Heart
A PREAMBLE….AND APOLOGY
I’m a slow typer, s-l-o-w…Yet I still managed a coherent and relatively well-argued and well-referenced piece of writing – even if I say so myself! -of over 3,000 words (yes I counted every-single-one) in preparation for Day 2. I even managed to make several visits to Bruce’s piece while finishing mine off, and even picked up on the comments made and incorporated them in my final draft. Lots of self congratulation going down.
Then, at 4.24am UK time, as the day peeped through the blinds, at the very moment I was saving this final version, Gaia, MS Word and I enacted what I have chosen to see as “a frickin computer meltdown!” Now my piece was never going to be a particularly scholarly affair, but given that
Bruce has served up such a masterly overview, and after last night’s tecnonightmare, my piece will probably be even more colloquial. Hopefully, given the weighty themes, this does not come across as flippant. It’s a bit too rambling and shapeless in parts but hey I’m a drummer. Apologies to all for the late posting - hope it doesn't disturb the smooth running of the Symposium.Thanks are also in order to Julian and Bruce for coordinating everything.
So here goes.I’ve been reading up a little on cognitive science and the philosophy of mind in the last 2 years. From what I have read so far it’s Varela who really does it for me. (Varela is one of many enactivist writers - my piece admittedly focusses on Varela a bit too much). Anyhow, I particularly appreciate the embodied pragmatic emphasis, illustrated in this quote from the first section of The Embodied Mind:
“Let us emphasize that the overriding aim of our book is pragmatic. We do not intend to build some grand, unified theory, either scientific or philosophical, of the mind-body relation. Nor do we intend to write a treatise of comparative scholarship. Our concern is to open a space of possibilities in which the circulation between cognitive science and human experience can be fully appreciated and to foster the transformative possibilities of human experience in a scientific culture.” Woohoo! If that’s what enactivism is about then give me plenty!
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE: CONFLATING “HUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD” WITH “THE WORLD”
One key question I had in mind when I started reading up on Enactivism was the question “Does it recognise the reality of a physical world outside of the subject observer?” and if yes, what language does it use to do so?
Perhaps even by the words I have just chosen, my take on this could be viewed as being fundamentally Cartesian. Maybe I am still so enmeshed with the Orange world view that I like to think I can see beyond it, but really I still view the world through an Orange lens. Maybe.
In any case I was still interested to find out. So I looked closely at the language used by Varela and co. whenever the topic seemed to be about what is regularly referred to as “the real world”. And I found some pretty clear statements rejecting the extreme Idealist view that the world is purely a construct of the mind. Again in the opening section of The Embodied Mind Varela says:
“Critiques of such a position (Orange scientific view), however, can easily go to the opposite extreme. The indeterminancy principle in quantum mechanics for example, is often used to espouse a kind of subjectivism in which the mind on its own constructs the world…neither of these positions…is at all adequate.” (my underlining)
Despite this rejection of extreme Idealist positions about a purely mind-constructed reality, there still seem to be many commentators who, through the use of confused language, seem to lean towards this extreme Idealist view. In particular I have noticed discussions which start off using the specific language of looking at “how human beings develop knowledge of the world”. The language then morphs into “how human beings interact with the world”, which becomes “how human beings enact their world” which morphs into “how human beings enact the world” (spot the difference) which morphs into “how human beings co-construct the world” which, no surprise, turns into “we create our own reality” and lo and behold we have The Secret.
Now this morphing process is most likely due to sloppy thinking & writing. As Bruce has pointed out, that’s not Varela’s fault, unless he’s the one being sloppy and not just his commentators. We shouldn’t judge enactivism on the work of those who misinterpret it.
So what’s the best language we can use in this and subsequent discussions with regard to the aspect of “the world” that is “out there”, as opposed to “the world as we interpret it through our various human lenses”. By “out there“ I mean genuinely independent of any observers, existing separately from human beings whether or not we observe them or interact with them. I’m thinking for example of the 450 million year old rock underlying the hills outside my house. It’s “there”! Honest! In previous exchanges Matt and I have used the phrase “the natural world”. Maybe it’s going to be hard to find agreement on the language because perhaps we don’t all agree that there actually is an aspect of the world that is “out there”?
