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enactivism
July 2009 
Enactivism, Integral Theory and 21st Century Spirituality
Posted on Aug 19th, 2008
by 
Julian
Julian
This is my contribution to Z4 - click here to see the other wonderful contributions to this fascinating discussion!
Of Music, Memory and Imagination
Press play please.
The Hours in 9 minutes
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.."
Peter Gabriel Talks About Passion And Real World
Z4: Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis
I 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:
The Police - Wrapped Around Your Finger
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 Spirituality
It’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 Thinking
I 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 Anxiety
The 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 Sauce
My 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 Examples
Consider 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.)
Conclusion
Please press play.
Radiohead "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" live Dallas - May 18, 2008
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!)
Access: PublicTagged with: julian walker, ken wilber, francisco varela, enactivism, integral theory, quantum phsyics
Nicely done, Julian! Great mix of music, personal snapshots of “you” in the midst of processing this material, and your well-delivered critical analysis of these ideas. It's too bad that you and Adam ended up back to back, because you've both given lots of stuff to work with and it's going to be hard for me to give it all its due.
Back this evening….
big up for the conductor of the gaia symposium orchestra!
plenty of goodness, truth and beauty…
great counterpoint, very evocative, needs more digestion, back soon!
and yes - i was aware of the possible change of dynamics created by the unfortunate order change…i trust the discussion will continue long enough to even it out…
best
adam
(you're also linked in from my page)
thanks senor…. yea i wanted the order to be as orignally set up for precisely that reason.
get a good conversation going between you james and adam - then take a break. then have matt come back strong and deep. i repsond to that and we all perhaps go a level further through our mutual stimulation - then have ben and tiger close us out with where they are landing after all of that…
oh well, here we are, with anembarassment of riches and a confusion of order…
note to ben:
i think your contrasting personality analysis was interesting and fairly accurate - i have said similar things to bruce before about our temperament and career choices…
in terms of my natural voice i only meant that i am an extremely sensual, poetic, goofy, creative person in lived experience…. and i had done only creative writing: songs, poems, a novel, shorter prose pieces etc prior to beginning to blog.
my blog, though, has been almost entirely an excercise in intellectual theorizing - which i love but have no background in…. (except for a voracious reading appetite that has feasted mostly on non-fiction and almost all of wiber's work over the last 15 years - while having no-one with whom to discuss any of it!
i have then ended up as i jokingly said before as “the lone mouthpiece for reason” in a community that is very suspicious of same…. so my reputation is that of the rational swordsman who takes all-comers…. i was saying that this was never my intention, but that i cannot back down on things that appear to be true in the face of assertions that appear to be silly..
hopefully the above article blends my varied interests and tones better than i had previously been able to..
I can't wait to dig more fully into this, but once again I have to go to work. Hopefully, I'll find a computer to get on tomorrow because its frustrating not having my own in working order.
i have then ended up as i jokingly said before as “the lone mouthpiece for reason” in a community that is very suspicious of same….
Which community is that?
Any philosophical, spiritual, or scientific system is only as good as the quality of the humans it produces.
”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 Integralities 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”.
One good thing out of Wilber's bag of tricks is his “pre-given” philosophical module in which I have pointed out numerous times to Integralist, is not at all new.
It is good because it leads to seeing, that the real goal of the mystic is to reach an objective state of mind, not any ethereal otherworldly state of superhuman consciousness. That can be done, but only after the seeker becomes established in objectivity, then the choice is there, since then the consciousness is truly free.
Though Wilber himself only pats himself on the back [gee what a great discovery] rather than instructing his students on where to put this truth in perspective.
Wilber [I wont use the word stolen, because I believe that people should be able to experience and express reality in their own language] really doesn't have any new ideas just rehashed and recycled old ideas that the old timers long ago included and transcended.
One of my jobs amongst you guys is to show you this, if ever you listen.
I know I don't have 22 books yet published, therefore you hardly listen, that's all right, I understand.
But in the end you will lose if you, for whatever reason stick to your AQAL, Integral dogma, without understanding his “truths” have always been here.
haha, present company excluded. i do mean the extended spiritual community - yoga, gaia, integral…but let's move on to the above piece.
hey zak - yea i think we are alll aware - and wilber acknowledges this all the ime - that integral theory is an attempt only to organize the work og many, many other theorists - he doesn't claim to have discovered very much of anything… he is a synthesizer.
Julian,
Wow man. What a thrill, an honor really, to experience your perspective in this walk-the-walk, super-integrated voice. Very inspiring. As I mentioned on James's post, I just can't engage in the philosophy of it all at the moment (that will change, I'm sure, as I tend to move through phases with this stuff). These days, I'm only interested in the direct expression of the thing, which is a hard thing to pin down, of course. But I know this: The thing is on display here, in this post. As always, I will be paying attention whenever you call out with this voice. I'm looking forward to supporting your 21st Century Spirituality inquiry as it continues to unfold. [Deep, deep bow.]
–Bob
haha, present company excluded. i do mean the extended spiritual community - yoga, gaia, integral…but let's move on to the above piece.
The lone voice of reason in yoga, gaia, integral… yikes! :-O That indeed would be a claim in need of lancing with the sword of reason!
Moving right along… :-)
After finishing my letter to Adam, I'm looking forward to diving in to your well written and, yes, reasonable contribution to this symposium…
dude did you not see that i said jokingly?
& you've been here from the start - you have seen the amount of fencing i've had to do with anti-rationalists.
& i think we agree that much religion and spirituality is prerational and therefore sees reason as the enemy or at least lesser…
& thecontext of that comment was as a setup for writing an inspired, poetic, very personal piece as an antidote to the voice of reason identity i was somewhat poking fun at……
OK?!
bob - nice to see you man- thanks!
And Thom sings:
Yeah everybody leaves, if they get the chance
and this is my chance.
I heard those lines, and felt that it was perhaps the best thing he has every sung, and thats pretty difficult task in itself. About transformation.
I connect deeply with your arguments, and those examples that I can follow (your moving a lot of data here!). I was wondering if the concept of evolution (which seems to me anyway the whole gamut we are now peering into), or rather its 'direction', is not indeed simpler. Not in a generalist way, but as an experienced way.
Example: If evolution means what adapts survives, then the mechanism for adaptation is what is embedded into us. If we consider that the world has become transparent in its (and our) narcisistic tendencies, that we are beginning to see all the crap 'humanity' is doing. 'Beginning' in the loose term of generational societal awakening.
I wanted to make this short, sorry, it isn't easy.
I think we indeed have a 'given world'. I think if we consider the fact that we have a mind that needs challenge to adapt to fight challenge, and that the 'first challenge' in our adulthood is to build a strong ego. The ego becomes then 'grounded' and capable of responsibility. That responsibility then must be challenged with allowing our potential to be released, in a sense, unfettered.Our potential will wither completely without a strong ego. Our potential is unmapped, unresearched, but we now (with a strong Ego) have the capacity to live with uncertainty, and not hope for good or bad, but to move ourselves our way into the world. The world is there. We just don't know where our personal future lies within it.
Julian I hope this wasn't off topic. It seemed to resonate perhaps very solidly with what I have been away mulching on - Oh and you are listening to all the same music as me!
Julian,
Very powerful contribution, thank you! I just finished a rather in depth response to Adam's essay, and my mind has enacted about as many words as it can tonight. You're essay presents a number of poignant criticisms to the enactive paradigm, and I want to respond with just as much depth as you presented them with. I should be able to do this tomorrow afternoon!
I think the biggest struggle for me will be to find a way to evoke exactly what Varela et al. mean when they say that there is no pregiven world. It admitedly sounds a bit suspect, and hopefully rewording the way it is presented will make what I find to be a very important, even paradigm breaking insight more apparent.
Great work, and you've also inspired me to download some music : )
be well,
Matt
sanjuro - tasty reflections - thanks!
thanks matt- i know that both you and bruce (as the enactive apologists here) can make wonderful nuanced arguments for what i may be missing here and i certainly look froward to that!
this was very much off the cuff - i started late last night and wrote throughthe mid-morning into the early afternoon. trying to address so many related subjects through the lens of soemthing very new… i hope i did it all some kind of justice. a very diffferent symposium epxerience for me!
all the best
~j
You may say he is a synthesizer fine, but what is AQAL and IPM, if not a synthesized theory, as well as the “myth of the given” and other of Wilber's extrapolations in which has become a dogma of its own. I don't mine dogma, but we should know when we do it, and don't try to distinguish this from other dogmas as if it is special or different.
Also it seems to me that we all are synthesizers, since knowledge is always handed down to us and as the inspiration hits us, we can alter it, change it or make it better [ or worse] as the spirit moves us.
But if we start pretending that we have anything other than the usual thing, then that becomes problematic.
Since my last post on Matt's blog, I've gone from wondering about the difference between enactivism and constructivism to wondering about the difference between enactivism and realism. It seems that enactivism holds that reality is co-enacted, but substantially enacted by our biology, over which we have no control. And since we share biology with all living things, the world that is co-enacted for all of us coincides to greater and lesser degrees, and perhaps this is where Wilber wants to aim his critique.
Zak,
not that you haven't leveled valid criticisms, but what do you suggest we put in the place of the ways of thinking you seem so flatly to be rejecting in their entirety?
zak i wonder if you read the ways in which i am actually critical of wilber's ideas?
Julian
Awesome, clear, forceful….
I'm temporarily suffering from Symposium fatigue as I've never engaged in such intense on-line activity before, plus I'm off for 4 days tomorrow drumming in a field…:-) so my next few contributions will be brief…
Just wanted to say that for me you absolutely nailed it. Stuff I'd been struggling to express is now out there on your blog…..[breathes sigh of relief]
Looking forward to everyone's repsonses.
All The Best
James
Hi, Julian,
Please forgive me for my teasing up above. I think you've done a beautiful job with this contribution – visually, auditorially, conceptually, in every way.
Like James, suffering a bit also from symposium fatigue, I want to respond to you in a more interactive way, rather than posting a big monster response to everything you've written above.
So, starting small…
You wrote: 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?
Obviously, one of your “sticking points” with enactivism was the notion of groundlessness and the specter of solipsism or idealism that seems to loom over it. I do not think Varela et al are arguing for either a solipsistic or idealist perspective, so I want to inquire into this sticking point a bit. What is meant by “pre-given world”? What is being denied?
Can you possibly try to re-enact what you wrote above, putting yourself in that space again, and report back to us, in an embodied way, what is going on in you, what constellation of thoughts, feelings, etc, participate in the surfacing of your powerful Huh?!?
Feeling into this, how would you describe the ontology of this re-enacted space – how is it organized? Is it more object or process based? How are “subject” and “object” held? Is a fundamental, pre-given division between them presupposed?
This is a brief response, as I said. There's more I want to return to, but I'll stop with these questions for now.
Best wishes,
Balder
I don't have much of a response to most of what you said. I understand your general viewpoint and I'm fine with it. I also can't say much about Varela as my reading of him is more limited than yours. I'm probably not as critical of Varela as you, but I'm certainly not embracing enactivism as my personal worldview.
There are two things I wanted to respond to. You mentioned development and interiority.
The human species has changed vastly on the cultural and psychological levels and some of that change seems quite good, but I'm reluctant to consider the vast movement of human change as developmental. Every new change to human society has an upside and a downside, and its never clear which is the greater.
I think the situation is between rationality and non-rationality (pre-rationality and trans-rationality) is confusing because in reality the levels of “development” get mixed. No one ever thinks purely in rational terms. The non-rational can never be fully excluded because its at the bedrock of our psyche. Besides, evolutionarily speaking, rationality isn't always advantageous.
Paul Shepard's view is that we essentially are the same (genetically and biologically) as Paleolithic man. In terms of enactivism, the body-mind remains mostly unchanged. What this means for my personal viewpoint is that the challenge man faces is much more immense than is normally presented because genuine development is a much more complicated endeavor. Bruce has written elsewhere about this in terms of Spiral Dynamics and maybe he'll tell you more about his own perspective.
Interiority is an even more complex subject. I prefer the term awareness over interiority. Anyways, you prefer to consider interiority as an emergent property of complex biological organisms, and I'd agree that is true for at leas reflexive consciousness. You consider your view a fact unless otherwise proven, but I don't consider it such. The only thing that is proven is that you are aware and that everything you know about reality is through awareness. You were aware before you ever came to any limiting beliefs about awareness.
I agree that there is no reason to assume a rock has interiority, but I also see that there is no reason to assume a rock lacks interiority. We simply don't know and we can't even calculate the probabilities one way or another. Of course, this would put it into your category of pointless inquiry. That is fine, but in that case there is no advantage to having an opinion one way or another.
