer can we think “oh, so and so would like that”, because the ’so-and-so’ is no longer there to appreciate the thought that we would like to share with them. When others die it is true that our world changes and through the ritual of burial we are at least brought one step closer to the unhappy shift that we must make in order to think about the world as it is now that they are gone.

Before the Cro-Magnon there were many variations of hominid. One story strikes me when I think our genetic ancestry. It comes from a species called australopithecus afarensis. When the species was discovered in Africa two sets of footprints were found, dated to the time that the species existed. The footprints are clearly of a man and a women walking, if not holding hands, then very close to each other.

There is an obvious poignancy to the story; these were the footprints of two people maybe very much in love, maybe just walking through the desert together, now very much extinct. What is left of them, of any idea that we can have of their identities are just footprints fossilized in the desert. beyond the species, the closest specimen of their individuality are these marks in the sand.

In a strange and ironic way it is these footprints that demonstrate the finite and momentary lapse of time that we have, just as the artwork in the caves some 7000 years old does as well. For what remains is not a eulogy or column in the back of a newspaper, nor the faint memory of someone who knew any one of these people. What is left are physical marks on caves and some shapes etched in the desert and these are not just the marks of humanity, they are the marks of the passing of time, not just for these species now extinct, they are the marks of our eventual passing as well.

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