Looking closely at an example in Bruce’s essay:
“Using the example of color perception research, for instance, Varela, Lakoff, and other cognitive scientists point out that color is not a quality that exists "out there" in the world; it is not an observer-independent, objective quality of things-in-themselves. Rather, it is a particular experiential domain that emerges through the interaction of our color cones, our neural circuitry, our embodied history of structural coupling (our particular evolutionary trajectory in time and co-determinative relationship with our environment), the reflective properties of objects, and electromagnetic radiation. Our words do not point to observer-independent, self-existing objects, unrelated to our activity in the world; our categories do not simply reflect what is already there.”
In the list of factors involved in colour perception, Bruce includes the reflective properties of objects and electromagnetic radiation. Whatever names we choose to give them, and however mutable our understanding of these things are, the reflective properties of objects and electromagnetic radiation are “out there” and do exist independent of observers. It’s these “out there” factors that I feel get overlooked in the rush to point out the interactive dynamic of all the other factors. In some cases our words do point – however inadequately or however shaped by our own lenses – to observer independent, self existing objects AND these objects are not unrelated to our activity in the world.
LET’S GET PHYSICAL…
I think basically I could be called a physicalist. I remember reading in 2002 in A Brief History of Everything the following:
"Q: So reality is not composed of say subatomic particles.
KW: Yikes. I know that approach is common, but it is really a profoundly reductionistic approach, because it is going to privilege the material, physical universe, and then everything else – from life to mind to spirit – has to be derived from subatomic particles, and this will never never work.”I wrote why not? In the margin, twice.
In the intervening 5+ years I have yet to be shown convincingly by Wilber’s writings or anyone else’s why not? Life, mind & spirit would have to be derived from the physical universe? Wilber seems appalled…. Why? Take away the physical body, there is no life as we know it. Take away the brain, or brains, the mind cannot operate. Spirit? I’m not even sure what he means by Spirit, but I don’t know of anyone claiming to live a spiritual life that is doing so without a physical body.
The current hard science of subatomic physics doesn’t explain how life started, or exactly how free will works, or what spiritual inspiration looks like under an electron microscope – but, take away the physical and what’s left? No thoughts cos there’s no brain or mind to have them, no emotions cos there’s no heart to feel them, no culture or noosphere cos there are no books, no newspapers, no computers. In that sense I am a physicalist.
I think Varela is a physicalist of sorts too. In his work on the immune system he is looking at ways in which it interacts with its environment or its “medium”, its “background”. He doesn’t put attention into wondering about whether the cells or their environments actually exist or not. He takes it as agiven.
Here he is talking about cells:
“a self-organizing network of biochemical reactions produces molecules, which do something specific and unique: they create a boundary, a membrane, which constrains the network that has produced the constituents of the membrane. This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what's unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. It doesn't require an external agent to notice it, or to say, "I'm here." It is, by itself, a self- distinction. It bootstraps itself out of a soup of chemistry and physics.” (my underlining)
But he’s obviously not just a physicalist in the traditional stereotype. Here he is taking a more postmodern view:
“The brain can't be understood as a computer, in any interesting sense, and I part company with the people who think that the brain does rely on symbolic representation. …..The same intuitions cut across other biological fields. Deconstruct the notion that the brain is processing information and making a representation of the world. Deconstruct the militaristic notion that the immune system is about defense and looking out for invaders. Deconstruct the notion that evolution is about optimizing fitness to live in the conditions present in some kind of niche.” And here’s where the language we all choose comes into play, because I would insert the word “just” or “simply” or “merely” in all of the above points that Varela seeks to deconstruct. In other words, I believe it would be more helpful to write: “Deconstruct the notion that evolution is
merely about optimizing fitness to live in the conditions present…” And the reason I’m being so pedantic is because it is easy to conclude from Varela’s words here that evolution has nothing to do with optimising fitness, or that the immune system has nothing to do with defense and looking out for invaders, when in any human sense of the meaning of these words, one aspect of evolution is about optimising fitness, and one aspect of the immune system is to look out for invaders.