I do resonate with particular parts of your view. Your personal version of body-mind practice is definitely a useful methodology. I wonder in what ways Varela's ideas could be placed in the context of yoga. So far, I haven't fully been able to get past the abstract understanding of enactivism. I'd like to hear more grounded examples of how it applies to everyday life. That seems the tricky part.
what's on the schedule today folks? is erin in the game?
i hear where you are coming from ben.
thanks for your thoughts!
i want to point out that it is not necessary to think that all development is positive progress in a simple way in order to recognize the fact of developmental stages as demonstrated by the multiple researchers in multiple fields cited above and used as the foundation for much of integral theory.
as far as the pre/tras falllacy - well it is not popular, but that is easy to predict given what it asks us to look at…. i still think it is wilber's most brilliant and will be his most enduring contribution to the field of transpersonal psychology and spiritual philosophy.
have you looked at the online version of the embodied mind that you can read for free? it skips a few pages here and there, but is remarkably complete! might be a good reference point from which to find out how critical you are or aren't of at least this piece of his work..
as far as the rock's interiority. for me this goes to the simple concept of the burden of proof.
if one is going to claim that a rock has interiority, one has to have some proof.
this is an extraordinary claim - much like the claim that consciousness is possible without a body (an odd thing for someone who's entire thesis lies on the interwoven nature of cognition and embodiment, but there you go..) nevertheless, without proof there is no reason to believe the assertion.
as far as we understand so far - consciousness is a function of increasingly complex organic structures. this is very, very easy to demonstrate - though of course it is not a final truth, as there is no such thing in science.
so the suggestion that a form of consciousness may be there in inanimate objects that have no discernable signs of interior awareness, do not have a life-cycle, eat, shit, reproduce etc is a radical claim. likewise to suggest that consciousness can continue on after the brain and body that support it are no longer functioning - is a radical claim. (in the case of varela and even wilber i think perhaps part of the problem is a romantic tendency to confuse the mythic component of buddhism with the philosophical and meditative component.)
the burden of proof is on those making the extraordinary assertions and the healthy scientific attitude is not to believe such things until they have been proven. the same goes really for anything supernatural.
one needs no other reason not to believe them - though one may still entertain them as hypotheses to a certain extent and be open to evidence (which by the way would win the noble prize and rock {pun intended} the world of everyone everywhere, were it to emerge…)
not sure i understand your question bruce.
however, let me be clear that i think there is a huge distinction between the groundlessness that is experienced in meditation and even the conceptual sense of co-arising and assertions about evolution and the relationship between subject and object that seem to imply either a) solipsism or b) extreme relativism.
it is possible to be open to experience of groundlessness and the dissolution of the “self” while simultaneously being grounded in an awareness of (to some extent) what is and isnt relative (or context dependent) and of what is NOT the case viz the different value spheres etc…saying everything is context-dependent is to me just the oppsite of saying that everything is objective and empirical, or everything is a product of the subjective mind's ability to manifest reality - it's a kind of quadrant absolutism.
i have a hunch you might be implying that my Huh?! comes out of a kind of cartesian anxiety and an unwillingness to open to radical groundlessness - i don't think this is the case. its more about the arguments being rpesented and what felt like a leap in terms of a grand ideology trying to assert itself.
my Huh?! was an expression of confusion as to how the authors made the leap from some pretty interesting observations and some not particularly convincing examples to the suggestion that we radically revise (perhaps even discard) the notion of any pre-given world.
if that is the case, then this is an over-reaching.
i am all for looking at the ways in which the world actually is not pre-given. the ways in which we subjectively interpret it, the ways in which we socially construct it, the ways in which there truly are multiple perspectives - but at the same time there are lines around all of these observations - and the multiple perspectives, subjective interpretation and social construction are all in reference to something that to some extent actually is out there (even though aspects of it keep co-evolving) and provable in certain to ways to be certain ways (across the three modes of knowing etc), regardless of opinion or belief…
for me all of these complex aspects of truth can co-exist just fine - and the profound and transformative experience of groundlessness and dissolution of self can occur in meditation on its own terms… its a quadrant differentiation thing for me.
it goes back to the recognition that satori (UL) is not proof of say life after death or reincarnation or the interiority of rocks (UR & LR), any more than e=mc2 (LR) is proof of our spiritual capacity (UL) to manifest material wealth, anymore than the complex interactions of organism and environment (LR, UR) and the subjective worldspaces (LL, UL) that are evoked by different sensorimotor apparatus' are proof that (LR) no pregiven world exists or is definable..
hi everyone - as far as i know erin has backed out due to computer difficulties and having to use one at a copy shop for an inhibitive price….
yea i agree on the fatigue.
maybe today is a chill out day - a catch up on commenting on the various blogs as you will day….. and we get up to full speed again tomorrow for our final presentation?!
i think matt, adam, julian one after another is enough to fry the circuits of anyone! not to mention bruce and james intense pieces in the preceeding days…
that's good to hear james - thanks!
Julian, I actually wasn't trying to imply that you were afraid of groundlessness or caught in the Cartesian anxiety; there wasn't that sort of judgment involved. I was asking you to explore the presuppositions about the world and its nature and organization that might form part of the “environment” out of which your reaction arose. Not to judge your reaction - I think it's perfectly legitimate to strongly question what appear to be unfounded leaps in logic, etc - but to try to get at the particular “features” of the cognitive space in which that reaction arose, the core beliefs that inform it. In other words, I was asking you to drop down a level from abstract “reason” to a more embodied one in which a particular line of reasoning is moving.
We can approach this in a different way, though. You mentioned that we need to be able to differentiate between what is context dependent and what is not. Can you name some things that are not relative and that exist independently of (AQAL) contexts?
Best wishes,
Balder
P.S. I agree about today being a good catch-up day on comments before Ben posts his piece, the final symposium piece, tomorrow.
ug sounds like more work than i can do rigth now after spending most of yesterday writing the above piece…
in the meantime - here's an interview with steven pinker on his book the blank slate - i found this work fascinating challenging to my worldview, rigorous, novel and brilliant. thinking up a way to try and blog about him..
Are you saying it's too much work to name something that is not relative or dependent on contexts? Or were you referring to my request in the first post?
little exhausted…happy to get into it later. though i think we may go in familiar circles…
i must say i feel like we have done this before. you know my position. many, many right hand observations are true independent of worldview, social conditioning, co-enactment, perspective etc…
how about “all that lives, dies” - for a start?
mathematics. chemistry. (not in their specific symbolism but in what they refer to)
the left hand quadrants are more subjective (by definition) and while all quadrants influence one-another, the right hand quadrants make stronger verifiable claims toward objective truths..)
i did post something at adam's a little earlier in the same general area if you wanna check that out!
also i linked the pinker article because i find wher he is coming from very interersting and strong.
i cannot in good faith pretend that the ongoing juggernaut (for better or worse) of progress in the hard sciences has not only radically reshaped what can be claimed in the intersubjective and subjective sciences but redefined their territories. i think it is a gross overstatement to claim the same in the opposite direction.
this is not to say i don't wish it were different, or that this has not been a big adjustment for me - bu there it is..
Forgive me for this long post, it is something I don't usually do, or like to do.
Adam:
not that you haven't leveled valid criticisms, but what do you suggest we put in the place of the ways of thinking you seem so flatly to be rejecting in their entirety?
Regarding this comment from Adam:
I am not a proponent of any particular philosophy, or faith, other than supporting the qualities of honesty with the hope of gaining some true insight through this interactive endeavor.
I don't totally reject anything here
Also, I don't totally reject Wilberism or Integral Theory at all [see my essays about Wilber on Integral World] In Wilber's case, I have some differences with him on metaphysics..
On another level, sometimes all I try to do is to get us to see ourselves, in relationship to Integral dogmatic philosophy, or any philosophy.
I criticize [SOME] comments here for doing exactly what they condemn others for doing, but yet don't seem to see that.
We ALL ONLY have a “faith' in something, that's it.
No more no less.
Though we have the right to critique each others beliefs and systems, but then should we go about pretending that ours is “the proof of the pudding”. Unless when we are challenged, we indeed go part the red sea, thereby making others unequivocally accept our doctrine.
But we, like anyone, only have theories and a faith in our particular system, that's fine and dandy, but we shouldn't pretend that we have anything else, as if our system is existential truth.
Julian
I do admit I don't know all of your ideas about Wilberism, sometimes my speed reading, is too speedy.
But at times
You seem to use Wilber's language [post-modern assumptions] as if it is existential truth, but of course you may have differences with his extrapolations to a certain degree, but you may be surreptitiously supporting him as doggedly as you critique others for believing in sky-God fantasies [that by the way I AGREE WITH YOU 100 PERCENT, in this respect]..
You like Wilber need to precisely identify your conception of what in religion you deem “myth of the given, bs, and to separate it from the genuine wisdom traditions.
It's easy to take out something ridiculous as your space lady, but what in “traditional” religion does Wilber and you identify as the above. I myself precisely identify it, not avoiding the P C western “traditional” religion that Wilber seems afraid to tackle.
The challenge to representationism and objectivism has been explored in some depth in modern Western philosophy; it isn't only something flowing from Buddhist-inspired biologists, as I'm sure you know. Heidegger, Whitehead, Hilary Putnam, Howard Pattee, Richard Rorty, Brian Cantwell Smith, George Lakoff, Nicholas Humphrey, and a number of other significant voices have each challenged these presuppositions in various ways.
I think some of the central questions of your blog post – does it make sense to say there is no pre-given reality? to what extent should this claim be bracketed or limited? – are obviously quite central to this whole symposium. So, I'm focusing on these questions instead on some of the other issues you also raised. At least for the moment.
In The Embodied Mind, in the discussion of the phenomenon of color perception, which you highlight in your blog, there's a point that might be helpful here. The objectivist approach takes “reflective surfaces” to be pre-given objects in the world (at least, objectivist research projects have proceeded in this fashion, for instance in trying to model color perception). But is “surface” a pre-given object? What constitutes the surface-of-an-object depends also on what constitutes the surface-for-an-observer. They go together. That “surface” isn't something the object inherently possesses; “surface” is expressive of particular relationships, in which a perceiver or observer of some sort is presupposed. What constitutes the surface of an object (not just the features of pre-given surface) will vary depending on the nature of the observer (its size, its distance from the object, its sensory capacities, etc). It won't be the same for all.
The important point here is that what we take to be an “object” (to be a “given thing in the world”) is better understood as a particular relationship, such that the features of the object cannot be said to inhere in the thing itself, independent of relationship to anything else.
As I see it, the enativist view – or the variations on it we've been exploring, such as the Integral – is a view that is relational, dynamic, participatory, embodied, and (in an important way) open or groundless.
In a process view, “objects” are understood, not as concrete facts, but as abstractions of experience. In some approaches, such as those of David Bohm or Hilary Putnam, among others, we might be justified in speaking of reality as an unbroken, flowing wholeness – a wholeness which concresces or coalesces in different ways for different organisms. It is not that there is nothing there at all, but when pressed to “identify” what it is that is there, we only find relationships-upon-relationships. Relationships in which we are (co-en-)active participants.
One reason why I was asking you about your “Huh?” is because I suspected that, underneath it, was essentially an object-oriented ontology – a perspective which starts with the presupposition of, with the “givenness” of, various objects (which then may “enter into” relationships of one sort or another). I think this perspective has been pretty thoroughly challenged and dismantled, not only in old Buddhist texts, but in many modern ones, from a number of different fields. Although it persists strongly in our common-sense understanding of things, and although it is, indeed, a useful and practical (shorthand) way of conceiving of and organizing the world.
But a process ontology like enactivism pushes us to see relationship as primary – at the least, it asks us to see what happens when we stop assuming that relata precede relationships; to explore what this shift in perspective makes available to us. It asks us to recognize that the “divisions” and distinctions and categories that comprise a given worldspace are not pre-given attributes of the world; but neither are they merely the arbitrary inventions of a solipsistic subject. It's just that things don't identify themselves. The “identity” of any “thing” is an expression of a particular perspectives, particular relationships. And while practical living requires us to draw various lines, based on regularities in relationship, these lines (the lines that are part of human-enacted worldspaces) are not inherent in the world itself, wholly independent of human beings.
The idea that there is a single correct description of reality is one committed to the myth that we can stand completely outside of “the world” and see it, as Matt as pointed out, from an Objective viewpoint situated exactly nowhere. But does the “world” have an “other”? Can we meaningfully inhabit a position as its other? Enactivism and other approaches which challenge objectivism (while also striving to avoid radical constructivism) would argue that this is not meaningful.
I haven't quite finished with what I wanted to say here, but I have to go out. Hopefully further conversation will allow us to unpack some of these things further – and, I sincerely wish, not in a way that repeats the same old tired circles.
Best wishes,
Balder
hi bruce
i think one possible route for avoiding the same tired old circles - and to share new ground and common understanding - is to do what enactivism points to: a combination of science and subjectivity. or as i would say, a combination of philosophy and psychology. i see some possible additional distinctions which could be made to the ontological and epistemological arguments presented by you here (and by matt over on my page), and i think some additional distinctions in the areas of psychoepistemology and “triune brain” modality preference may help to free up some of the sticking points.
i think solely increasing the precision of the logic without introducing additional variable psychological factors may not give enough ground for either (gross) perspective to recognise commonality with the other. i think there are ways of looking at this which will allow both perspectives to be less positional and exclusive, accommodating objectivity and subjectivity without contradiction.
i'm going down my own blog comments right now (i'm up to conlang so far ; ), and i'd like to respond to matt on the logic issues, back to you in due course.
Yes, I hear you, Adam. I think that's a good point. I tried to initiate another way of exploring this in my first post to Julian – asking him to engage in a phenomenogical/embodied re-enactment and analysis of one of his reactions to the text – but he was (understandably) too fatigued to try that at the moment. But in time, I hope we can bring multiple perspectives and approaches to bear on these questions.
And for what it's worth, I do not think what I am saying in my argument above accommodates both subjectivity and objectivity…without insisting on either subjects or objects as pre-given!
you tweaked your comment just as i was getting all conciliatory!
now i'm moved to enquire:
what is an object?
what is an object prior to an act of enactment?
What is an object in itself? From an enactive, relational, process-oriented view, that question doesn't make sense. There is no object in itself. “Object” here is an abstraction (out of the relational flux), just as “the world” is.
Alright, J. I've read over your essay again and made some notes, and while I have thought about what Bruce mentioned above about responding “in a more interactive way, rather than posting a big monster response to everything you've written,” I still think that part of what makes textual exchange worthwhile is that we can really zero in on specific conceptualizations to tease out what was implied and what might be left out, etc. So I am going to post a big monster response, even though I know we are all exhausted. It will remain here until the power goes out permanently and the Internet is no more, so you have plenty of time (I hope!) to revisit it when you are ready. I will say, though, that I hope we get to meet in person eventually, as a direct face to face conversation is a HUGE aid when it comes to better understanding one another in an embodied and enactive sense.
