Part 1: Attending to...
Iain McGilchrist of Talisker House, located at the foot of Preshal More on the Isle of Skye with a breathtaking view of the ocean, has made a few observations about attention that are worth noting here. It all began when he attended a lecture by John Cutting on the lateralization of brain functions. That was the seed that led to two books: The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021). Suffice to say, attention is a bit more complex than one might think. Very briefly, there’s at least two general ways of attending. How we attend also influences what we fail to attend to - what we neglect. So let’s get straight to the chase.
Today we find ourselves in a cultural moment, the Anthropocene, that is defined by neglect. Not just neglect in the ordinary sense of the word, as in “I neglected to buy food on my way home today, and therefore will go to bed without my supper”. This is a more thoroughgoing form of neglect, sometimes called inattentional blindness, in which it never even occurs to us that we should buy food in the first place. In other words, we don’t know what it is that we are neglecting. And so, the solution isn’t to “tie a string around our finger” so that we remember to buy food. We must ask ourselves “Why are we not attending to something that is so important? Is it something about the way in which our attention operates that is preventing us from seeing clearly, from seeing to our needs? And if so, what can we do about that?”
Here is where McGilchrist’s research comes in. How we attend is at least as important, if not more important, than what we attend to. It’s critical for our future. The reason we haven’t recognized this sooner is because the very way in which we attend prevents us from locating the problem at this level in the first place. Furthermore, the solution appears entirely counterintuitive - enhancing our focused attention will merely further prevent us from attending to these consequential aspects of life. Why is that? Before we go any further, we need to understand the two different ways of attending and how this is a result of brain lateralization. The brain is divided down the middle into a left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH), with demonstrably different psychological profiles. The right hemisphere has a more "global mode of apprehension" that sees the big picture, integrates context, and considers nuance. The left hemisphere has a more detached, narrowly-focused attention that is used for grasping things (metaphorically and literally), but if over-indulged, can dispose us to extremism and alienation. Both ways of attending are important, but for different reasons. Another way of thinking about the differences is that the left hemisphere treats the world like a predator would; it locks onto something to chase it down and kill it. A bird uses its left hemisphere to identify if a grain is food or sand, while simultaneously using its right hemisphere to be on guard for predators. McGilchrist writes:
"Each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything – just in a reliably different way. The right hemisphere is primary in the bringing about of the experienced world. As far as the left hemisphere is concerned, what it doesn’t attend to doesn’t exist. A common consequence of a stroke in the right hemisphere is a disorder called 'hemineglect' or just 'neglect'. It leads to a failure to take into account half the world. Unlike subjects affected by hemianopia, writes neuropsychologist Edoardo Bisiach, "neglect patients not only do not see stimuli presented in the contralateral half of space, but behave as if that half of space did not exist and never had existed. Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of neglect is perhaps this: patients suffering from it, not only are unable to perceive the left side of space, but are not even able to conceive it." One patient with neglect, as reported by Peter Halligan & John Marshall, recounted "I knew the word ‘neglect’ was a sort of medical term for whatever was wrong, but the word bothered me, because you only neglect something that is actually there, don’t you? If it is not there, how can you neglect it? It does not seem right to me that the word ‘neglect’ should be used to describe it. I think they thought I was definitely, deliberately not looking to the left. I wasn’t really... If it is not there, you are not neglecting it." These patients exhibit not just neglect, but what is called anosognosia (Greek a, not, + nosos, disease, + gnosis, knowledge), unwillingness to acknowledge a deficit, as we have noted. This is almost always consequent on right hemisphere damage. This might sound like a simple cognitive problem, a neglect of information, rather than, as it is, a denial of experience. There is not just a derangement of cognition (knowledge about), but of affect (emotional involvement with), known as anosodiaphoria (Greek adiaphoria, indifference)."
"The right hemisphere is sensitive to the whole picture in space and time, background and periphery, while the left hemisphere is focused on what is central in the field of vision and lies in the foreground. It gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail. (People who lose their right hemispheres have a pathological narrowing of the window of attention.) Focused attention, the only kind the left hemisphere can offer, makes us blind to almost anything, however arresting and however close, that happens to be going on outside our sphere of concern at that moment in time. So focused is the left hemisphere on what it is up to, that it is content to ignore all that is irrelevant to its purpose. When we are highly focused on a single aspect of a situation we can miss obvious events happening right under our noses."