Again here I think he goes too far with his choice of language:
"We have to abandon the enormous deadweight of the materialism of the Western tradition, and turn to a more planetary way of thinking.” I don’t think we need to abandon materialism; instead we need to keep what’s good and then move on to the planetary. Even when we reach a planetary thinking stage, we’ll still be living on it, it’ll still be under our feet. And without its physical existence to support us there’d be no human beings capable of such planetary levels of thinking. I remember Julian using a phrase “the primacy of the physical” – I think that’s what I’m looking to flesh out here. I’m sure others will do a more lucid job.
Ken Wilber has talked about how virtually the whole of the Tibetan culture has been an ongoing experiment in self-reflection. And the results of this show that individual after individual can attain knowledge of higher experiential truths and that these are replicable. (Whether one can then extrapolate propositional knowledge of “Reality” from such repeatable subjective experiences is a moot point I feel, perhaps it just signifies that these higher states exist, and noting else, but that’s another discussion!)
Similarly I believe that every minute of everyday human beings are carrying out billions of experiments which I see as confirming the primacy of the physical, and confirms the reliability of our models of reality and their close or “close-enough” correspondence to the “out there” qualities of “the natural world”. Everyday, billions of people step out on pavements, roads, paths and you know what, they don’t fall through the ground. Billions of people drop things and guess what, they don’t fall up. Billions of experiments confirming that, despite the uncertainty principle, despite postmodernism, on the human scale our interaction with the physical world is pretty reliable, and our understanding of it, even in a conventional scientific sense, is close enough to allow us to thrive.
POST-WHATEVER THEORISTS - DIRTY ROTTEN SPANDRELS?
Sometimes I am impatient on seeing all the energy poured into seemingly pointless thought exercises by extremely intelligent thinkers, specifically into those extreme Idealist perspectives about supposedly mind-constructed reality. I wonder if it’s a case of people having too much time on their hands and ending up with a bunch of spandrels!?
Spandrels -what are they I hear you ask?
Let’s go over to Andrea–Diem Lane courtesy of Integral World:
"At this point I chimed in with Stephen Jay Gould's notion of spandrels, the unintended consequences or secondary effects of a more primary adaptation. If consciousness is an evolutionary adaptation which allows for any sophisticated strand of DNA to develop a virtual navigating device within itself, thereby increasing its odds by allowing for a prior contemplation of varying strategies before making a decisive and decidedly empirical decision, then it is quite reasonable to expect that there should be much in a virtual simulator which is merely imaginary and has no real world correlate. This would easily explain why many of our projections are delusional. If consciousness is a probability adjustor (played out in our minds replete with an emotional feedback loop), then sometimes we will opt for strategies that are indeed wrong, misguided, and illusionary.” DARWIN WAS FROM SHROPSHIRE YOU KNOW…..
When Kant said
“the object is external to me, and the knowledge is in me, I can only judge whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object.” he is hitting on something pretty fundamental, to say the least!. But I also I think he was underestimating the ability of his senses to “know” at least something pretty reliable about his external environment. I want to say to him in response to his famous quote: “Yes that’s right, but your knowledge of the object is pretty bloody close to how it is in “reality”."
We’ve had millions of years of evolution helping us hone our interaction with our environment. I like to look at the ways in which evolution shows us both the part and the whole, what is separable and what is inseparable about our existence.