But for now, let's examine the written word!
That enactivism is trying to navigate a treacherous path between the rock of objective materialism and the whirlpool of solipsistic idealism is the perfect image to retain in mind through all of this. If we look at the Western philosophical tradition, we see that these two perspectives have at various times and in various places taken the forefront of our collective imaginations. Never has either one completely won out, and I think it is important to admit that each is saying something very important about the human condition. We can not reject, in their entirety, the attitude of either perspective. In a sense, the relation between the two ideologies is co-emergent, in that each is a reaction against the totalizing claims of the other. So at the end of the day, what appear to be two diametrically opposed approaches are actually quite deeply related to one another.
Materialist objectivism points out that there is a world that the senses can come to know and interact with in a reliable way, more reliable than one would expect if matter were merely a projection of the mind. On the other hand, idealist subjectivism points out that we cannot be entirely certain whether or not this life is a dream. As the popular Zen koan points out, one can be drawn quite deeply into the question of whether “I am a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man.”
For me, neither of these perspectives is sufficient on its own, which is why I was so drawn to Varela's project the moment I heard of it. It is not a finished project, however. In fact, part of what enactivism entails is a full acceptance of the degree to which certainty, or objective knowledge, is impossible. Knowing is a process, and we reveal deeper truths about the reality we inhabit together by participating in the ongoing unfolding of it. What this means about the nature of a “fact” is as yet not entirely clear to me, but I think this symposium has helped me tremendously in this respect. I've started, rather experimentally, to explore this over on Adam's essay, and I hope his response will deepen the pursuit.
But let's get to your essay, J. You say early on that you were not entirely convinced by the “grand theory” of enactivism “that appeared in many ways to over-reach itself.” I applaud your skepticism, but I wonder to what degree we should also remain skeptical of the equally “grand theory” of objectivist materialism? Modern science is a rather young enterprise, but it is very tempting to suppose that it has just about wrapped up a complete and total explanation of everything that exists. But of course, all this rests upon the supposition that materialism (the metaphysical system which supposes that all that is real are particles in motion obeying certain mechanical laws) is true. None of the empirical evidence brought forth by science (which is a method, not a metaphysics) has or can prove this, however. I say the method of science cannot prove materialism, because materialism can only be assumed a priori as a possible explanation for the data produced via scientific inquiry. So all in all, there is nothing more grandiose about the enactive project than about the materialist, and we should be careful not to assume either is true a priori.
You suggest that applying enactivism leaves us with the “fascinating conundrum as to whether or not there is any world separate from our capacity to perceive it.” I think we need to deepen out appreciation for exactly what Varela et al. are suggesting about perception before we try to understand the implications of this conundrum. Perception, or observation, is something which must be considered within the context of evolution, or in biological jargon, phylogeny. It is not that, in each moment, the observer magically “creates” the outside world, but rather that the history of structural coupling between the organism and environment calls into question whether any ultimate separation exists. Further, on the level of ontogeny, or individual development, we must remember that perception is not a passive reception of the world, but active participation in the ongoing unfolding of a world. We will touch on this again below…
When it comes to the re-contextualization of the standard Darwinian account of evolution, enactivism is suggesting that the adaptive paradigm is insufficient. Adaptionism is not just Varela's pet peeve. It has been criticized from within evolutionary biology by mainstream theorists like Gould, Lewontin, and Margulis, among others. The criticism is that organisms are not just shaped by a harsh and unfriendly environment, forced to “fit” into a pre-given niche, but rather than there is an ongoing dialectical relationship between both changes to the environment because of life's activity, and changes to life as a result of the environment. There is the further criticism, especially leveled by Gould and Lewontin, concerning how giving an adaptive explanation for a specific trait is rather speculative and unfounded, based more in the prejudices of the scientists than in historical reality.
Later in your essay, in the section about mind-body reductionism and magical thinking, you suggest that “meaning emerges out of process,” and that “spirituality should not be dissassociated from reason and science, reduced to surface interpretations that leave out depth-oriented inquiry-based process, or equated with prerational concretizations and externalizations of interior experience.” I do not disagree with any of this and I think it is very important to continually drill these points home. I would just add that we also need to be on the look out for misplaced concreteness that is the result of taking rationalist dichotomies too literally. The danger of literalization should be avoided on all sides, whether mystical or materialist.
Getting back to how our understanding of perception is radically revisited within enactivism, we should discuss the implications of the experiment mentioned in The Embodied Mind concerning the sensorimotor development of kittens. What is the goundbreaking revelation here? Only this, that organisms must act in an environment to know it. Perception, again, is not passive representation, but active participation. We know only what we can do, and do only what we can know.
You remark that these experiments may not have anything to do with “cognition,” or “thinking.” I disagree. Thought, being correlated with the sensorimotor surfaces of neurons, can no longer be considered a passive reflection, or mirroring, of an already given world. Thinking is a technique we learn to construct abstractions, and then to participate in the ongoing unfolding of the world through those abstractions. None of our thoughts can be considered “neutral.” When we construct abstractions, we take a risk, as if they fail to relate adequately to the world around us, we will suffer as a result. I know you agree with this wholeheartedly, and here I think I am interpretting it in a new way. It is not that our thoughts could ever be “factual” in a traditional, representationalist sense; but rather that they could be adequate or useful in the context of our ongoing activity in the world. It also pays, as has been mentioned, not to literalize these abstractions, but to leave them constantly open to revision as circumstances change.
As an aside, I don't think the example of Hawking is appropriate, because he was not wheelchair bound until after his ALS was diagnosed at the age of 21. He had plenty of time to develop a deep sensorimotor appreciation for the world around him. Had he been paralyzed since birth, I suspect his genius would not have been possible. Indeed, he probably would not have had any ability to develop or produce mental abstractions at all.
In regards to what the investigations into the nature of color tell us about the world out there, I think Bruce has touched upon this very well.
About the co-emergence of bees and flowers being a challenge to standard evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism), I think what enactivism uses this example to challenge is the sense in which, from the Darwinian perspective, nature is all about competition and adaptation due to natural selection. The co-evolution of bees and flowers calls us to recognize that, not only are the boundaries of species permeable, but the boundaries of individual organisms are, as well. Bees and flowers, while autonomous in one respect, also form a third organism of kinds, a bee-flower. Bees are part of the sexual organs of flowers, and flowers are part of the stomach of bees, their nectar having evolved to suit their needs so specifically. So there is a tremendous amount of cooperation and interconnectivity in the natural world that neo-Darwinism tends to ignore, even if it doesn't reject it outright (though it has also sometimes done this).
To close, I'd like to try and explore what may in fact be the central question of this entire symposium: what is scientific knowledge? This question is, from the enactive perspective, essentially about the nature and scope of our abilities as language-using observers. It also concerns how our technologies allow us to extend our senses. Let's pursue this using an example: gravity.
“Meditate all you want, gravity still applies…” Indeed! But what is “gravity”? Modern science was in its infancy when Newton declared that gravity was a force exerted by one body of matter upon another. In the early 20th century, Einstein overturned this conceptualization by saying that gravity was actually the result of the curvature of spacetime. Today, string theorists are trying to prove that gravity is neither of these, but rather a function of the interaction between infinitesimal filaments of vibrating energy extending through multiple dimensions.
Now, what Newton meant is clearly understandable. It fits our naive impressions well, even though it required a eureka moment for him to formalize it mathematically. What Einstein discovered is more difficult to conceptualize, but nonetheless, I think I get the gist of it. When it comes to string theory, though, I'm left wondering if I'll ever understand what gravity “is.” Sure, I described the abstraction the string theorists are working with, but that doesn't mean I have any clue what it refers to.
I don't think it is appropriate to define this development surrounding the abstraction called “gravity” a trend toward a more accurate understanding of what is going on independently of our attempt to know it. “Accuracy” implies that we will eventually arrive at the final abstraction which is unambiguously exactly what gravity is. This seems misguided to me because gravity is not an abstraction, a formula, or a theory, but a lived reality. What science has been doing through its inquiry about the phenomenon is devising ever more ingenius technological means of manipulation, such that we come to know how gravity works by participating in its possibilities. As a further example, the LHC at CERN may not tell us what matter is, but rather, what matter does in the situations we put it in. So we gain a “know-how,” not necessarily a “know-what,” at least not a “know-what” beyond our shared lingusitic abstractions.
When it comes to quantum physics, what we have NOT discovered is that observation creates reality. Rather, we have discovered that we cannot know the nature of quantum phenomena without interfering with them. In other words, it is impossible too passively observe subatomic particles. The knowledge we gain at the quantum level is a function of our technological manipulation of matter/energy. “All knowing is doing, and all doing is knowing.”
Briefly, when it comes to panexperientialism, what is being suggested is not that “rocks are conscious,” but that all holons have some degree of interiority. A rock is not a holon, but an aggregate of molecular holons. It has no sense of itself as a whole; only individual holons have that (at least from the panexperientialist perspective). That interior experience is correlated with complex material bodies is true, but don't discount the complexity of atoms, etc. They do not have the kind of personal “I” consciousness that we do, but to suppose they have NO ability to prehend the world around them is, in my opinion, a greater leap than the panexperientialist claim. If we suppose matter is entirely blind until it organizes itself appropriately, we must explain why cosmic evolution seems so unambiguously to move in the direction of greater complexity. Why does time have a direction if matter is not in some sense capable of proto-intentional action? This (time asymmetry) is a HUGE problem for a strictly materialistic cosmology which has only been temporarily solved by adding a few theoretical suppositions as yet unsupported by empirical investigation.
Alright, that's the end of this monster. No need to feel rushed to respond. I just wanted to get it out there.
Thanks for your wonderful contribution, J. I look forward to exploring all of this with you in as honest and open-minded way as possible (without, of course, calling absolutely everything into question!).
-Matt
yo mr alderman
you may notice a general theme in these questions:
“What is an object in itself? From an enactive, relational, process-oriented view, that question doesn't make sense. There is no object in itself.”
i asked simply “what is an object”
and “what is an object prior to an act of enactment?”
how does enactivism propose to know that the environment is comprised of any material thing in particular?
by what criteria does enactivism propose that i (including any notion of i) and everything of which i think i am aware are not simply created in software?
what is a process?
by what criteria does enactivism claim that process occurs? how do varela et al know that any particular thing is being processed during process?
similarly, in a relational model, what is relating to what, and how does enactivism claim to know to be able to identify any particular things that relate?
what is a model?
when varela et al were looking down a microscope at organisms and sugar solution, what was it that was emitting or reflecting the energy pulsations from which their percepts were transduced?
how does enactivism claim to know anything in particular?
all is enacted apart from or including enactivism ( i saw mention of the paradox of enactivism). by what criteria do they claim that it is a paradox and not simply another act of enactment which has no claim to identity?
by what criteria does enactivism claim to be more truthful than any other formulation?
by what criteria do they claim to know the identity of anything if all things are enacted?
” “Object” here is an abstraction (out of the relational flux), just as “the world” is”
what is object and world an abstraction of?
like i said in my piece, nearly all discussion comes down to metaphysics and epistemology and ethics… and i can't begin on the ethical considerations relating to enactivism, other than as a useful phenomenological situational reframing tool, until i've investigated the metaphysics and epistemology…
Adam,
I know you're questions are to Bruce, and I'm not going to try to answer them all because, 1) I want to see Bruce's answers, and 2) I am about to pass out (it's 3am PST). But uber-briefly:
for enactivism:
1) what does it mean to know (epistemology)? - knowing is living. any organism that survives is a cognitive system, bringing forth valid knoweldge about its environment. Try this link for more about enactive epistemology.
2) what does it mean to be (metaphysics)? - I'll supply you with a few links… the closest metaphysical system to what enactivsm is pointing toward might be Max Velmans' ”reflexive monism.” Read this short comparison between enactivism and reflexive monism for an idea of how they can differ, depending on who is doing the interpreting. Varela and Maturana never said much about the ultimate nature of anything.
3) what should we do (ethics)? - “Every human act takes place in language. Every act in language brings forth a world created with others in the act of coexistence which gives rise to what is human. Thus every human act has an ethical meaning because it is an act of constitution of the human world. This linkage of human to human is, in the final analysis, the groundwork of all ethics as a reflection on the legitimacy of the presence of others.” -Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 247
matt
thanks for the links
what flaws and excesses have you found in the enactivist model, or are you proposing that it is a perfectly accurate description of the domains which it claims to describe, with necessarily perfect integration with adjacent domains which it does not claim to describe, and if not, why not?
“Every human act takes place in language. Every act in language brings forth a world created with others in the act of coexistence which gives rise to what is human. Thus every human act has an ethical meaning because it is an act of constitution of the human world. This linkage of human to human is, in the final analysis, the groundwork of all ethics as a reflection on the legitimacy of the presence of others.”
i need more criteria before i can know what he means. i can think of many human acts where language is simply not present in consciousness. this is simply too generalised a statement with too many obvious exceptions, and is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
like i said, it's back to philosophy time, because despite your claim that they never said much about the ultimate nature of anything, enactivism is a claim of how aspects of reality are in preference to other claims, and i want to know on what basis they make these claims.
sweet dreams!
Julian, something I haven't mentioned yet is that I love Peter Gabriel's Passion album. I lost it in a move and I miss it. I used to listen to it a lot – often with the windows wide open, juniper-scented wind swirling into the room, while I worked on some creative project or another – building a drum, writing a poem, exercising, whatever. Thanks for the reminder! I'll probably go out and buy another copy soon….
Adam,
I wrote: “What is an object in itself? From an enactive, relational, process-oriented view, that question doesn't make sense. There is no object in itself.”
You replied: i asked simply “what is an object” and “what is an object prior to an act of enactment?”