In a separate presentation McGilchrist concluded "We've drifted further to the left hemisphere's point of view nowadays. We live in a world which is paradoxical. We pursue happiness and it leads to resentment, unhappiness, and an explosion of mental illness. We have more information, but we get less and less able to use it, to understand it, to be wise." The combination of neglect, denial, and indifference that characterizes our relationship with much of the world today represents a significant challenge to overcome. Though we can perceive the world with our senses, our ability to actually imagine and attend to it as it is presented may be diminished. Locating the source of the problem at this level helps to explain why we face many of the crises we do today. The hyperfocus on the part, to the neglect of the whole, leads to dissolution and the escalation of global risks. When we become blinded by narrow pursuits, and blind to our own limitations, we often disregard risk factors, if we even see them to begin with. At the local scale, this applies just as well to personal health and the quality of our relationships with others.
And so we need to shift to a more balanced way of attending to life, to better appreciate context and circumstances, the peripheral conditions that are always one step removed from the narrow center of focus. No amount of increasing the focus of our attention can reveal what is needed, it cannot disclose the whole picture. Increased focus only serves to exclude larger portions from view. Instead, we must value that which is at the periphery of our attention, what is outside the narrow focus of the LH. "Depth is the sense of a something lying beyond. It is only in reference to what is lying both beyond and around something that it can be understood, and this is what is meant by context." (TMAHE) An old issue of Reader's Digest quoted a saying that John Lennon later made famous when he put it in a song: "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." That stuff we fail to focus on is 97% of the field of view, that’s where life is going on, not in the narrow 3% we can focus on at any one time. This is why it’s so hard to fully appreciate the circumstances we find ourselves in. Another song instructs us that it “'tain't what you do, it's the way that you do it”. McGilchrist reiterated, “Attention is not just another “cognitive function” – it is actually nothing less than the way in which we relate to the world. And it doesn’t just dictate the kind of relationship we have with whatever it is: it dictates what it is that we come to have a relationship with … nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.” But making that shift back toward a RH way of attending won’t be easy. “The LH has three great advantages. It has control of the voice and the means of argument: the three Ls – language, logic, and linearity. It has control of the media. The left hemisphere's world is reflexive, and refers us back internally, not outwards to the embodied world. It does not care to turn its attention to the world 'outside the window'... Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.” To shift our way of attending we might consider how the RH engages with the world. "The world of the right hemisphere is the world that presences to us, that of the left hemisphere a re-presentation." To adapt Korzybski's phrase, the left hemisphere is the 'map' while the right hemisphere is the 'territory', the very world of experience. It is more capable of understanding music, play, and curious engagement as opposed to detached verbal analysis, and the endless consumption thereof encouraged by significant portions of the media environment.
How do we shift attention? We need a theory about how we attend, why we attend in seemingly different ways, and how attention is able to shift to begin with. That might ground a new narrative, a story for why stepping back to see the big picture of relationship to Earth is going to be (and in most respects is) far better than a reductionist narrative that erases value from our lives and blinds us to holistic considerations. We need a theory that can help people remove their ‘mental block’, open their eyes, see things clearly, and lead us away from nihilism and back to a flourishing world. It could be the one McGilchrist described. That idea is by no means original with him. He is merely reinterpreting a much older recognition to a contemporary audience that hasn't heard it before; there are many Indigenous teachings around the world, such as that of Taronhiawagon and Tawiscara (Iroquois), that described the same idea before he did.