From Andrea Diem-Lane again:
“If consciousness is simulating its environment so as to better its odds when it does indeed make a real life choice, then much of its success is due to how well it actually matches up with and predicts the incoming stimuli. Consciousness could never have survived the brutal machinations of natural selection unless it was somewhat accurate in how it modelled its exterior environment. If it came up with simulations that were continually mistaken, it would have been eaten up by a predator long ago. No, consciousness must be on whole a fairly accurate modeller of the outside world in order to confer the benefit necessary to evolve as a significant adaptation. That there will be glitches and mistakes and illusory detours is to be expected, but overall those have to be kept at a minimum since otherwise the very advantage that consciousness confers as a virtual simulator would be automatically lost. If consciousness was merely projections of our temporal lobes, it wouldn't have any real world benefit, but would act as a punishing (and ultimately eliminating) detriment.”
SEPARATION AND NON-SEPARATION:
Extreme versions of the Myth of the Given say subject and object are totally separate and when human beings look at those object we see them for what they are. Myth of the Framework says subject and object are not separate, and in fact it’s all one big subjective indistinguishable mush. Enactivism claims to be looking at “a middle way”.
If so I think it needs to be clearer on what ways we are connected AND in what ways we are separate. I get the feeling that since things have moved on from the simplistic orange scientific world view somewhat harshly described by Cook-Greater earlier, that no one wants to go back and look particularly closely at questions regarding the ways in which we are separate, and to do so within the context of an awareness of how we are also all interconnected.
To link this in rather clumsily with Integral Theory, it reminds me of a comment Julian made about transcend and include when he said the process equally involves transcend and exclude – exclude the unhealthy, exclude the “less adequate to reality”. This excluding involves a separation of what is or is not …., um, I choose the word, helpful. But it seems to me the effectiveness of our tools for separating the helpful from the unhelpful are what is in need of closer scrutiny.
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER:
What might a clearer understanding of our commonalities look like or sound like? For me it lies in something that Varela touches on so beautifully and powerfully in this interview in 2000 with Claus Otto Scharmer, about holding others perspectives, allowing an empty space and allowing compassion to come through:
“COS: What's the role of love in developing the capacity of the virtual self?
Francisco Varela: Well, if you mean by love open compassion, the way in which one can be of service in a social context, it has everything to do with it. Now let me take this perspective, which is either the Western perspective of phenomenology or a Buddhist perspective. Both of them coincide there. which to me is one of the really deep, interesting observations that we can have. The more the fragile self-subject deploys itself, the more compassion deploys itself because that's what it is. The more there is the opening into space to accommodate or to take care of the other, there is kind of an intrinsic decenteredness, and therefore the other appears closer. Solidarity, compassion, care, love – all of the different modes of being together – appear when the self owned is decentered. Now that, to me, is a great gift of the universe. Since we are not solid and private and centered, the more we get close to all our reality, the more we are who we are. That is, both you and I. Not just me, but the "us-ness" in us. Which is another way of saying that my mind is not my mind. It is a mind that requires that interbeing. There is naturally that kind of concern and care and solidarity. But it is not just how nice I am, or how good a guy I am. It has nothing to do with this. It has to do with how real things are, in reality, that non-distinction between the intersubjective network of things. When it's considered for what it is, when it is absorbed, or lived, or embodied for what it is, it works precisely in that mode of care and concern. So you see the Buddhists have a wonderful message, saying that compassion is the natural condition of what one really is.”Of course we don’t have to choose to do this. We don’t have to feel obliged towards what Varela calls being “of service in a social context”. But I think most of us here feel an “evolutionary impulse” of sorts to offer out what we know, and to make efforts in our own daily lives to open to the very compassion that Varela talks about. Here's to more of that for all of us.
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ADDENDUM: LANGUAGE AND CONTEXT EXPECTATIONS or ”THE ENACTERS” VERSUS “ THE REAL WORLDERS”
I’d like to look at some aspects of the recent online communication on this subject leading up to this symposium. Adam just made a comment on Bruce’s essay about a growing consensus here, us surfing a wave, and helping each other avoid the rocks in the future. In that spirit I’m now looking at some “rocks” that we’ve been hitting.
This next section is also written with apologies to those non-regular visitors at Julian’s, Bruce’s, Matt’s blog, because this next bit is just a little bit “cliquey”, sorry - hopefully one outcome will be to open up the discussions even further.