I answered the way I did because the answer to the first question involves enactment, and so the second question doesn't make sense, unless you presuppose the existence of an “object in itself.”
The point here is not that I am claiming there is “nothing out there” or that everything is in my head, but that, from the enactive perspective, we can no longer pretend to speak as if we are giving perspective-free information about the cosmos – as if the objects in question that we are describing exist (as we describe them) independently of enactive perspectives. In other words, when I give information about the cosmos, part of the “ethics” of the enactive approach requires that I acknowledge that I am necessarily involved in whatever I say; I can't pretend that my human voice signature does not inform or shape my pronouncements.
In everyday conversation, it isn't necessary, of course, to qualify everything in this way. That would get tiresome very quickly. (Though, in the process-oriented language I created, I built “perspective” into my grammar, so conceivably there can be language forms which do not start from an object ontology which appears or pretends to be perspective-free.) But when it comes to making metaphysical or universal statements about the nature of reality, then I think it is important to bring this dimension in, even in science – as Varela and Maturana are doing, for instance.
One way that Wilber defines “material object,” which I find acceptable (though not perfect), is as the “outside of a perspective.”* Or you could just say that an object is a perspective. Whatever is out there (the processual flux I described as unbounded wholeness), the objects of my world(space) are objects-for-me. To “know” the world, I must take a perspective, I must interact with it (sensorimotor coping is one level of this but not the only one). So, saying that an “object” is a perspective is not an idealist/subjectivist claim that the world is merely a projection of my consciousness, but rather an acknowledgement that, to describe the world, we cannot do so apart from perspectives – that any description we can offer is an enacted worldspace in which we are co-implicated.
Maybe I played this particular note a bit too much in this answer, but I do think there has been confusion around it in general, so I wanted to spend a bit of time on it. I'll respond to your other questions in a subsequent post.
Best wishes,
Balder
* In Wilber's tetra-enactive cosmology, here is one description he offers that might be interesting to look at: “Since space is often taken as ontological and time epistemological, then in third-person terms this amounts to saying that space and time are not separate but rather are a spacetime continuum. Fleshing that out with the AQAL metatheory, we say that the exteriors of spacetime appear topographically as chains of mass-energy interlinked in various networks and systems, while interiors appear as feelings and awareness interlinked in various cascades of intimacy. But they all arise together as perspective-occasions of the self-reflective Kosmos” (Wilber, 2005, Appendix B, para. 30).
Adam,
No, enactivism isn't perfect. I think one area where it could be expanded would be how it solves or re-contextualizes the hard problem of consciousness. I can imagine how it might attempt to tackle this issue, but I've never seen anything by Varela or Maturana (or anyone else associated with the project) that attempts to do this. If Bruce knows of something I'd really like to read it!
I think that the way enactivism views science as a form of “objectivity-in-parenthesis” is extremely significant and calls into question the role the institution of science has come to play in popular culture as a kind of priesthood that can say no wrong. Scientists can only strive for objectivity, but they cannot achieve it. It is important to remember this, I think.
As far as expanding on the ethics, I think I gave you a quote some time ago which went something like, “We have only the world we bring forth with each other, and love is how we bring it forth.” So it is very much an ethic centered on spontaneous goodness, rather than a set of rules and prescriptions. I suppose we could draw from Buddhism and say that, once one has realized the selfless nature of their cognitive experience, they recognize the same sort of selflessness in others, and so come to see how, in this existence, we are all impermanent beings passing toward death together. Compassion results of itself (which literally means “com” - together, “pati” - to suffer).
bruce - i just want to flag this passage quickly as a positive departure point after i've got that irksome whippersnapper off my heels ! (we'll get round to the rest of yr comment as well, but that just leaped out). bookmark!
“The point here is not that I am claiming there is “nothing out there” or that everything is in my head, but that, from the enactive perspective, we can no longer pretend to speak as if we are giving perspective-free information about the cosmos – as if the objects in question that we are describing exist (as we describe them) independently of enactive perspectives. In other words, when I give information about the cosmos, part of the “ethics” of the enactive approach requires that I acknowledge that I am necessarily involved in whatever I say; I can't pretend that my human voice signature does not inform or shape my pronouncements. ”
hi everyone - i just came back from a 3.5 hr dental appointment …
is ben up and running?
Ben's up!
and i bet your head was hurting before the dentist right ? ouch and double ouch…
Julian, back to your response to me…
I understand your view on burden of proof, but the problem is that what claims are considered extraordinary isn't agreed upon. However, I understand what you consider to be extraordinary. So, taking that as a starting point, I'm wondering how someone promoting enactivism would respond. If scientists are also embodied in the world they're studying, then how might this change our definition of proof?
ben the burden of proof is not arbitrary, nor is the definition of what is extraordinary in this context.
the simple sense of teh argyumentis that if one makes claims outtside of the established order of what has been proven the onus is on you to prove it - not on anyone else to disprove it or give a good reason not to believe it.
i have no problem with the recognition that scientists are embodied in the world they are studying or that they influence what they observe to some extent.
this does not change the definition of proof at all unless we take the “observer effect” to an untenable (but popular) extreme or take the claims in this case of enactivism inthe direction of the solipsistic idealism it claims to steer away from…
In regards to the degree to which enactivism might be spiraling down the whirlpool of idealist solipsism, it struck me that it is hard to out do the solipsism somewhat covertly implied by the representational paradigm. Whatever our consciousness is (which it must be admitted, from the representationalist view is not quite clear), it only experiences a virtual representation of the world out there, as directly presented to the senses. It is the Cartesian paradigm that gave us movies like The Matrix. I'll explore this more later, I've got to run to class now. It seems like an interesting line of thought to counter the claim that enactivism is the solipsistic approach.
yup this is true but then we are back to hummer suv's that give a pretty convincing impression of that virtual reality as capable of mangling the flesh of lizards, hound dogs, tribesmen, withces, evangelists, scientists, extreme realtivsts, solipsists, and mystics alike!
I really am confused why we're back to this hummer example. You've read The Embodied Mind. Do you seriously think that Varela was suggesting even for a minute, with his notion of groundlessness, that people who understand enactivism become transparent ghosts? Or that an ant, because it doesn't see or “understand” a descending foot, will therefore not be crushed by it?
If so, I think there's been a serious misunderstanding.
The observer cannot freely choose on a whim what it will see and what it will not. Enactivism is not suggesting that “I create my own reality.” The suggestion is that what we know about the world is the product of a long line of co-development, and not a set of facts about objective relations existing independently of the perspectives which have evolved with and through them.
Enactivism just reminds us that Jupiter is as much an object as it is an achievment of the billions of years of evolution that went into the design of the eyes and nervous system through which it is seen. If we stop noticing it tomorrow, it will still be there. But when we look at it, we should remember it is only our biological structure/organization that allows us to see. We don't see what is there. We see what we have brought forth with what is there. The differerence between this and solipsism is subtle, but notice the difference… Solipsism says your brain does it all, there is no connection to outside. Enactivism says outside and inside co-emerge. You are in direct contact with the world around you, and through your contact with it, everything changes.
“Enactivism just reminds us that Jupiter is as much an object as it is an achievment of the billions of years of evolution that went into the design of the eyes and nervous system through which it is seen. If we stop noticing it tomorrow, it will still be there. But when we look at it, we should remember it is only our biological structure/organization that allows us to see. We don't see what is there. We see what we have brought forth with what is there.”
right. so jupiter has an objective existence of some kind, we have a subjective impression of some kind, and our perception of the object that jupiter is is made possible by direct contact with our sensory apparatus, and mediated by the nature of that apparatus. we see the object that is there, and what we see of it and how we interpret it is inextricably an act of enactment of numerous biopsychosocial factors.
alternatively, the thing that is labeled as jupiter exists outside of our minds, we are able to be aware of something that is that thing in specific identifiable ways through sensory interaction with the energy pulsations which allow us to be aware of it, and that awareness arises as a combination of factors including the stimulus of the energy pulsations and our biological, neurological, and psychological processing of them.
or reword/re-conceptualise to taste.
one could remove the word objective, replace “subjective” with enacted, replace “what we see of it” with “bring forth with what is”, replace “direct contact” with “structural coupling”, all of which emphasise different aspects or preferences in describing or conceptualising the process. what actually happens is the same either way.
as matt says this is a matter of “should” not “must”. i would say this is a matter of preference.
a short and perfectly acceptable way of saying it for humans is: we look at jupiter.
one could argue that this is a falsehood, because in a way, jupiter is looking at us by reflecting light towards us, and we are merely passive receptors. then “i see jupiter” might be more “accurate”. “looking” might imply intention. but “we look at jupiter” does not negate enactment. it may not reflect the subtlety of the interaction, or reflect the evolutionary process, but since the interaction doesn't have feelings, and the option to feel part of what is is always available, what is lost here by saying “we look at jupiter”? we all understand what process is being described, even if we don't understand how that process occurs. that is not the job of the sentence “we look at jupiter”. for its purpose, it is enough.
i don't think enactivism is suggesting this - but i think integral folks take perspectives like this and apply them to mean that there are no objects or facts whatsoever independent of context and so therefore ghosts, goblins and white bearded men in the sky are real for their respective altitudes and while this is an important partial truth i think it gets really tweaked with regard to things like the pre/trans falllacy the recognition of pathology and the general mistrust of science and reason. which after all are just one prespective…. so who are we to say etc.. in non-integral spiritual circles this mistake is so common as to be a dogma - and the way it is applied is usually plain wrong and highly problematic, i had hoped it would be different in integral circles..
i go back to the hummer example when i hear what sounds like a denial of the extent to which certain perceptions of the world are not only extremely accurate and predictable but also transcendent of perspective…
i go back to the hummer exammple again to make the point that there is an undeniable, humbling and in many ways unchanging power of the material world to demonstrate its power over us all.
honestly sometimes i think a lot of this stuff is a way to try and make reality seem more trippy than it actually is.. which is already pretty fuken trippy!
i go back to examples like this b/c from enactivism or other perspectioves with similar observations i see what is often a small (but of course misguided) hop skip and jump into calling into question:
a) whether or not peoople enmslaved, tortured, raped etc in other cultures really experience this as negative or painful or oppression etc… i mean really, who are we to say with our privileged notion of the subjective self, the personal ego that wants “freedom?” soounds like a judgment - and after all aren't they learning exactly what they need to - and isn't their cultural wordlspace exactly where it needs to be on the spiral?
b) things like whether or not HIV causes AIDS or disease even exists outside of the “scientific paradigm”
c) whether or not magic and supernatural powers are actually real in other “worldspaces” that are not dominated by the nasty bugaboo of pesky rationalism
d) whether or not denial of trauma causes suffering outside of the “psychological model of victimhood” and whether it is more spiritual to interpret trauma as karma or the universes perfection or co-created between victim and perpetrator etc… in other words he notion that trauma is just a construct as is the psyche and suffering itself and all of this can be side-stepped by just shifting “perspective”
e) whether or not the environmental crisis or energy crisis or poverty are just a “perspective that we bring forth” with what we choose to focus on and reframing that focus might allow us to see a different world
for me a lot of this is the antithesis of what good philosophy and spiritual practice should leead to and i find it deeply, deeply disturbing.
so this is my struggle. my persepctive is that we are swimming in a spiritual culture for whom most of the above statments of error sound pretty plausible.
i ammostly interested in philosophy and practice that can set this straight and create more grounding in both internal and external reality.
i think that enactivism, constructivism, relativism etc are interesting and important within a specific context, but that they bring are alrgely misused when applied to our lived experience in the real world.
i was hoping with this symposium to a) learn more about the perspective and b) be shown how it might be applied in ways that were not suceptible to these ubiquitous problems.
i feel like i did learn more about the perspective but haven't ha my concerns adequately addressed.
since wilber's IS came out i have been feeling increasingly that the line between extreme relativism and “second tier” has become waaaay blurred, that most “integral” people i meet in the real world now think that “second tier ” is a kind of hodge podge of postmodern and new age ideas with non-dual jargon woven through it - this is troubling and sad for me…and reiterates that he VA tech/pavlina debacle was in many ways an accurate reflection fo where the community is at with a lot of this stuff..
Julian,
I have several more substantive posts I hope you'll engage with, and I believe Matt does too up above (I know you've been out of pocket because of your dental procedure), but I just wanted to make two remarks: One, I do not know any “Integral people” who use enactivism to support the literal existence of bearded men in the sky at any stage of development. Two, I still think your notion that certain of the objective features of the world you've been pointing to are transcendent of perspective is incorrect and not supportable. I think this is a misunderstanding of Wilber's Integral theory as well. This is why I've said that aspects of your arguments sound pre-Green (without ever meaning to imply that you or your overall vision of integrative spirituality is pre-Green).
Concerning the potential for misuse of the enactive perspective (or post-metaphysics or related subjects), I expect you will also acknowledge that the representationist paradigm also has potential for misuse? That any model does?
