This is my contribution to Z4 - click here to see the other wonderful contributions to this fascinating discussion!
Of Music, Memory and ImaginationPress play please.
Its a little balmy in L.A. - and my office is in an area of the apartment that gets no ventilation and little light, so it's warm, dim and moist as I sit down to write. The strains of Phillip Glass' soundtrack to The Hours trickle and swell through from my bedroom, where the light is brighter, the breeze cooler and the music louder. Glass' geometric motifs and the images I have associated with them from repeated viewings of the movie swirl through my mind, as if evoking ghostly presences in the hallway behind me and the empty living room and bedroom.
It’s this way, only different, with Peter Gabriel's Passion, Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, by Scorcese (not Mad Mel’s S&M autoerotic slasher-piece, The Passion of the Christ - that is a martyr of a different slice.)
I have gotten so involved in the evocative power of that music over the last 15 or so years. Having used it for yoga, bodywork, breathwork, love-making, dance, writing, and just plain I-wanna-be-in-a-soulful-space-at-home-soundtrack, it has been fascinating to return again and again to the movie and be reminded of the peculiar Middle Eastern Zero C.E. period-piece quality that prevails through the bulk of it. Even as Harvey Keitel portrays his Brooklyn-infused Judas:
Wassamadda wid yew!? Huh? First you say you wanna bring a sword, now you say you want peace… I should kill you myself!
(Grabs the side of Willem Defoe's Jesus-throat-and-face, glaring intently into his eyes.)
But the Glass soundtrack is more explicitly evocative in some ways - the music so closely related to the interwoven narratives and perspectives of The Hours. Passion is more indirectly evocative, or perhaps more adaptive to whatever space with which it interacts. The Hours’ music carries a specific meaning, a mournful story of the bittersweet transient nature of life and love, of the ineffability of art and the constrictions of social convention - and loneliness, tragic loneliness.
Passion perhaps is more postmodern, in that the story of the Last Temptation of Christ intentionally turns the myth on it's humanistic head and the music (which Gabriel spent 5 years crafting after the film was completely in the can) is the first truly cross-cultural, timeless, electronic meets indigenous, East meets West soundtrack ever created. For Christ's sake, (literally!) it introduced Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn to the West - who Jeff Buckley (before he martyred himself) would later say was "his Elvis.."
Z4: Caught Between Scylla and CharybdisI have enjoyed reading all four pieces on display so far. I cannot know them in and of themselves (if there even is such a thing with the written word)- I know them only through the mediation of my own mind, my own interpretations and associations, my own biases and intuitions, my own misunderstandings and desires...Yet we can converse, we can discuss, we can debate, and to some extent this is a tremendously satisfying and revelatory process!
BY the same token, I cannot know any of the presenters or comment-makers in-and-of-themselves. You are each icons to me, avatars – projections of self into cyberspace. Known only through typed words on a screen. Words that do indeed represent something; thoughts, confusions, feelings , reactions, ideologies, defenses...
I am all for embodied experience. So important. This is where we live. This is what we are. For me, the body is the beginning and the end. We live, we love, and we die, and yes - we enact perspectives. Ironic to be exploring the topic of embodied cognition via an internet symposium!
I am all for Ken Wilber's grand taxonomical project. For me it has been a lens, a framework, a way of making sense of the world and understanding why I think what I think, how my intuitive sense of the accuracy or wrong-headedness about certain ideas and beliefs maps out pretty consistently along the lines of certain key principles and distinctions. Yet I find I disagree with some of his, and certainly many of other’s, application of the system. Fascinating!
I am not that familiar with Varela, but reading some interviews online and getting most of the way through The Embodied Mind has been really fun, stimulating and satisfying.
I will assume that those who’ve
traveled thus far with us have looked at both Bruce and Matt’s symposium offerings and therefore are pretty familiar with at least a basic sense of Enactivism.
What I found the most interesting about The Embodied Mind, the primary source for my limited knowledge of Enactivism is the proposal of incorporating a first person experiential methodology like Buddhist mindfulness practice into cognitive science as a way to fill in the blind spot of what in Integral terms would be called an excessive Upper Right quadrant focus. What an important observation. Of course Wilber counters somewhat by saying that autopoesis is really still the inside of the outside, because it is “mired in the sensorimotor…” hmmm.
I was very taken with the elegant and precise writing style and the fascination with the interdependent, co-enacted relationships between subject and object, organism and environment, as well as the stunning overview of schools of thought in cognitive research, artificial intelligence, evolutionary theory etc.