[deep breath] In recent discussions, I sense that Bruce, Matt (and maybe others? Let’s call them The Enacters for now) seem just a little too ready to classify Julian (and me and others? Let’s call ourselves The Real Worlders) as something akin to dyed-in-the-wool materialists who are trying to “deny” the value of the mythic and other levels. We are too easily compared to the orange rationalists of the enlightenment, as opposed to people who are tending towards integral but with a robust approach to applying the healthy rational where appropriate, (at least that’s how I like to see myself!). I’ve seen this in other online discussions on similar subject matter too.
Unlike Matt and Bruce, who go gently on us, Cook-Greuter does not pull her punches: “
By most modern Western expectations, fully functional adults see and treat reality as something preexistent and external to themselves made up of permanent, well-defined objects that can be analyzed, investigated, and controlled for our benefit. This view is based on a maximal separation between subject and object, thinker and thought. It epitomizes the traditional scientific frame of mind that is concerned with control, measurement, and prediction. It also represents the goal of much of Western socialization. Most adults have little or no insight into the basic arbitrariness of defining the objects and are completely unaware that according to Koplowitz “the process of naming or measuring pulls that which is named out of reality, which itself is not nameable or measurable.”3 They operate under the assumption that subject and object are distinct, and that by analyzing the parts one can figure out the whole. From the conventional Western perspective, the acquisition of this scientific, rational mindframe (or formal operations in Piaget's model) is seen as the goal of socialization and defines what it means to be a fully grown adult.” Despite the truths in here, to me it’s something of a caricature, and if applied too rigidly, it’s an unhelpful one. Such a stereotype can contribute to the unfortunate situation where someone focussing on the rational in a discussion is almost pigeonholed as being an example of Cook-Greuter’s description.
Actually there is a wider point I’m trying to make, and
Hokai made this point better than I can when he said:
“At the same time, rational as an available structure and potential should be distinguished from rationalism in any of its calcified expressions and formulations, conditioned during the initial breaking-away from the mythic order by means of desacralization”.One of the causes of past misunderstandings I have observed on Julian’s and other blogs, is simply the desire and expectation of the Enacters among us to hear strong rational arguments
always put in the context of the whole spectrum. (Examples of this kind of dialogue are Hokai http://hokai.info/2008/07/transformative-power-of-development.html just asking for qualification re Santa Claus, or (and I paraphrase Bruce here) Balder saying to Julian “just put it in context and you’ll get less beef from us”).
However, as we all know, it’s a big demand to make that on each entry all writers need to always refer to almost the entire breadth of their knowledge and range of perspectives lest they be too readily labelled as lacking in the perspective they have perhaps knowingly chosen not to include. This is especially true when, if we are regular contributors or readers, we know from other entries that the writer does indeed have a deeper understanding.
On the other hand, for some less familiar readers, that particular entry is all they have to go on. I have seen similar critiques on the i-i pod about a David Deida audio clip. I was initially baffled as to several comments all pointing out Deida’s lack of understanding of vertical development (in Wilberian terms). I later realised the reason for my confusion was that because I am such a regular reader / listener to his material, and have therefore heard him make so many references to this vertical aspect, that I always take it as a given that he has an in depth understanding of the vertical. So I thought those critics were being pedantic or even deliberately choosing to miss the point! However, I soon realised the validity of their criticism because within the short time allowed on the audio clip in question, he did indeed give no mention of the vertical and so gave the impression that his depth of understanding stopped at simply an intense level of horizontal experience/awareness.
So my request is to readers / commentators not to assume a lack of understanding on the basis of, say, one blog. And for writers, if we are going to put out a piece of writing into the public domain, we make the effort to present it in as wide a context as possible, with as many qualifications as possible… then after that you can make your point and no one will get hung up on what you
aren’t referring to!! I see most of us trying to do this, but methinks a little bit more of the same from all sides would help us surf more waves together.
And so to beddybyes.
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symposium
August 2008 
james
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