Best wishes,
Balder
matt - the above comment is very well said and within that context i think enactivsm is stunningly beautiful and important.
bruce i have almost only met integral folks who think that way - so all i can say is that i wish i moved in your circles. i would ask that you not poo-poo my experience as i am reporting it just because yours has been different.
i understand that you think i am caught in a pre-green perspective, but i have yet to hear a single retort from you that agrees that certain things are indeed transcendent of perspective a la the many inventive examples i have come up with over the last two years… in this regard i think i may be bumping up against your fundamentalist ideolgy - i dont find matt to be this hard line.
personally i think green has much to offer but also (as used to be the fierce integral position) makes a lot of mistakes and makes possible a lot of confusion and regression.
do you think that any of the examples i listed above are dependent on perspective?
how am i misunderstanding wilber?
sure all models can be misused, but this type of model is being misused in this type of way right now and i find it more problematic than anything just about anything else in terms of the spiritual health of our culture.
i don';t really feel that representationalism is a problem in its own domain - if it is combined/integrated with methodologies that address the other quadrants.
in the same way i dont think that something like enactivism or social constructivism is a problem, as long as it is combined/integrated with methodologies that address the other quadrants.
for me the problem is one of quadrant absolutism and i think that when any perspective denies the other quads we are in big trouble.
part of the problem is that the 4 quads are not equal. there are two kinds of contradictory hierarchies at play - one that defines depth and one that defines transcendent influence.
while the UL has more depth than the LR, a bacterium that eats your brain will do so regardless of your level of spiritual realization.
i think i am pushing for some kind of recognition of these details as not being context dependent.
from there many other assertions become possible that i think are called into question mostly out of a fear of facing and living in reality.
i understand that the green perspectives you are refering to call our lack of self-reflection and into question in many powerful and important ways - again i just think they need to be correctly limited.
i understand too that you are commited to certain philosophical positions that make sense in an abstract way - but i sttart to wonder - where is the meat? and if these positions seem to make possible more errors in application than they provide for elegant novelty i start to get bored with them as useful ideas.
I just saw your edited version of your post above. What are the concerns you have that have not been addressed? This symposium will be a waste – or will be less than successful than I had hoped for – if we end up exactly where we started! We may not agree, but I think we need to at least make a concerted effort to address your concerns adequately.
Concerning this remark: but i think integral folks take perspectives like this and apply them to mean that there are no objects or facts whatsoever independent of context…
Can you show me any object or fact which exists independent of any context?
Best wishes,
Balder
I am working on a paragraph-by-paragraph response to your post, Julian. I really want to try to get past this communicative impasse. Give me 30 minutes or so.
B.
thanks dude!
lets take a step back and a few deep breaths!
i think we get stuck here because of something we each want the other to hear…
would you like to formulate a statement you really feel i am not hearing and have me try and take it in? perhaps i can then do the same…
i would hazard a guess that this might help:
i understand that it is important to you to get across that the notion of any object or fact independent of context is in many ways meaningless because all of conscious experience is an enaction - we cannot separate ourselves from reality - and the idea that we can is a disembodied, context denying fallacy, one that might be interesting as a thought experiment, but even that thought-experiment is still context bound - a product of our perspective.
there is a fundamental way in which we cannot deny the fact that all experience is mediated, it is impossible to find the “view from nowhere” from which to have true objective certainty of the “way it is.”
we in fact are inextricably part of the equation we might imagine to be neutral or transcendent. this is the great mistake of the representational paradigm. it is naive precisely because it is ignorant or in denial of it's constructed enacted nature (believing rigidily that it has the final objective truth ) and in enacting precisely this naivette it paves the way for a kind of monological tyrrany that devalues and condescends to other perspectives and fails to respect cultural differences, value-sphere differences, the central importance of interiority, the influence of socialization and the interdependence of subject and object.
what do you think - have i heard you/do i get this point?
i am gonna go up and check out the posts you referenced thhat i missed on dental day… :O)
matt:
”
As an aside, I don't think the example of Hawking is appropriate, because he was not wheelchair bound until after his ALS was diagnosed at the age of 21. He had plenty of time to develop a deep sensorimotor appreciation for the world around him. Had he been paralyzed since birth, I suspect his genius would not have been possible. Indeed, he probably would not have had any ability to develop or produce mental abstractions at all.”
this was precisely the problem i was anticipating.
i happen to have played as a kid in an adult tournament in which one of the regulars playing at a pretty high level (my father was in the top 30 or 40 players in the country at the time and i was with him at the tournament) was a man who was born with cerebral palsy.
i also know a young woman with cerebral palsy who uses her computer interface to write poems and music and journal in great detail on her interior psychospiritual experience of life..
both of these were wheelchair bound and born with their motor/brain damage.
what do we think about helen keller? deaf and blind rom 19 montths - certainly not motoring around in her environment very much - nonethelesss “capable of abstraction” to a significant degree, no?
matt: The danger of literalization should be avoided on all sides, whether mystical or materialist.
different kinds of literalization though yea? do you agree that we are on dangerous ground if we directly equate these two kinds of “literalization?”
as to gravity - well there is a difference between a) what we understand gravity to be and b) whether or not we are at the effect of it. frankly - in the sense i am trying to communicate, it makes no difference if we explain it in newtonian, einsteinian or superstring terms - it behaves in a predictable way and when standing at the edge of a cliff, one's perspective has zero influence over what will happen should you jump.
in a way “gravity” is a word we use whose definition is “whatever that principle is that means things fall predictably…” the content of that definition may change but, all other things being equal the concrete meaning of it is undeniable regardless of perspective, stage of development or opinion..
Hi, Julian,
You said: bruce i have almost only met integral folks who think that way - so all i can say is that i wish i moved in your circles. i would ask that you not poo-poo my experience as i am reporting it just because yours has been different.
Sorry – I'm not intending to poo-poo your experience. I just haven't seen what you've seen, at least not to the dire extent that you describe it, and I was assuming your experience with Integral people is largely here on Gaia.
You said: i understand that you think i am caught in a pre-green perspective, but i have yet to hear a single retort from you that agrees that certain things are indeed transcendent of perspective a la the many inventive examples i have come up with over the last two years… in this regard i think i may be bumping up against your fundamentalist ideology - i dont find matt to be this hard line.
I don't think Matt is saying anything different than I am, at least not with regard to this question of whether or not there are things that are transcendent of perspective. I think there may be a miscommunication here, though, about what “transcendent of perspective” means or implies. Here is how I understand your definition: “No matter what I believe or what worldview I hold, there is still a hard, objective SUV coming down the road, and if it hits me, I'm a pancake.” In other words, you are insisting that we differentiate between LQ “beliefs” and RQ “facts” – not (mistakenly) assuming that the outer world magically conforms itself to whatever belief-du-jour we adopt (or whatever affirmation we repeat), transforming itself at our whim.
I don't have any objections to this, as it is. I agree that, on the level you are addressing, we do need to differentiate between subjective beliefs and objective reality. There is not a one-to-one correspondence or a direct causal link between subjective beliefs or speculative thoughts and the outer world of things, processes, environmental conditions, forces, systems, etc, such that we should feel justified in asserting that our thoughts actually cause the physical world to reorganize itself. Not on the level you are addressing.
As I believe I mentioned in an earlier post to you, this sort of interpretation – which is rampant in certain New Age circles, and does need to be addressed – is actually a product, not of postmodern (4p) thinking, but of certain postmodern statements or claims getting filtered through a rational-level, Cartesian, 3p cognitive perspective or framework. In this view, subject and object are still neatly and firmly distinguished, as two separate “things” or objects in themselves, which are then imagined to “interact” causally (resulting in a new form of rationalized magical thinking).
If you take perspective to mean subjective belief, in the sense described above, then yes, it is fair to say that objects “transcend” perspective – at the least, they are resistant to such “perspectives” and can impose themselves on us, quite forcefully (or mortally), regardless of our particular belief systems.
But when proponents of Integral Theory, enactivism, or certain postmodernist perspectives (including me) talk about the primacy of perspective, the “dependence” of objects on perspective, this is not what is meant. They (we) are not suggesting that “perspectives” are particular objects which causally act on, manipulate, or interfere with external reality. Rather, we are saying that, because we are part of the world and interdependent with it, and because of the nature of our cognitive and perceptual processes, we are not able to stand apart from the world and describe “it” as it is in itself; we are saying that, when we speak about the world or “reality,” we are fooling ourselves if we think our descriptions and views are perspective-free or transcendentally Objective. That sort of objectivity is a 3p myth, one that cannot be sustained anymore. We do not mean that objects physically depend on perspectives. That is describing a particular type of interaction that makes sense within a given worldspace (which i described above), whereas the enactivist/Integral/pomo approach is trying to point out the window frame, not only the view through the window: we are saying that, while we may abstractly posit the existence of a world-in-itself, we only ever (always already) deal with perspectivally, enactively generated worldspaces – meaning, the world-as-it-appears-to-us-through-our-ongoing-evolutionarily-and-otherwise-contextualized-modes-of-interaction-and-engagement. The notion that “observation is theory laden” is relevant here. When we interact with the world, we don't simply discover bare, interpretation-free facts; that is the myth of pure, representationalist objectivity that is being critiqued here.
Therefore, at the level at which this critique is being aimed – and at which these claims are being made – it doesn't make sense to speak of objects which transcend perspectives. Because it recognizes we have never seen an “object” which transcends perspectives – simply because perspective-taking is what allows us, interactively, to extract or ab-stract “objects” from the flux in which we, as observing organisms, are always embedded. To imagine we interact with or perceive the world, or that we can make pronouncements about it, independently of all perspectives and interpretations is a form of hubris, and as I mentioned to Adam, part of the “ethics” of the enactive approach is to avoid this sort of discourse (not necessarily in casual conversation, but in more formal, professional, or theoretical discussions).
The reason I have critiqued your notion of “good quadrant separation” is not to disagree with the first perspective I described (imagining that beliefs physically interact with or transform external reality), but because it sometimes seems as if you are speaking of right-hand quadrant “objects” as if you are describing interpretation-free “bare facts,” rather than theory-laden observations.
You asked how you were misunderstanding Wilber. In some of what you wrote above, it sounds as if you are describing the Right Quadrants as “reality as it is in itself, independent of interpretation or models.” But the Right Quadrants are perspectives.
It also sounds as if you are separating them in a way that is not tenable…
You wrote: part of the problem is that the 4 quads are not equal. there are two kinds of contradictory hierarchies at play - one that defines depth and one that defines transcendent influence. while the UL has more depth than the LR, a bacterium that eats your brain will do so regardless of your level of spiritual realization.
In my understanding of the Integral model, the LQs and RQs are not separable in this way. They are aspects of a single holon. The LQ is the depth dimension of the holon which also has RQ dimensions. So, it doesn't make sense to say that the RQ has less depth than the LQ. Do you see what I mean?
I have more to say, but I'll post this much for now. I spent more time on your first paragraph than I expected I would!
Best wishes,
Bruce
P.S. I just saw you added a new post. I'll read it first before responding to the rest of your previous post. I really want to know if what I'm offering here helps clear up some of the misunderstandings.
P.P.S. Regarding my challenge to you to show me an object that exists independent of contexts, part of what I was referring to was the “objective” interdependence of holons. It is related to my earlier questions to you regarding process ontology versus object ontology. In the former, which includes systems theory, chaos theory, etc, as well as Buddhist pratitya-samutpada, “object” is seen as a fairly stable pattern of relationship, not an independent thing-in-itself (which would supposedly exist inherently, outside of cause and effect).
Julian,
About perspectives not allowing us to avoid oncoming hummers… keep in mind that a perspective is not a disembodied ghost able to pick and choose from where it views the world. A perspective is very much tied to a particular body. The very thing that makes it a perspective is its concrete place in spacetime among other bodies. That we always view things from a perspective is precisely why a hummer is able to run us over.
About gravity… yes, we experience it as something concrete because of our particular biological situation, and something more abstract because of our technoscience. You can imagine that dolphins and birds etc. don't have quite the same understanding of the importance of gravity based on their perspective, yes? It still has an effect of some kind, but very different. The point is not so much that gravity doesnt really exist on its own; it is that gravity is experienced in different ways by different creatures. Gravity is nothing at all without bodies to act upon, right?
About cerebral palsy, this is a good example of how not having full use of the cerebellum (which is usually the brain area affected) doesn't necessarily prevent intellectual development. It is not a degenerative disease, so their problems don't get worse as they age, at least not due directly to the birth defect. ALS is a much more debilitating disease, from what I can tell. It breaks down motor neurons throughout the entire body, and continues to degenerate the body for the life of the afflicted. You bring up good points, though. I think what enactivism is suggesting still applies on the neural level. We learn to think/speak, etc. because our neurons are especially active, using their sensorimotor surfaces to forge new links and find new connections. A better example of what would happen when we are not given the opportunity to excercise our neurons are “wild children,” those unfortunate souls who get locked in the basement for the first years of their life and experience no human contact, much less receive any intellectual stimulation. Even when rescued, the damage has already been done. I'm sure you heard of the famous case of Genie. There is nothing new here, really. Enactivism is just using these ideas to strengthen the case for the degree to which we must learn how to have a world.
i mean what the right hand and left hand disciplnes disclose.
does that clarify?
and did you see my statement to you above?
Hi, yes, I did. Thank you for that gesture – if I had read that before I posted my last letter, I might not have spent so much time trying to communicate a point which you did a very nice job of mirroring. But I don't think my effort was redundant, because I wanted to try to contrast it with the perspective I think you are criticizing and to trace out the differences.
“i mean what the right hand and left hand disciplnes disclose.”