Clearly these are passionate and engaged thinkers - scientists, philosophers, researchers, and above all, intellectuals. I found myself relatively unconvinced by their arguments though, and had the odd experience of finding the “naïve representationlist” counter-arguments they were presenting as a foil to actually be more plausible than some of the more extreme positions they appeared to be taking.
scyllla and charybdis
Cue The Police’s Wrapped Around Your Finger. Listen for the line in the first verse about
Scylla and Charybdis: So here we are, caught between the rock of objectivism and the whirlpool of subjectivism. Enactivism is an attempt to find the middle way between these extremes. (Or so we are led to believe..)
In Integral terms Enactivism is attempting to relate (when speaking of cognition) the Upper Left and Upper Right hand quadrants and (when speaking of evolution) perhaps the Upper Right and Lower Right, while taking the Upper Left seriously. To some extent the contructivist implications of the ideas presented also evoke the specter of the Lower Left Quadrant. So we have an obviously thoughtful, complex and integrative exploration on our hands. Cool!
I felt I could go a certain distance with their ideas, and really enjoy them, but that what was being called for was a kind of radical revolution in thinking – and one I didn’t find that well-evidenced or that compelling. It's as if there were some fascinating new ideas and observations about how cognition functioned, about how evolution may occur, about the necessity of acknowledging subjectivity and the mutual interactions of organism and environment and then suddenly I was expected to go along with this information as implying/supporting a grand theory that appeared in many ways to over-reach itself.
Minds are embodied. Subject and object exert influence on each-other. Organism and environment co-evolve. The sensori-motor apparatus that an organism is working with will determine the worldspace it is capable of experiencing – and so to an extent we have enactment, and the fascinating conundrum as to whether or not there is any world separate from our capacity to perceive it…
What a beautiful and elegant observation – the organism brings forth a world via its sensorimotor functioning. Therefore: there is
no pre-given world that the organism evolves to better adapt to, nor is there any pre-given world that cognition – as an expression of evolution, seeks to better represent?
None whatsoever, really?
Huh?!
At times I found myself wondering – what are they
actually saying, would it be a gross misinterpretation to see this as another form of solipsistic idealism or radical constructivism, or - of course these observations are important, but where do they draw the line?
I want to present of few of the examples that were given in a moment, but first let me return to the voice in which I began.
Wilber and My Form of 21st Century SpiritualityIt’s evening now. My office is much cooler, I have returned to the Phillip Glass soundtrack, mostly because I found my Radiohead compilation too distracting. I have the piano and strings coming straight at me from my iTunes application, don’t want to disturb my neighbors by blasting it from the bedroom. It’s different, more in my face. If I had more hair I would picture it whooshing back a little. But would it really?
I am thinking about why I love yoga and (to a lesser extent, it must be admitted) meditation. Thinking about the holistic process of bodywork, physical and somato-emotional healing, and organ cleansing. How these all go together. Thinking about my respect for good psychotherapeutic method and for beautiful art that is emotionally evocative and intellectually insightful.
I am thinking about the old Greek chestnuts of truth, beauty and goodness – about the different value-spheres and their validity-claims. Wilber puts truth in both the right hand quadrants – what is empirically provable, hard science gives us “Truth.” He puts beauty in the upper left hand quadrant. “Beauty,” he says, is in the “I” of the beholder. He associates beauty with art, with contemplation, with subjectivity, with interior meaning. “Goodness,” he says, belongs to the lower left, the inter-subjective realm. When we ask “what is good?” we are speaking of morals, ethics, what is good for an “us.”
In my daily work I invite people into a “we-space.” Together we evoke a sacred space – a domain enacted for a community of inner work. I ask participants to imagine two circles: one around themselves, and one around the entire group - to simultaneously hold the sense of our shared humanity and our personal subjectivity. I suggest that that the “group-energy” supports each of us in being as we each are personally - that the large circle contains a living mandala of the human experience and that we take turns holding different qualities: grief, joy, numbness, ecstatic opening, stuck-ness, cynicism, compassion, judgment, jadedness, novelty, hope etc.. I suggest that there is nothing we can experience individually that is alien to that living mandala, and that we each live our uniquely individual life story against the backdrop of that universal human experience.
Within that context, I am encouraging participants to take a journey under the surface, into their own mind-body process, into a kind of moment-by-moment present attention to sensation, emotion, color, image, metaphor, intuition, words – whatever may emerge. We use yoga postures and breath and music and sometimes dance or singing or drumming to enter this deeply embodied state of shared yet personal inquiry. What emerges is a kind of truth, or perhaps truthfulness.