The "be here now" mantra of Ram Dass, allowing ourselves to be absorbed in what we are actually doing now and not distracted by the LH's "monkey mind" is relevant. The RH has more of an intuitive "wuwei" approach (spontaneity observed in uncontrolled, quick, intuitive, relaxed, effective, and seemingly natural actions or behaviors, as described by Edward Slingerland) than a cognitive behavior therapy approach. Echoing Wang Yangming's "unity of knowledge and action", we might attend more to the interaction between the mind and body, and better appreciate factors contributing to our health like sleep, diet, and exercise. And we might thereby address the decline of mental health in Western nations as seen in the rise of anxiety and psychosomatic disorders. Action is the key to psychologist Timothy Pychyl's most offered strategy for addressing procrastination, the mantra "just get started!" I’m also reminded of the Zen parable: "Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters." My former philosophy professor, Walter Benesch, liked to recite this parable often, and indeed, in his old age he regularly warned students about the dangers of the 'map' and took greater delight in the living world of experience. As children, we grow up viewing the world with eyes full of wonder, then as adults, sometimes, the magic begins to fade. But this is not an inevitable consequence of aging. It is instead a consequence of shifting our way of attending to the world. We can see “mountains as mountains” once again, but not if we retreat to the way of attending that the LH employs. In some cultures, attention is considered to be a skill that can be taught like any other. Perhaps many of us may need to relearn and re-embrace the RH way of attending. It's not just a way of recapturing a more youthful and vital view of life, but a way that is better able to preserve everything we hold dear throughout our life. McGilchrist himself famously avoids offering much in the way of a prescriptive approach for exactly how to do that. His books are not shelved in the self-help section of a bookstore, nor with popular psychology (like Herrmann's "brain dominance" test). His interviewers often try to pin him down, or ask for a list of things to do. To one of them he replied "That openness of mind, that willingness to acknowledge that one doesn't know everything, that one's reaching and searching for something, is far more fruitful and spiritual to me than saying 'I know it, it's written down in this book, and these are the rules.'" ...The "what" is not the issue, it's the "how". And the fact that so many people are still asking for the "what" underscores just how far we still need to go.
Part 2: ...the terrain...
In Simulacra and Simulation (1981) Jean Baudrillard argued that in contemporary society the map has come to precede the territory, and the simulated copy has superseded the original object. Slavoj Žižek extended this thesis further in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), referencing a line from Baudrillard's book. And there are also parallels with Niko Tinbergen's research on the supernormal stimulus effect, as well as thought experiments like Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis and Robert Nozick’s experience machine (and Joshua Greene’s reformulation of it). We are fascinated with the virtual, the metaverse, the hyperreal. That fascination has generated numerous books, movies, and the parallel worlds available on the information superhighways we increasingly live and work through and within. Why is this, and how has it come to pass? In The Matter with Things Iain McGilchrist writes "Language may not be about communication, primarily, at all. It may instead be a way of mapping the world – a system of symbols that reflects the world. Words, according to this view, are tokens for things, and grammar a schema of how they relate, enabling us to plan a strategy and manipulate more effectively. As a map enables us to see things that just living headlong ‘at ground level’ would never allow us to see, so language, the manipulation of those symbols, enables us to see, as if ‘from above’, what the overwhelming impact of immediate experience hides from us. It enables alternative hypotheses to be compared and examined for their projected consequences. We can, for the first time, go ‘offline’ and play with the shapes." He continues, "With the advent of language, being able to go offline creates a relatively abstracted and virtual world alongside the immediate world of perceptual experience." The virtual world is where the evolution of the LH's form of attention leads, given its narrow focus, and tendency to decontextualize from time, space, the body, and emotion. So to sum up, "the right hemisphere is largely responsible for sustaining the lived world we inhabit, while the left hemisphere deals mainly with a theoretical schema or map – a representation only." Perhaps instead of the simulation hypothesis, we need an "anti-simulation hypothesis" in keeping with Rodney Brooks, who wrote "The world is its own best model. It is always exactly up to date. It always contains every detail there is to be known."
Social media, with its "endless recording of the trivia of daily life", and the growing "attention economy", fragments and erodes attention (see Tristan Harris). This can lead to a situation where we confuse the map with the world that it maps. "Living in the map, not the world: words that refer only to other words; abstractions that become more real than actualities; symbols that usurp the power of what they symbolise: the triumph of theory over embodied experience. The assumption that the failing is in humanity if we don’t fit the model, not that there is a failing in the model if it doesn’t fit humanity: the map is, it would seem, more real than the terrain." McGilchrist fears that this resonates with the world-picture of the average Western citizen. It looks a lot like the world described by Baudrillard. McGilchrist goes on, "As Cutting formulates it, in The Psychopathology of Thingness (2017), 'the schizophrenic self is concerned with universal essences, not particular things or persons... with names and signs, signifiers detached from what they signify, and... talks like a philosopher'." In The Unconscious (1915) Freud made the same comparison: "the expression and content of our philosophizing then begins to acquire an unwelcome resemblance to the mode of operation of schizophrenics". F.C.S. Schiller wrote “If you insist on having a system of eternal and immutable 'truth,' you can get it only by abstracting from those characteristics of reality, which we try to express by the terms individuality, time, and change. But you must pay the price for a formula that will enable you to make assertions that hold good far beyond the limits of your experience.” He argued that the reality of time and change is intrinsically opposed to the very modus operandi of all systems of abstract metaphysics. Since the possibility to change is a precondition of any moral action (or action generally), any system of abstract metaphysics would inevitably lead to moral scepticism, if not moral nihilism.