Can you say a little more?
did what i said amount to enough of an understanding of the central idea you want me to hear?
well i get that one aspect of the quads is to talk about holons and their attributes, but i think the original way i interacted with it was as a way of talking about how different disciplines related to reality - what lenses they used, what kind of information they acquired and which aspects of the good true and beautiful they reveal..
for me this is very practical and is a way of organizing different disciplines as well as their strengths and weaknesses, with an eye toward how they might complement each other and be better inregra(l)ated… as well as how to differentiate them from eachother and not commit category errors or quadrant mistakes/absolutism.
i think that at a certain stage of complexity all holons have all four quadrants but i think it is an over reaching to ascribe all four quadrants to everything that exists, period.
i think we make a mistake when we try to get all of reality to fit into a system rather than having the system relate to all of reality..
this for me is part of the problem with wanting to ascribe interiority to rocks - because they are holons too and so they must have an interior as well as, say, a collective community of how it is to be the interior of a rock…. ? oy!
so i get the mistake you think i was making - but do you see what i mean viz the disciplines of the different quads and how in practical terms the right hand disciplines have radically transformed the left hand quadrants disciplines way more than in reverse, even though postmodernism has a lot to say about science - i don't know that it has impacted science that much, whereas science has most definitely influenced psychology, social studies (cf the pinker interview i linked) etc…
and i think there is something to that paradoxical relationship between the two hierarchies viz depth and universal impact across the quads…did that make sense above?
i think philosophically the assertions of enactivism and constructivism etc are very powerful in terms of depth - but it has to be acknowledged that perspectives are immaterial in certain practical ways and that science does succeed in certain ways in transcending perspectives up to a point - just as subject and object are co-enactive up to a point and it is that point or the line between the two that precisely is defined by the domains that the quadrants delineate.
simply put: the way i hear this stuff being used problematically is when it comes to layering another tool into the mix - the altitudinal map of development. now if everything is a matter of perspective (or in this case worldview) then i think three things appear to become possible - 1) for other cultures or stages of development certain things are literally true that foir us are not true - literally and 2) if i can just change my worldview/perspective then relaity will change along with it as a co-enacted worldview… (nevermind the amount of growth, practice etc it really takes to change a worldview!) 3) so who are we to say that schizophrenic people are not enlightened, angels don't really exist or 77 virgins might be waiting for the suicide bombers in heaven?
this is a mess - and though you doubt this can be the case, most integral people i have talked to in the real world actually entertain those kinds of ideas based on these kinds of misunderstandings.
though they may not be the same people - they are making the same mistake as the integral gaians who had such a problem with me (and then with me and wilber) over my critique of the secret and then with me (and wilber and stuart davis) over the va tech/pavlina incident - whcih i keep bringing up b/c you were there too and you know what teh prwevailing “integral community” position was….
I'm not sure. It's close – you've nicely captured part of what I've been trying to communicate, including some of the pomo points about value tyrrany (being careful here not to conflate pomo, enactivism, and Integral). So I would say that, on these points, I feel heard. But when you ask, “do I get this point,” I'm not entirely clear yet. I feel some discord or disconnect between this perspective and some of the points you made in your post just previous to it. But let's keep exploring this.
What do you think of my most recent post? Any thoughts on that?
Julian,
Panexperientialism is radically different than the paradigm that reigns in most scientific circles, no doubt about it. But in regards to
“this for me is part of the problem with wanting to ascribe interiority to rocks - because they are holons too and so they must have an interior as well as, say, a collective community of how it is to be the interior of a rock…. ? oy!”
I'll copy what I said to you in the long post above. Rocks are NOT holons:
Briefly, when it comes to panexperientialism, what is being suggested is not that “rocks are conscious,” but that all holons have some degree of interiority. A rock is not a holon, but an aggregate of molecular holons. It has no sense of itself as a whole; only individual holons have that (at least from the panexperientialist perspective). That interior experience is correlated with complex material bodies is true, but don't discount the complexity of atoms, etc. They do not have the kind of personal “I” consciousness that we do, but to suppose they have NO ability to prehend the world around them is, in my opinion, a greater leap than the panexperientialist claim. If we suppose matter is entirely blind until it organizes itself appropriately, we must explain why cosmic evolution seems so unambiguously to move in the direction of greater complexity. Why does time have a direction if matter is not in some sense capable of proto-intentional action? This (time asymmetry) is a HUGE problem for a strictly materialistic cosmology which has only been temporarily solved by adding a few theoretical suppositions as yet unsupported by empirical investigation.
Also, I plan on responding to some of what Pinker said in that interview. Much of it should not just be labeled under the heading “objective science.” There are many disputes within academia and the scientific world about some of the claims he is making.
J.,
In connection with Pinker, what role do you think institutions play in shaping human consciousness? I wouldn't want to go overboard in either direction with this (innate vs. social construction), but Pinker makes me think he is lining up too far on the side suggesting that everything we do is a result of our genetic inheritance. I think this is a kind of gross reductionism, and beyond that, a thinly veiled political ideology.
What say you?
I've been noticing all that you guys have been posting here. I'd love to join in or even be able to keep up with reading it, but I haven't had much time on the computer. As soon as my new computer comes in, I plan on reading through this whole symposium and play some of those videos I haven't yet seen.
I hope y'all are havin' fun! :)
Julian,
You said: well i get that one aspect of the quads is to talk about holons and their attributes, but i think the original way i interacted with it was as a way of talking about how different disciplines related to reality - what lenses they used, what kind of information they acquired and which aspects of the good true and beautiful they reveal..
Yes, of course; that's another valid way to look at / use the quadrant model. But even if you are talking about different disciplines or methodologies, the results generated by any particular mode of inquiry must be interpreted. Even in the empirical sciences, although we might wish it were otherwise, nature does not present us with simple, context-free, interpretation-free facts.
You said: i think that at a certain stage of complexity all holons have all four quadrants but i think it is an over reaching to ascribe all four quadrants to everything that exists, period.
i think we make a mistake when we try to get all of reality to fit into a system rather than having the system relate to all of reality..
this for me is part of the problem with wanting to ascribe interiority to rocks - because they are holons too and so they must have an interior as well as, say, a collective community of how it is to be the interior of a rock…. ? oy!
As Matt has also pointed out, neither according to panpsychism nor Integral pan-semiotics are rocks understood to be in possession of subjective depth. And as I said earlier, I don't think an Integral approach requires us to embrace a pan-experientialist perspective; I just believe it is a more sensible approach than expecting wholly insentient pieces of matter to suddenly and rather miraculously give rise to subjectivity or “interiority.”
You said: so i get the mistake you think i was making - but do you see what i mean viz the disciplines of the different quads and how in practical terms the right hand disciplines have radically transformed the left hand quadrants disciplines way more than in reverse, even though postmodernism has a lot to say about science - i don't know that it has impacted science that much, whereas science has most definitely influenced psychology, social studies (cf the pinker interview i linked) etc…
Well, postmodern thought (particularly postmodern hermeneutics and genealogy) is younger than empirical science, but it has already influenced and impacted both phenomenological, psychological, social, and empirical disciplines. In Integral Spirituality, Wilber argues that it has presented an even greater challenge to spiritual contemplative disciplines than science has. So, I'm not sure if the picture is as lopsided as you say.
You wrote: i think philosophically the assertions of enactivism and constructivism etc are very powerful in terms of depth - but it has to be acknowledged that perspectives are immaterial in certain practical ways and that science does succeed in certain ways in transcending perspectives up to a point - just as subject and object are co-enactive up to a point and it is that point or the line between the two that precisely is defined by the domains that the quadrants delineate.
If you are suggesting that we can trim the “interpretation part” off of the fruit of science, like so much bruised skin, or that the method of science itself achieves this, so that we are left with just the interpretation-free part, I am afraid you may be committing a fallacy of division.
What did you think of my discussion of the different views of “transcending perspectives” in my previous post?
Good night for now.
Bruce
hey thanks for acknowledging (as you have done before) the popular new age misapplication of many of these ideas.
i assume this is the pertinent paragraph:
They (we) are not suggesting that “perspectives” are particular objects which causally act on, manipulate, or interfere with external reality. Rather, we are saying that, because we are part of the world and interdependent with it, and because of the nature of our cognitive and perceptual processes, we are not able to stand apart from the world and describe “it” as it is in itself; we are saying that, when we speak about the world or “reality,” we are fooling ourselves if we think our descriptions and views are perspective-free or transcendentally Objective. That sort of objectivity is a 3p myth, one that cannot be sustained anymore. We do not mean that objects physically depend on perspectives. That is describing a particular type of interaction that makes sense within a given worldspace (which i described above), whereas the enactivist/Integral/pomo approach is trying to point out the window frame, not only the view through the window: we are saying that, while we may abstractly posit the existence of a world-in-itself, we only ever (always already) deal with perspectivally, enactively generated worldspaces – meaning, the world-as-it-appears-to-us-through-our-ongoing-evolutionarily-and-otherwise-contextualized-modes-of-interaction-and-engagement. The notion that “observation is theory laden” is relevant here. When we interact with the world, we don't simply discover bare, interpretation-free facts; that is the myth of pure, representationalist objectivity that is being critiqued here.
sure, i understand. we do however get to test these theory laden observations in ways that strive not to be biased - even though this is never 100% possible. this is what makes it science.
the above does not (as i am sure you agree) put these theory laden observations on the same level as say mythic statements about reality or magical interpretations of causality. this is the move i watch many (most) make and it is a mistake.
the scientific method still delivers more objective information than was possible before and has enabled us to make progress in everything from medicine to technology to space travel. the fact that these observations are not 100% objective (because that is not technically possible) does not negate the fact that they are as objective and as opinion/belief transcending a form of knowing as we have developed.
i think of apollo 13 slingshoting around the moon based on the emergency calculations - accurate to within one degree - of a bunch of guys in a room in houston, eventually to land squarely in the pacific ocean..
Well, postmodern thought (particularly postmodern hermeneutics and genealogy) is younger than empirical science, but it has already influenced and impacted both phenomenological, psychological, social, and empirical disciplines. In Integral Spirituality, Wilber argues that it has presented an even greater challenge to spiritual contemplative disciplines than science has. So, I'm not sure if the picture is as lopsided as you say.
this may be the case in terms of philosophical debate. but my point stands with regard to the harder sciences making massive inroads over the last 300 years into areas that were previously the domain of the softer sciences, or spiritual/religious explanation . while postmodernism may have a really valid and interesting, challenging critique of hard science, i would hazard a guess that hard science is feeling it not at all and being influenced by it very little as we continue on with cloning, the human genome project and olympic record breaking swimsuits that are less water resistant than skin.
again, far too often i hear this argument used to suppport belief in the supernatural and the magical or in pseudoscience, because in ingegral seond tier terms, this is simply another worldspace and i must just be a mean orange rationalist if i am unwilling to go along with some integral guy's propositions about everything from badly argued 911 conspiracy theories to belief in mayan prophecy to supernatural claims ascribed to this or that enligghtened guru, to essential oils “charged up” with the frequency of gold that balance your entire system by being sprayed on your body - here watch, we'll muscle test you to “prove it!” (this is almost a summary of my last three meetings with the integral community here in l.a…..)
this is not to say that a holistic AQAL approach is not highly desirable. it is - AND i think that recognizing the differences between the disciplines, the information they give and the varying degrees of depth vs. consistency is important.
that fire burns exposed skin is true for all people everywhere, period. that having more than one wife is wrong may not be, but we might be able to make a convincing moral argument for it. that belief in god gives one a sense of inner peace otherwise be unattainable may be true for some people but not for others and debate might ensue as to the meaning of peace, god and belief as well as other possible doorways into peace..
i think it is a form of quadrant absolutism - just as much as it would be to demand empirical hard scientific proof of satori and it's contemplative value - to demand that the statement that fire burns the exposed skin of all people everywhere on the planet be anally contextualized ad infinitum. (agreed?)
i am not saying that we should not look at all at the scientific window frame, just that we shouldn't overdo it in the direction of the absurd - in the same way, i don't think we shouldn't examine the neuroscience of satori, but rather that we shouldn't do it to the extreme that we overlook the unique meaning and interior value it has in the process..
i am fascinated with how the disciplines from the different quadrants relate to one another!
As Matt has also pointed out, neither according to panpsychism nor Integral pan-semiotics are rocks understood to be in possession of subjective depth. And as I said earlier, I don't think an Integral approach requires us to embrace a pan-experientialist perspective; I just believe it is a more sensible approach than expecting wholly insentient pieces of matter to suddenly and rather miraculously give rise to subjectivity or “interiority.”
while it is certainly remarkable (miraculous, even), i don't find it implausible that interiority makes an appearance for the first time in perhaps single celled organisms that exhibit intentionality of some kind. for me the lack of understanding as to how this happens doesn't make n argument for god, intelligent design, or the interiority of say stardust or supernovas. this may be a difference in temperament, and i feel no need to debate it with you. to you it seems more sensible, to me less…
two points:
1) i think you are correct in trying to get me to see that:
a) transrational does not just (as perhaps was the earlier iteration of the term from transpersonal psychology) mean contemplative, mystic and altered state peak experiences that may or may not be foreshadowing of later stages of development in the spiritual line…. but:
b) must also include transrational cognition a la postmodernism and beyond - which clearly i do not know enough about.
thanks for pointing out a big blind-spot of mine based on my own biases and areas of focus!
2) by the same token i think we have to acknowledge that failing to:
i) differentiate prerational and transrational experiences and their interpretations viz the spiritual line (via a practice-based methodology) failing to
ii) point out how much of spiritual belief is a defense against psychological and existential shadow material and failing to
iii) maintain rational critical thinking as a foundation
leads (or may lead) many to take transrational cognition (or learned cool ideas) a la postmodern relativism to mean that:
a) scientific method is no more or less accurate than magic and mythic assertions.
b) reason is the enemy of spirituality and
c) that everything, including science and including speculative metaphysics is relative and can never be proven true or false one way or the other…
the consequences for psychology, spirituality, empathy and plain old common sense are appalling - and i stand at the ready to give you examples of how i see this playing out every day in ways that vary from the deeply tragic to the plain old ridiculous!
Hi, Julian,
I appreciated both of your recent posts. I wanted to reply yesterday, but I think I'm just a bit tired after this symposium. I sat in front of the computer several times but just didn't have the energy to put my thoughts together. I also would like to write a summary / wrap-up blog for the symposium, a post possibly discussing practices that support the themes of this symposium, further responses to Adam's blog, etc. But at least this weekend, it's not coming out!
I will try to write more this evening.