Along the way there are landmarks: moments of insight regarding habitual thought patterns or identifications/projections, moments of recognizing a particular emotion or psychological conflict as being related to a physical tension – and observing the release of that tension as related to the conscious feeling of that emotion or conflict, the transcendence of limited individula identifications as archetypal forces and qualities emerge, the deep surrender into both primal, instinctive bodily experience as well as exquisitely subtle, refined, deeply compassionate and nuanced mind-body states.
Muscle and bone, blood and guts, nervous system energy, brain chemistry, hormones, endorphins, neurotransmitters, oxygen and carbon dioxide, interior meaning, an inter-subjective space in which we enact a supportive embrace of that which is ordinarily carried in the collective shadow, heightened states of consciousness, embodied presence, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, courage cultivated in the face of difficulty, creative responsiveness..
Mind-Body Reductionism and Magical ThinkingI am a big proponent of embodied awareness, and of inquiring into the mental/psychological meaning inherent in bodily experience. But I am careful here. I think there are two big mistakes too easily made; one is to jump to the conclusion that every bodily tension or symptom is psychological in nature (which is just the flipside of thinking that there is zero psychological influence on the mechanistic activity of the body), the other is to buy into an oversimplified set of concrete correspondences: oh! You have conjunctivitis - Aha! What are you afraid to see?! Sore throat - must be something you are not saying. Cancer of the bladder – well, aren’t you pissed off? Knees hurt – clearly you’re afraid to move forward in life. This doesn't work for me.
I am cautious to remind people that meaning emerges out of process and that, while there may be interesting information to learn or fairly accurate generalizations to apply, there is no substitute for inquiry. But then of course we get into the other easy mistake to make; that of questioning absolutely everything in the name of inquiry. How do you know that its not an evil spirit that made me have the car accident – aren’t we supposed to be in inquiry? Well, maybe 8/8/08 really was the day that the celestial beings from another dimension finally began communicating with us – and it’s just the judging mind that stops you from hearing!
Or my recent favorite: Who are we to say that writing my name on a piece of paper and placing it into the shoe of a departed “saint” might no be the cure for chronic illness? (In this specific case my literal answer should have been – who are we? Well, you are a Phd. psychoanalyst who should know better and I am someone who can use my own experience, thought process and Occam’s razor to make an assessment as to the probability of such a thing being true.)
This is where critical thinking comes in, along with a good dose of the kind of distinction making that wonderful Integral tools like the four quadrants, pre/trans fallacy, three modes of knowing make possible. The point is that spirituality should not be a) dissociated from reason and science, or b) reduced to surface interpretations that leave out depth-oriented inquiry-based process or c) equated with prerational concretizations and externalizations of interior expereince.
Let’s return to Varela.
Of Kitties, Color, Bumblebees, The Lack of Both Ground and Self, and Cartesian AnxietyThe first point I want to make is that I was extraordinarily sympathetic to a lot of the ideas in The Embodied Mind. I found it an extremely worthwhile, humbling and engaging book and learned a lot from it. I think it is important to note that the first few chapters of the book are about models of cognition, some of which are based on computer processing – and as such the observations about the breakdown of representational models of cognition were fascinating. By the same token, the ways in which the authors revealed blind spots and weaknesses in both classical evolutionary theory and objectivist science was breathtaking and made me want to keep digging into those fields.
At key points in their narrative, the authors offer up contrary explanations as a foil to their hypothesis. One such example is on page 180 in the section titled “Retreat into Natural Selection,” but this strategy is employed at least once if not twice more. The arguments presented as foils actually sounded like more of a “middle way” than what was being alluded to in the ideology being constructed. I also didn’t find the counter-arguments and examples able to cash the check being written as to a complete annihilation of the Myth of the Given or naïve representationalism.
Kittens in Rickshaws
Page 174
A group of kittens was raised in the dark and exposed to light only under controlled circumstances. Half the group was allowed to move about freely. The other half were drawn passively in little carts attached to the mobile kitties. They call this experiment “beautiful” because of what it proves about cognition as embodied action. When finally released into the world – surprise, surprise, the kittens who had been developing their sensory and motor skills concurrently were able to move through the environment more effectively, whilst the passive kitties were complete spazzes who fell off and bumped into just about whatever they came across.
Perhaps this is what Wilber is referring to in his critique cited above. Where is the groundbreaking revelation here about consciousness, evolution or coenactment?