The distinction between map and terrain is seen in terms of their interrelation, per McGilchrist. "Although a map depends on the world, the world does not depend on a map. The map is a special case of the world, by which it is included, not the world a special case of the map. This is an important point because it is sometimes assumed that if you can break the world down, by the same process you could build it up. As the theoretical physicist Philip Anderson once put it, ‘the ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe’. As always there is an asymmetry: the right hemisphere’s take is in no sense a special case of the left hemisphere’s, but that of the left hemisphere is a special case of the right’s, which already includes it. A map gives one power to manipulate, to understand the form, while at the same time, and not coincidentally, distancing one from the substantial world which gives it content. This doesn’t mean there is something intrinsically wrong with the left hemisphere’s thought processes – unless they get mistaken for reality. If you start to believe the map is the world, you are lost." He concludes "I argue that the reductionist paradigm has had a good run for its money, but its time is over. We need a new one..." The reductionist paradigm, and the maps it has generated as described here, while claiming to provide an experience that is more real than reality, has instead led to the neglect, denial, and indifference toward the very terrain that gave it birth. Our new paradigm must be rooted in the terrain itself. As Laozi's words are recorded: “There was a beginning of the universe which may be called the mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her sons (things), and having understood the sons, still keeps to its mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime." This was seemingly confirmed by Robert Rosen's observation that "The identification of one's self with one's models explains, perhaps, why human beings are so often willing to die; i.e. to suffer biological extinction, rather than change their models."
In a recent dialogue McGilchrist said, “I agree with Robert Rosen, the philosopher of biology, that inanimacy is the limit case of animacy." I read this to be, at least in part, a criticism of reductionism, which is the attempt to explain the complex in terms of the simple. And when doing this, ideas of synergy and emergence invariably get invoked. Concerning these, Peter Corning pointed out that synergy is not “more” than the sum of the parts, just different, emergence being one type of synergy (water and table salt are common examples). In his paper "The Re-emergence of Emergence”, Corning writes "in evolutionary processes, causation is iterative; effects are also causes". And he concludes: "In accordance with the Synergism Hypothesis, it is the synergistic effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature. In other words, the functional effects produced by wholes have much to do with explaining the parts. (Another way of putting it is that synergy explains cooperation in nature, not the other way around.) In this light, perhaps the time has come to embrace the full import of Koestler’s famous metaphor; in fact, both faces of Janus are indispensable to a full understanding of the dynamics of the evolutionary process.” This suggests a remarkable consilience between Corning and McGilchrist (as well as Rosen and process philosophy). In hindsight, given what Corning has written about teleonomy and Rosen's views on anticipatory systems and retrocausality, as well as Corning's work with others on the extended evolutionary synthesis, this isn't surprising. Corning's synergism hypothesis is used to explain selective advantage and evolutionary transitions. The wholes explain the parts, the animate explains the inanimate, future anticipation explains present action, the effect explains the cause, the terrain explains the map.
Part 3: (and avoiding fragmentation)
But the virtual world does not only exist through the tools and technologies that appeal to the LH (and are biased in its favor). It exists in our minds. It is in the reification of ideas, the fascination with abstraction and the Platonic forms. This is the essential fact of the matter. A blind faith in formalization, the failure to appreciate shades of difference, and the resistance of change all distort relationships. Do we see actual people, or representatives of an idea? Do we see specific individuals, or a certain picture we hold within our minds that does not necessarily correspond to reality? These things are also a virtual reality, an abstract simulation detached from the actual situation. Thinking things are other than they are and persisting in that illusion despite being confronted with disconfirming evidence produces anxiety when change is at long last forced upon us, separating us from our beliefs in perfect Platonic relations. How dare reality distort our illusions, rob our us of our optimism, spoil our perfect world, and treat us so harshly! After all, it was hard work constructing the maps that it summarily discards. McGilchrist writes “These tendencies lead us to live in a world in which abstractions are more real than whatever it is they represent, and in which words become more important than acts or facts. Reader, do you recognise this world?” Indeed many of us do, it is the world-picture of the average Western citizen. It is strikingly similar to psychological conditions that are increasingly common.