Best wishes,
Balder
awesome dude - i hear ya…
i will look forward to reading that blog!
hoep you're having a relaxing sunday evening..
ooooh i should also mention that your point about rational misinterpretation of postmodern insights in a literal way is at the heart of at least some of the new age confusion is very interesting and astute!
matt
sorry i havent responded to you directly.
i tend to have more issues with the way bruce frames this stuff than i do with you - so we continue trying to understand eachother!
this has been keeping my focus…
Hey J,
I am going back over the Pinker interview right now to try and articulate how I see his perspective as rather partial, or as arising out of as much a political ideology as a scientific finding. He is far from “integral,” as we might say. He is right that our biological inheritance plays a role, but I think he marginalizes the extent to which human institutions and culture emerge amidst complexities that bring them far beyond just genetically determined tendencies. We are not blank slates, but nor are we the playing out of biological blueprints. Did you catch my comment about this above? I'd be curious to know what you think about these criticisms, though if you want to wait for me to pick out specific examples from Pinker's interview, that works, too. More soon…
Julian,
I sometimes forget that you live and work in LA LA Land! If I still lived in Sedona, I might be having exchanges and experiences a lot more similar to yours.
The main concern in your two recent posts, as I understand you, is that views such as post-metaphysics and enactivism can feed into and appear to lend support to trends and ideas in New Age and Integral communities that you find to be regressive, confused, and potentially harmful. This is a concern, of course, that you have expressed many times before. I think this is a very legitimate concern, and one of the outcomes I had hoped for in this symposium was the formulation of clearer statements of these positions (particularly in relation to spirituality) that would differentiate them from those interpretations which verge more on magical thinking.
To briefly address a few of the points in your recent posts:
* The claim that observation is theory laden runs deeper than the issue of bias (which might be seen only as an issue of “after the fact” distortion of pre-given experience, rather than going to the deeper issue of the nature of “objective observation” itself). But your general point is well taken: Neither the idea that observation is theory laden, nor the perspective of enactivism, renders the activity of science arbitrary, subjectivistic, or solipsistic. While postmodern critiques (or developments within postmodern science itself, such as quantum theory) may impact the self-understanding of the discipline in significant ways, it remains a powerful, effective, and valuable knowledge discipline – more revolutionary, socially impactful, transformative (in certain spheres), and generative of helpful new knowledge than many of the disciplines that preceded it.
* Rationality is in no way the enemy of spirituality. And in some traditions, of course, it is recognized as a powerful aid … a transformative agent. But it should be noted that “rationality” does not function in a vacuum; it too is an embodied, contextually dependent process, not an abstract, disembodied faculty which can evaluate or “act on” reality from the outside.
* When you question the assertion “that everything, including science and including speculative metaphysics is relative and can never be proven true or false one way or the other…,” I want to know what you mean by “relative.” Because, from my perspective, science is an historical, embodied, contextually situated practice. It does not generate absolute, perspective- or interpretation-free data. (This is not an indictment of it!)
* Your point about how spiritual material is often used as a psychological defense is well taken. I agree. I believe the careful deconstruction (and reconstruction) of self-and-world that something like an Integral/enactive spirituality can effect can be genuinely transformative and healing, in the right context; but it appears that, like anything else, these things can also be co-opted for defensive or escapist ends.
There's more to discuss here, of course, but I'll leave that for future posts. I want to do a sort of “so what” post, looking more constructively at what the perspectives explored in this symposium offer. Maybe we should work on something together. Maybe each do a brief “wrap up” piece that summarizes what we've taken from this exercise, after we've discussed these things a bit more.
Best wishes,
Bruce
Reason.com isn't loading for some reason, but I had a portion of the interview with Pinker saved on my disk, so I'll just use some excerpts from there…
Reason: You say in The Blank Slate that Hobbes was right and Rousseau was wrong. Is civilization basically the development of institutions designed to rein in male violence?
Pinker: I think that's got a lot of truth to it, absolutely. That's what the rule of law is, and that's what a democracy is for. I don't think it's wiped out these impulses, and our fantasy lives may not be that different from those of the Yanomamo warrior. But we don't actually act on them. We can have lust and mayhem in our hearts, but not necessarily in our actions.
For fear of enacting the myth of the “noble savage,” I'll say that Rousseau was painting a rather utopian image that was mistaken in many respects. But to put forth the opposite hypothesis, that civilization is about reigning in agressive male tendencies, seems just as misguided. The prehistorical goddess worshipping traditions were very much dominated by the sense in which the feminine was the violent and bloodthirsty principle. Male sacrifice was a common occurance, as blood was though to be a neccessary fertilizer for the coming year's crop. War as we understand it today (as an attempt to conquer a people, or possess land) was not yet a mainstay, as the Great Mother (the earth) was still recognized as the only true source of power. No man would dare attempt to gain power for himself for fear of castration, etc. If the goal of civilization was, as Pinker believes, to reign in violence, it has succeeded only to the degree that the terrible aspect of the feminine principle has been repressed, cropping up now as our apparently more acceptable form of ritual sacrifice, colonial warfare in the name of the paternalistic empire. I guess the flip here from the bloodthirsty feminine to the bloodthirsty masculine remains rather unconscious, as from the civilized ego's point of view, femininity represents something fragile and motherly, while the masculine stands for oppresion and violence. In many ways, civilization is more violent than prehistoric humanity. Don't forget that it was the culmination of the Enlightenment's emphasis on nationalism and “rights” that gave us the two world wars of the last century. It might not be a stretch to say that more people died in these battles than in all the human inflicted violence of prehistoric times combined. Civilization's attitude toward the natural world seems to be about as violent as one could imagine, as well. The deep respect for the earth reflected by the rituals of prehistorical people's may have been a bit overboard, being that they did practice human sacrifice as a fertility right. But civilized man's relationship to nature has gone too far in the opposite direction, towards complete disrespect of nature, if you ask me.
Reason: Why is the ghost in the machine doctrine a myth?
Pinker: Neuroscience is showing that all aspects of mental life – every emotion, every thought pattern, every memory – can be tied to the physiological activity or structure of the brain. Cognitive science has shown that feats that were formerly thought to be doable by mental stuff alone can be duplicated by machines, that motives and goals can be understood in terms of feedback and cybernetic mechanisms, and that thinking can be understood as a kind of computation. Not computation the way your IBM PC does computation, but computation nonetheless – a kind of fuzzy analog to parallel computation. So intelligence, which formerly seemed miraculous – something that mere matter could not possibly accomplish or explain – can now be understood as a kind of computation process.
A “fuzzy analog,” indeed. Too fuzzy, I would argue, to be considered useful as a metaphor. That “motives and goals” can be understood as mechanisms is true enough. The question remains, though, if they are best understood this way, or if attempting to do so squeezes off most of what makes these motives really interesting phenomena to begin with. Questions about the nature of consciousness are very easily “solved” by simply saying consciousness does not exist. Now I wouldn't want to get stuck in the old Cartesian way of thinking about “mental stuff.” Mind and matter are not two separate substances. But while Pinker elsewhere quickly brushes aside the Cartesian understanding of mind as outdated superstition, he completely swallows the other half of Descartes' dualism, that matter is a purely insentient mechanism. My feeling is that this is a false dichotomy, and that when science enforces it the public ends up thinking that they are determined machines without free will, and that their deep emotional core is a wild, destructive animal waiting to lash out at any moment. This “scientistic myth” has done great harm to our collective psyche, in my opinion. That intelligence can be understood as a computational process is somewhat of an exaggeration. Work done by Damasio, Sam Harris, and others, has shown the neurological connection between the prefrontal cortex (associated with abstract reasoning) and amygdala (emotional processing) runs deep; so deep that intellectual and emotional faculties cannot so easily be divided into separate modes. I think neuroscience would be hard-pressed to develop a computational way of measuring emotional qualities. They are trying, no doubt. But I don't think the result will be satisfying. Understanding emotion seems to require bringing purpose irreducibly into play. The organism's motivations are not just “cybernetic mechanisms,” but teleological acts of will. To reduce the later to the former is quite obviously a form quadrant reductionism.
Reason: Do you feel like we're going through a cycle of anti-science sentiment, of technophobia? Biotechnology, in particular, has raised the ire of both the right and the left.
Pinker: I think part of the fear of biotechnology really comes from a notion of the ghost in the machine. One of the great fears of cloning – the absurd idea that cloning is going to create an army of mindless drones – comes from a mental model of cloning that says that it's duplicating the body without a soul. The other fear is that it is some kind Faustian grab at immortality, a hubristic desire to make ourselves immortal. That relies on a mental model of cloning as duplicating the soul together with the body. So if I clone myself, that's actually going to be me. So much of the debate on cloning comes from these misconceptions of what it is. Which I think makes perfect sense, if the mental model that most people have of other humans is a body inhabited by a ghost.
I also think there's a notion of purity vs. contamination at work. It's a kind of noble savage myth. Cognitive psychologists call it “intuitive essentialism” – that living things have an essence that gives rise to their biological properties. It's easy to think of genetically modified foods as living things whose essences have been contaminated by polluting elements as opposed to the biological view, which is that organisms are bundles of genes which vary continuously over the course of evolution
This part of the interview gets into the reason why I think it is rather unsettling that, as you said J, the hard sciences have not paid the slightest bit of attention to postmodern criticism. We are forging ahead with biotechnology as a society naively assuming that the motives of the scientists involved are purely objective. This is complete fantasy, though. GMO research is funded for the sole purpose of making corporations rich. The government passes legislation approving these foods without doing the kind of in depth research that should be done to really determine if they are safe b/c of the tremendous influence of agrobusiness lobbyists.
Organisms are bundles of genes that naturally shift through the course of millenia, but what we are doing today is nothing like this natural process. Corporations are making decisions based solely on greed. They are not worried about the issue of genetic diversity one bit, which has already brought our civilization to the verge of complete collapse. 70% of the crops grown worldwide are from GMO seeds, and each species (corn, wheat, rice, soy, etc.) is genetically identical, such that if a infection takes root in any particular crop, it could very quickly drive the entire population into extinction. This is already happening to Chiquita bannana co. Very soon, we will not be able to buy the familiar species of bannana at the grocery store. Not to damn all genetic tampering. We can, with a little more thought, use these technologies to benefit humanity and the planet. But thus far, global capitalism has used them to do quite the opposite. Here is Vadana Shiva talking about this issue.
My fear in regards to cloning is not that my soul might be duplicated, but that our modern civilization's lack of respect for the natural world may be translated into a lack of respect for the lifeforms that are produced via cloning, as though they are just more products to be used however we humans want.
Reason: In an earlier book, How the Mind Works, you say it's possible we will never understand the mind. Do you still believe that?
Pinker: We may never understand it at an intuitively satisfying level. From a scientific standpoint, I think we can be satisfied that every aspect of conscious experience can be tied to or caused by some process in the brain. But what it actually feels like to have a brain is one of these age-old paradoxes that probably is an artifact of the way our mind conceptualizes things. I would liken it to our puzzlement over how time can begin at the Big Bang. It's impossible not to think, well, what was it like before the Big Bang? Or, what is the effect of the universe being curved in the fourth dimension – what exactly does that look like? There, the problem is not a deficit in physics; the problem is a deficit in our own intuition. There is an aspect of reality that can never be intuitively satisfying even though our best science tells us that it is true.
Here again, I think Pinker is performing a gross quadrant reduction of conscious experience to brain mechanism. There is as of yet not even a hint of what a feasible explanation for the production of consciousness by way of neural mechanisms might look like. I don't think this is because of an “age-old paradox,” but the result of asking the wrong questions, of framing the problem in such a way that we very quickly reach an impasse. The relation between conscious experience and empirical observation seems to be understandable, but only once we have cleared away the mistaken frame that pits primative animism (mind pervades the world) against modern materialism (mind is an illusion). Both of these are oversimplifications, which is why I prefer panexperientialism (which, again, has nothing to do with believing rocks are conscious).
Much of materialistic/reductionistic science, while very well reasoned and logically bulletproof, seems to start from incorrect premises (like that scientific consciousness is somehow stands outside and above the rest of human consciousness, or that mind and matter are sharply divided, or that only physical necessity and historical fluke account for the whole development of life, on a collective and individual level). Pinker falls right in line with all this, and as I said seems to reduce the left hand quadrants to the right (as most mainstream cognitive scientists do).
Curious to hear your response, J.
take care,
Matt
Hey Julian!
I just quickly read through your blog again. I do feel I have more of a sense of where you're coming from. In general, you seem fairly willing to share a more personal side of yourself. I do like getting a more clear picture of your life away from the computer.
I find it intriguing how this format gives you an opportunity to express part of yourself that doesn't normally have an outlet. However, this outlet for your intellectuality seems secondary to your real world activities, and so intellectuality itself seems secondary to you (and your embodied practices). Is that how you perceive it or no? I was wondering if that is some of what the conflict is between you and Bruce. For Bruce, intellectuality seems more primary… to the extent that he shares much less about his personal life and subjective experience. Might this partly be a difference between Sensation function and Intuition function?
You are often saying that a particular idea or thought experiment is interesting, but you often follow it with a “so what then?” Abstraction (Intuition function?) seems only interesting to you as long as it serves the “real” world (Sensation function?). I've been a bit reluctant to put arguments forward to you because I get the sense that an “abstract” argument isn't as convincing for you. What simply makes sense to me doesn't simply make sense to you, and vice versa.
One thing I was trying to get at with my boundary types is that what may seem like just abstraction or just belief to you actually fits a thin boundary types “real” experience. Research shows that thin boundary types aren't only more likely to believe in the paranormal for they are also more likely to claim to have experienced the paranormal. Of course, you can say that such a person is deluded for experiencing woo woo hallucinations or otherwise misinterpreting the data.
What is real is very tricky. An example I've had on my mind recently is freewill. There is no scientific reason to believe in freewill. Its a purely metaphysical belief. There is nothing in human behavior that can't be explained by a mechanistic model… even the evidence of enactivism can be explained mechanistically. The idea of freewill is unecessary from a rational objective viewpoint, but still we feel that freewill exists. According to the rule of parsimony, discounting freewill would be the simpler theory, but in doing so we would discount some essence of what it means to be human. Freewill (along with all of consciousness) is not so different from the paranormal in that its scientifically problematic.