The study does indeed prove that the ability to effectively use the feedback loop of sensory and motor apparatus in a given environment depends on embodied action. But cognition? Thinking?
I have two words for you: Stephen Hawking.
stephen hawking
Uber-cognition sans motor function - about as close as we can get to a disembodied brain (i said brain not mind!) Seems to function cognitively and map outrageous aspects of reality pretty darn well...
The Mystery of Color
Page 157
Likewise for the wonderful and fascinating color examples given at great length. What an absorbing technical exploration of the nature of color and vision, cognitive labeling and social conditioning. Color is not merely “out there,” not merely a function of accurately perceiving differences in frequency or surface reflectance, but is an experience made up of complex relationships between visual apparatus, brain processing, what is seen and how we are taught to label it. Beautiful.
The tricky part is that this does not necessarily translate into things like say, the sharpness of a knife, the viability of a mate, the steepness of a cliff or the dangerousness of a T. Rex, right? Color is has none of the embodied consequences that accurately perceiving, interpreting and responding to other features of what is indeed pre-given about the world and our relationship to it might demonstrably have.
Ultraviolet Reflectance Patterns (I just like the sound of that..)
Page 201
Similarly we move on to the cool example about bees and flowers and ultraviolet reflectance patterns. Bees and flowers appear to have co-evolved(bees in their visual spectra and flowers in their ultraviolet reflectance patterns) so as to be more successful and harmonious at achieving their evolutionary imperatives to survive and procreate. Awesome. Mind-blowing. Ummm, but both are organisms. They are in a symbiotic co-enacting relationship within an environment that perhaps provides for certain pre-given characteristics like temperature, rain-fall, a type of soil and other factors without which their organismic co-evolution would not be possible. Are we suggesting here that the flowers are merely the environment and not themselves organisms? If not, where is the revelation here – the radical departure from classical evolutionary theory?
It is awe-inspiring to consider the various worldspaces that reveal themselves given the differing sensory and motor apparatus of different organisms. Uniquely, human beings can conceive of such things. We can create microscopes and sonar and we can map the different types of vision possible via different types of eye structures.
We do this not through some easy-to-strawman "denial of the subject's influence" but through the sophisticated cognitive ability to be able to put our limited subjectivity temporarily aside and (to the best of our ability and prodigious imagination) take other perspectives and attempt neutral interpretations of data - we do this much better than most spiritual people convinced of supernatural phenomena, magical causation or otherwordly realities would like to admit!
We can understand that different creatures perceive things that we are unaware of but are nonetheless there – and we can include these things in a map of a world that is indeed out there – though there is this fascinating phenomenon that what we perceive and interact with is a function of our limited abilities. Does this mean there is
absolutely no pre-given world? I am as yet unconvinced.
Boiling Down the SauceMy sense is that there is a world out there, but that we enact various versions of the world via a complex of variables that have to do with sensory and motor apparatus, social conditioning, worldview, cognitive development and various skill sets that have or haven’t been developed, things like communication, empathy, critical thinking, mindfulness etc…
But I remain pretty confident of three things: a) as we continue applying a broad scientific method across all three domains of knowing, we continue to find out what reality is*, was and what it can continue evolving along with us towards and b) that higher stages of development reveal more depth and more accuracy as to our ability to relate to reality and c) that we can understand wrong-turns, pathology and misinterpretations of data by contrast to this evolving depth and accuracy in relating of subject and object, organism and environment, interior and exterior realities.
This is true in Piaget’s developmental stages of cognition, Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, Gebser’s worldviews and so on. Whether personal or collective, each stage transcends the misperceptions and errors of the previous stage while including the necessary, useful and accurate lessons learned and moving forward into deeper, more nuanced and more accurate perceptions and interpretations. This is demonstrable through scientific method in all four quadrants.
Call this a defense against
Cartesian Anxiety if you like, but I don’t buy it. Sure the ground is shifting, sure what was certain today will be replaced by something more elegant tomorrow, sure the notion of a fixed self is receding into a fantasy as we examine the insights of both contemplative meditation and cognitive science. But this is all congruent with an open-ended scientific method and I am not proposing anything unreasonably fixed and solid – nor am I buying into anything unreasonably undefined.