McGilchrist writes: “While schizophrenia and autism are distinct conditions, they have many overlapping features. The concept of ‘autism’, meaning a morbid self-absorption (from Greek autos, self) and a lack of contact with reality, is a core feature of schizophrenia. Western modernity has many overlapping features with the phenomenology of schizophrenia, and I submit that this is because modernity simulates not a disease state, but a hemispheric imbalance. The Swiss psychopathologist Roland Kuhn saw, at the core of psychosis, ‘an inauthentic materialisation, technicalisation and mechanisation of everything’. The hypertrophy of the logical faculty and tendency towards analysis causes loss of the sense of the whole. The fact that fragmentation plays such a part in schizophrenia is philosophically significant: fragmentation is the drive behind an atomistic vision of the world, abstraction and disembodiment, and an untempered belief in analysis. As a patient of Sass’s put it: ‘Well, look at the word analysis. That means to break apart. When it turns in upon itself, the mind would rip itself apart.’” And in the process, rip apart the world. This produces a condition of hyper-consciousness, an...
"inability to tap into embodied skills and intuitive wisdom – making us ever less spontaneous. Everything must be passed, checked and planned beforehand. We have lost awareness of the importance of the spontaneous and implicit. This loss of spontaneity alienates one from life itself. Life has no need of extrinsic meaning because to those who intuit and are alive to the implicit it has a wealth of intrinsic meaning. Those who can operate only explicitly – essentially those somewhere on the schizoid-autistic spectrum – have difficulties understanding human meaning of any kind. …As Minkowska remarks of schizophrenic subjects, ‘they sit by like spectators on the life that plays itself out around them; they neither act nor feel’. Excessive abstraction is ‘probably at the source of cognitive deficit in schizophrenia'. In right hemisphere damage there is often logorrhoea – a meaningless hypertrophy of language. Responses lose ‘connection to their referent’, and become lost in ‘a bewildering variety of intraverbal associations’. As the referential links to the situation become obviously less and less adequate, the productions do not show signs of halting, but instead are redoubled. Symbols refer to other symbols, signs to other signs, ideas to other ideas, language to other language, without so to speak breaking out of this hermetic space to what lies beyond… a partial or complete divorce of word from meaning, of signifier from signified, such that words can begin to appear absurd or meaningless. Searching for what accounts for the strangeness of schizophrenia, Freud noted that ‘we eventually come to realise that it is the predominance of what has to do with words over what has to do with things.’
“This is reminiscent of modern money markets in which money displaces the lived reality which alone gives it meaning, and appears to take on a ‘life’ of its own, undergoing a myriad transactions with itself. In the world of the schizophrenic subject, mathematical criteria are applied to determine the value of objects and events – not unlike the mindset of modern bureaucrats – solely in terms of their measurable dimensions or geometrical characteristics. …Once the theoretical mind is untethered from the body and community, in which it is grounded, and from which it receives its intuitions, there simply is no longer any solid basis for discriminating truth from untruth. One sees parallels in some kinds of contemporary philosophy, and some kinds of belief systems driven by the irrationality of identity politics, which lead subjects to doubt everything except the validity of a bizarre conclusion which they feel driven to accept by formal rules. But never doubting the rules, the tendency to schematisation, to logical abstraction, and to the building of a system at all costs. Excessive systematisation leads to the substitution of rules and procedures for the intuitive, engaged, intersubjective understanding of the world: human affairs are seen as guided by specific rules, rigid principles and schemas. Solipsistic subjectivity on the one hand (with its fantasy of omnipotence) and alienated objectivity on the other (with its related fantasy of impotence) collapse into one another, and are merely facets of the same phenomenon. Both imply isolation rather than betweenness.
“Abstractions are derived from the unique incarnate cases taken in by the right hemisphere, and are therefore secondary to them. Yet from the left hemisphere’s own viewpoint the situation appears reversed, and abstractions come to appear, in Platonic fashion, more real than the real-world instances from which they are derived. Engagement with real persons is replaced by a utopian interest in abstract humanitarian values: ‘I love Mankind, but I detest humans’. According to a patient of Minkowska’s: "I have managed to detach myself from the realm of the material, and in my actions I am guided by impersonal principles. I respond not to a limited environment, but to the whole world. I’ve come to live for the idea and look on people impersonally. I’ve been united in thought, not with human beings, but with humanity, and sought as far as possible to attain the absolute. I’ve submerged my filial love in a greater love."