You can summon the old standby of commonsense which is just to say that it makes sense to you and to many others. However, the same goes for the paranormal. According to the commonsense of the masses, the paranormal makes sense. The vast majority of the world's population believes in some form of the paranormal. So, is commonsense reliable or not? If not, we're in quite a quagmire.
Ben,
You said: I find it intriguing how this format gives you an opportunity to express part of yourself that doesn't normally have an outlet. However, this outlet for your intellectuality seems secondary to your real world activities, and so intellectuality itself seems secondary to you (and your embodied practices). Is that how you perceive it or no? I was wondering if that is some of what the conflict is between you and Bruce. For Bruce, intellectuality seems more primary… to the extent that he shares much less about his personal life and subjective experience. Might this partly be a difference between Sensation function and Intuition function?
How much of what I've written here on Gaia have you read to arrive at this assessment of me? On what are you basing your conclusion that I am essentially a non-self-disclosing, primarily intellectual, impersonal type? I feel like I'm getting type-cast, and I'm resistant to this, especially since I expect you are basing this conclusion on a limited number of exchanges with me. (Typology is cool, and I'm interested in it, but one of its dangers is type-casting and pigeon-holing).
Here are some of my Gaia blog entries that contain personal stories, self-disclosure, emotional/poetic self-expression, excursions in fantasy, etc. Please, give them a glance! I'd be delighted to share a different side of myself with you and perhaps broaden this rather narrow image you've formed of me.
Bandung (a true story from my travels in Indonesia)
A Musical Travelogue series (from my studies and travels in Asia)
What Imaginary Worlds Did You Create as a Child? (a Zaadz/Gaia QAR response)
What's Your First Memory of the Night Sky? (another Zaadz/Gaia QAR response)
The Crossing (poetic reflections on a landscape and season I love)
Sedona Spirit
My Thoughts Twenty-One Years Ago Today (an old journal entry)
Five Things People Don't Know About Me (a tag game response)
Young Prince Siddhartha (A Buddhist Fable)
Snapshots from India (some haiku I wrote in India)
Best wishes,
Balder
P.S. I just saw your new comment on your log entry. Looks like we're on the same page! I'll comment more over there….
hey bruce, it may be that you are indeed being pigeonholed in general by all the spiritualists who see integral theory as being overly intellectual……
i followed your blog conversations with adam two years ago (or so) and i found the dynamic being buddhism and atheism really interesting………
i have to say that this medium is fairly impersonal and when we consider the content which is usually pretty deep and intellectual it's easy to come across as unfeeling……
thx. matt. for continually deconstructing the insanity of the orange rationalist worldview which is as lethal as any amber intolerance…….
ben, i just read your blog….but there is a intense low pressure system moving thu vancouver and it's kicking the crap out of my body so i have to go to sleep………i'll reread it tomorrow and offer my handful of loonies……..:)
I'm not typecasting you, Bruce. I haven't even made a guess about what type you are, and I'm quite reluctant about applying typology to individuals I meet. I did point towards you being either a Thinking type or have a Thinking persona, but that leaves things pretty wide open. I don't see that as an extreme assessment. Even you wondered about your having developed a Thinking persona.
I'm only basing my assessment on blogs of yours I've read recently. For whatever reason, maybe you've just been in a more abstract mood recently because of these debates with Julian. I have seen some blogs where you mention a little more about your life, but you do tend to keep the personal and abstract in separate blogs. If you don't wish to be perceived that way, then that is fine. I'm just saying that I prefer when the abstract and personal is mixed up together, and maybe you don't (?). Anyways, I thank you for providing the links to these previous blogs of yours.
In this last comment of yours, I feel a more emotional presence from you… not to imply that you are unemotional. That helps me because then I actually know where you're coming from. I don't know if it was me projecting or not, but I felt you were in a teacher mode and so there wasn't a level playing field. I realize you see me as just being antagonistic, but I want a genuine interaction beyond these recent debates. I would guess that you also want the same.
My view of you is extremely limited and yours of me. You keep saying that I'm projecting or have baggage, and I feel the same about you. So, that now its become clear that we are just two normal people who both have our separate issues, maybe we can relate to eachother differently.
I understand, Ben. I felt I was being put in a box in some of your recent comments, because you were characterizing me as being a certain type, in contrast with Julian. And I wanted to know what you were basing that assessment on, feeling it was likely on a limited exposure to me and my writing here. You admitted as much on your last post on your blog – a post which I appreciated very much for its warmth, openness, and directness.
In different sorts of conversations, I will use different voices, rather than mixing them all up. Though I do try to integrate some of my poetic sensibilities into even my abstract, theoretical writings.
One thing to keep in mind – I do – is that I teach at a school where many of my students are likely to visit a spiritual networking website like this. So, I am a little careful about what I say, maybe not hanging out as rawly here in public as I do on some of the private forums in which I participate.
Anyway, I hope you do check out some of the other blog posts. But more importantly, I hope we can connect more deeply and authentically with each other as our conversation(s) continue.
Best wishes,
Bruce
Thanks for mentioning that you are more reserved because of the potential of your students visiting here. That would definitely give a filtered if not distorted view of you that I'm sure would be much different in a more private situation. I should have considered that more in my assessment because that thought had crossed my mind.
Its kind of funny because I'm a bit opposite. I tend to let things hang out more online in general no matter what the situation. Partly, this has to do with my Introverted Feeling that shows more online than it would if you met me in the flesh. People normally perceive me as being very solid and stable. Just the other day, one of my co-workers said that I was the most Zen-like person she knows.
The reason for this is because in normal life I just don't care about most things enough to express my internal experience, but a discussion like this touches on very personal issues because to me ideas are always personal. I'm not a teacher like you and so I don't separate my discussion of ideas from my discussion of the personal. I have no students that will find me out.
Another thing is that my first experience of online discussions came from an INFP forum. You'd have a better context of where I'm coming from if you were to observe this forum. Interpersonal discussion is considered normal on that forum. I know that my expectations are therefore a bit outside of the norm, but I still forget that most people don't perceive the online world the way a group of INFPs view it.
very interesting and astute commentary on the pinker aticle matt.
i must say thoug, i don't find talking about consciousness as a product of brain function reductionist, or to be commiting a quadrant error. what is the alternative explanation?
can you describe a middle ground between this position and the pure dualism of mind/soul as something other than brain/body altogether? (ironically i think may spiritually minded people pillory descartes every chance they get while unwittingly buy into a version of his religiously-influenced dualism in their concept of the soul, consciousness, past lives etc… while still holding a liberal view on things like abortion!
but who said consistency was important?!
well i think my point bruce was to demonstrate that my disagreeing with the position is not a function of me not understanding it. i understand it and then the points in discord with it atttempt to illustrate why i don't completely buy it - or perhaps find it to be (wait….) a partial perspective..
My concern was not that you couldn't intellectually grasp it, but that you possibly haven't really considered or digested its implications. My sense is that your “default position” in thinking about these issues is still essentially a representationist, object-oriented ontology. Which, of course, is fine, if that's what you find most convincing. I think Matt and I are just trying to point out why, although enactivism is also a partial perspective (Wilber amends it, for instance with AQAL tetra-enactivism), it is nevertheless stronger than its predecessors.
Julian,
That conscious experience and the nervous system are correlated is quite clear. But there is a big difference between acknowledging a correlation and positing that the brain causes consciousness. I do not ascribe to the latter possibility for several reasons, the most obvious being that there is absolutely no empirical evidence for it, nor is there a coherent theory to explain how it might work. There are all kinds of mechanical explanations for how the brain might steer us around the world, process verbal information, etc., without the need of any mysterious “consciousness;” but we cannot explain consciousness away, because if you understand the meaning of these words, you are awake, aware, and experiencing yourself as alive. Nonetheless, we have absolutely no explanation for how neurons create interiority. If you know of one, please enlighten me! What the evidence coming out of the neurosciences has shown (at least in my opinion) is that, as consciousness shifts between different states, brain activity is also shifting. Whether there is an exact 1-to-1 shift is not yet clear, but my guess is that no such exact, lock-step connection will be found, at least not as some general map that applies to every individual. Even in the same individual, the conscious experience associated with one brain region (or synchronously firing regions) can change over time, such that the way experience and neurophysiology align is extremely dynamic.
I think getting out of the Cartesian fold will require re-evaluating our understanding of matter, as much as it will our understanding of “the soul.” Instead of positing an artificial boundary between the animate and the inanimate, or between mental and physical qualities, I think we need a kind of mature animism, otherwise known as panpsychism or panexperientialism. This doesn't mean we must come to understand rocks as conscious, but that we deconstruct the Enlightenment notion that consciousness and experience are the same. Descartes, Kant, and others make this assumption, and it leads them to believe that human beings are very special, and very separate from the natural world around them. Instead, we might apply our more recent understanding of depth psychology and evolution in order to realize how many layers of experience exist below that of waking/rational/egoic consciousness, and that a continuum must exist between the most primordial forms of experience and the most complex. The findings of quantum physics are easily inflated, but one of the things we have discovered beyond a doubt is that matter is not made up of inert particles. Subatomic particles “act,” which is to say that they exhibit spontaneous behavior which is not predictable even in principle (ie, it is not a result of a lack of information on our part). I find this significant because it suggests a degree of interiority, however small. If these particles were merely blind billiard balls moving as the result of exterior forces, we would not expect to find any sponteneity whatsoever. When it comes to re-evaluating how we understand the soul, i think you're right to point out the inconsistancy of those who attack Descartes only to appropriate his view of the soul as our immaterial essence. I think we have discussed the implications of enactivism concerning the self enough for you to know that this is not my view, that on the contrary, I see the self as completely lacking any essense, immaterial or material. My personal consciousness is what gets brougth forth in every moment of transaction with the world and with other I's. Outside of these relationships, there is no me. As far as what might occur experientially at death, I, like Varela, can only remain in the question.
very well said matt - thought provoking and clear - thanks!
haha - i hear you bruce. that makes sense.. i agree (partially) and diaggree (partially) and probably (mostly) need to keep learning more and digesting the relevance before i have a well integrated and nuanced opinion..
all the best
~j
I'm curious to know more about how you relate to these issues, J… What is your feeling regarding the relationship between matter (whether atoms or brains) and experience? What was it exactly that drew you to Pinker's approach to understanding the human being, etc?
Matt, you explained yourself well in your last comment.
What you said is related to the point I was trying to make with my freewill example. Present science can only claim a loose correlation between brain and consciousness, but causal links aren't clear as far as I know. Causal links can be conjectured about in terms of specific experiences but not consciousness as a general state.
We can poke at a part of the brain and then ask the person what they're experience is. However, even there causation is complex.
To use a much simpler example… When a knob on a radio is turned, the music may switch to different music but is the knob isn't causing the music. There is a perfectly rational explanation for the music, but its not immediately obvious to someone who doesn't already know about radios. Studying the radio for years may never lead to an answer because part of the mechanism for music exists outside of the radio many miles away with the transmitter at the radio station. Even so, the music isn't just at the radio station either because the radio waves once transmitted will travel throughout space possibly being picked up by an alien race billions of years later.
To relate it to what Matt was saying, outside of the relationship of transmitters and receivers, there is no music on a radio. I'm not saying that humans are just receivers of consciousness. I was just wanting to point out how causal connections can be very indirect and not very apparent to our bodily senses, not seemingly rational to our commonsense.
Of course, to your viewpoint, all of this abstract theorizing might be irrelevant to your life and your practice. You can disagree because it just doesn't make intuitive sense to you or because it seems to have no application to your life. Or you could say its true but partial. And those are perfectly fair responses.
Even so, it does make sense to others and to these people such conjectures do seem applicable to their lives. For instance, if we consider “interiority” to be a fundamental factor to subatomic particles, then this can deepen our sense of being a part of the world. So, this could lead one to feel more responsible to a world beyond mere human interests, and to feel more compassion towards others in that larger sense of the world. Is panpsychism practical? It depends on how one defines practicality and to which end one applies it.
As science is too limited at present, we can't turn to science as final arbiter. So, where can we turn to? It seems we must rely on our own sense of things, our own experiences and observations combined with the limited evidence of science. Then, we attempt to hash it out in debate, but ultimately it still comes down to our personal opinion.
So, how do we sort through all the data to discern what is pertinent to our personal lives? First, we have to decide what is our goal, our purpose. Then, we pick the worldview that can be accomodated by at least some of the evidence and at the same time lead us to the goal/purpose we've chosen.
The problem is that, in this process, we can't deternime who is right because there are many viewpoints that can accomodate the same set of data. Probably the best we can do is to calculate which worldviews are the least likely and also the least useful for our purposes. Anyway you cut it, there is a large element of non-rationality in this endeavor.
As such, where can a discussion like this lead? I get the feeling that we all have many very strong differences. We have different life experiences, different personalities, and different roles we play (here and elsewhere). We define practicality differently and have different goals and purposes to which we apply it. We have different reasons that bring us to a discussion such as this and we have different expectations of what such a discussion should serve.
There might be a better question to ask. What do we all have in common and what are the base tenets we agree upon? What are we agreeing to just in having a discussion like this? What are the underlying assumptions that go unstated?
I don't know if that is helpful or not. I'm feeling a bit out of the loop here. At the moment, I'm not quite grasping what is the fundamental issue, the fundamental difference of perspective. Julian says he understands but disagrees. Bruce still seems to think that full understanding hasn't yet been reached. Matt seems to be mostly just trying to explain his own viewpoint in response to Julian.
jewels…this was an excellent presentation…i really enjoyed reading it…*