Meditate all you want (I've tried it - a lot), gravity still apllies - whatever name you call me for saying so! Shift through multiple perspectives faster than you can say integral Methodological Pluralism and HIV (not a curse from the witchdoctor) still causes AIDS, and while organism and environent co-determine one another it appears that there actually was a "chicken" environment in which no presence of the "egg" of organismic consiousness existed at some point - and I ain't buying the round peg in a square hole self-referential hypothesis that rocks and supernovas
must have some form of interiority or rudimentary consciousness. Consciousness is apparently pretty deeply related to complex organic structures and no amount of Tibetan, Maori, Native American or Abrahamic mythic or pantheistic assertions to the contrary will subvert this fact - until it is proven otherwise.
There is a self that we experience. It is a kind of mind-body interior hologram made up of the functioning of multiple systems accruing experience, mental and emotional meaning, associations, preferences and survival strategies – and this self is plagued by anxieties, repressions, reactivity, grasping and aversion. Good then to enter contemplative and psychoanalytic and embodied self-development activities that help optimize and ultimately relax around that useful yet often confused illusion.
There is a world out there (unless we are firm solipsists), we experience it through the lens of our conditioning and the limitations of our organic apparatus. Learning more about the world, taking multiple perspectives, weighing and contrasting and following effective methodologies makes it possible to suggest the most likely interpretation of our knowledge of the world. This is why the more open-edned non-repressive structures of modern and posrmodern society are not only demonstrably better in terms of the life experience of the individual than premodern traditional scoiety, but also more effective at engaging the world out there on it's own terms. Think medicine, natural disasters, roads and telecommunications for a start...
Two Final ExamplesConsider the example of
Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered that hand-washing would limit the incidence of fatal purpureal fever in women undergoing childbirth. Turned out the interns were bringing cadaverous material in on their hands from their performance of autopsies and infecting the mothers to be. Now, these women were dying of something that we did not know about, but there it was, doing what it did at a microscopic bacterial level, (in a sense) waiting to be understood and perceived before we could respond to it adequately.
I am not suggesting that Enactivism would have a problem with this, rather that if we take the dismissal of a pre-given world too far, and if we then ill-advisedly cross-over into things like Wilber’s Altitudinal map of social development and try (as many relativist Integralites do) to suggest that Wilber V means that there is
no pre-given truth whatsoever only what is true in the worldspace of each altitudinal stage – then we are in trouble, because this is interesting up to a point, beyond which it becomes absolute nonsense, and unless we are clear about where that point is (and I think applying good quadrant seperation is helpful here as well as of course applying PTF) we open the door to all manner of silliness that corrupts both the legitimacy and intelligence of the system.
Take for example that other ill-fated kitty -
Shrodinger’s Cat in a box. I bring it up because with Enactivism, it is easy to get into leaps of reasoning (or faith) regarding the influence of the observer. Most people who like to cite this thought-experiment (that’s right it has not and could not actually be performed outside the mind) are unaware that it is the result of Einstein and Schrodinger’s conversations about the bizarre and untenable implications of quantum theory and how they still had much more work to do!
Schrodinger:
“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks..”
Einstein:
“You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation..”
(Note that no charge of gunpowder is mentioned in Schrödinger's set-up, which uses a Geiger counter as an amplifier and hydrocyanic poison instead of gunpowder; the gunpowder was only mentioned in Einstein's original suggestion to Schrödinger 15 years before.)
ConclusionPlease press play.
So, after that circuitous fugue, I emerge into Weird Fishes. So sublime. The bassline toward the end of the song playing it’s repeated rhythmic and melodic motifs, the swirl of Thom Yorke's sampled vocal layers, the driving yet silky drum figures. I have the vaguely yellow light on in my office, even though it is daytime, because I needed to read the un-illuminated words on pages as well as those held in the complex mystery of the computer screen. My lunch awaits me, tasty and green and a vegan, raw strawberry mousse tort as a reward for this hard work.
Life is good, and my body works, my mind is stimulated and my heart seeks the fearful tenderness of intimacy and love, creativity surrounds and infuses my life and I remain drawn to the possibilities of truth, beauty and goodness – not as rigidly fixed, unmoving attributes of a pre-given world, but as qualities that are universal, that emerge that prove themselves via experience and method and that continue evolving and surprising (within limits) the more we look into them and they look into us.
* (from above)
this does not mean that we do not influence or co-enact our worldspace or perceptions, but that I think the fact that we make progress in our ability to effectively interact with multiple layers and aspects of reality represents a de facto improvement in our being able to know what it is. (Bear in mind: A stronger argument than calling this the merely naive representationalist paradigm from a lower stage of development will be required to overturn this assertion!)
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julian walker
September 2009 
Julian
Access: Public