Avoiding fragmentation of the whole, and the resultant disembodiment, hyper-consciousness, and need for abstraction, explicit analysis, and systematization is no small task. McGilchrist identifies the cause of fragmentation with a dysregulated way of attending, a loss of the whole. And substituted in its place is an inordinately narrow focus, a preoccupation with fabricated maps and virtual worlds. C.S. Peirce wrote "The true precept is not to abstain from hypostatization, but to do it intelligently". Indeed we should be suspicious of absolutes, abstractions, schemas, and so on. Just look at the features that modernity shares in common with the phenomenology of schizophrenia. Our way of attending has indeed become fragmented and constricted to an over enumeration of the parts at the expense of the greater whole from which it is all derived. The resulting virtual worlds we find ourselves living within are increasingly divorced from reality, ultimately undermining our health and well being. The key, once again, lies in recognizing that it's dangerous to allow these distorting processes to become privileged over the phenomena from which they are derived because that leads to neglect, denial, and indifference. Neglect that inhibits real engagement with other people, that disrupts both society and the places in which we live. There are very real personal and public health consequences.
At a recent rally Trump said "I’ve gotta be the cleanest sheriff. I think I'm the most honest human being, perhaps, that God ever created, perhaps." Clearly Trump is none of those things. He lies and cheats all the time. Everyone knows this. So what is he really saying here? Iain McGilchrist wrote "We have lost awareness of the importance of the spontaneous and implicit." It's this that explains what Trump means by being clean and honest, and it's also the source of his populist appeal. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche expressed his view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: "Honest men do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion... what must first be
proved is worth little." Trump is transparently corrupt in a way that corresponds to our intuitions, and he seems incapable of proving anything - all his attempts to do so are farcical. This communicates an overall less deceptive impression than politicians who employ complex frameworks of analysis and speak in abstract terms, and are assumed to hide malevolent intentions behind their sophistry. Recall Trump was caught on a hot mic saying “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything, grab 'em by the pussy." People were at first shocked and revolted by this unreflective and impulsive behavior without regard for personal integrity. Now they see that as proof of his honesty. McGilchrist is right, we have lost awareness of the importance of the spontaneous and implicit. The political left, for whom explicit analysis is important for realizing progressive values, needs to understand that it can also be a handicap in communicating with the public and navigating the media environment. Economists have long known that people aren't rational decision makers. A politics that proceeds by purely rational calculations is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. We need to recognize that there are limits.
Nietzsche continued in The Twilight of the Idols: "One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this." With the loss of the power of intuition, "rationality was then hit upon as the saviour; neither Socrates nor his ‘patients’ had any choice about being rational: it was de rigueur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation." Is this is the desperate situation in which American culture and politics finds itself today? Nietzsche saw in Socrates a "hypertrophy of the logical faculty". John Cottingham writes that "much Western philosophy has suffered from a ratiocentric bias. At its worst, ratiocentrism involves a fantasy of command and control, as if by sufficiently careful use of reason we could gain an exhaustive understanding of the human condition." McGilchrist notes "The phrase 'command and control' suggests the coercive fantasy of rationality, that conclusions can be compelled on another, and is strikingly in keeping with the suggestion that it is the tool of the left hemisphere, whose raison d’être is control." How often has the fear of a 'command and control' economy been used by plutocrats to undermine all manner of policies proposed? The practical effect of this is to have prevented attempts to uphold the values of 'positive liberty', restricting us to a collection of 'negative liberties' compatible with a plutocracy. This ratiocentric bias, symbolically traced back to Socrates, could help to explain cultural evolution in Europe, particularly the growth of industry and technology, as well as the ecological neglect that accompanied it (and continues today).
A further note on where fragmentation has left it's mark. Glenn Albrecht has noted that the concept of 'rights' had its origin in the ‘social invention of the autonomous moral agent’ based on a view of life that was dependent on notions of a mechanistic and conflict-driven view of nature and human nature. This perspective is prevalent in societies characterized by atomism, reductionism, and competitive, possessive individualism. [Per Iain McGilchrist, this is precisely the left hemisphere's perspective, which is that of fragmentation.] "The contemporary clash of rights and/or the failure of rights to protect the innocent and non-consenting (children) in issues like climate change shows how ineffective the ‘rights’ pathway is at resolving disputes in contemporary societies. The tensions between the science of life and the ecocidal economics of life-exploitation are now so great that forms of knowledge suppression in conventional impact assessments are conducted by pro-capitalist governments in order to maintain policy settings that protect, among other things, the right of individuals and corporations to continue to exploit discrete natural ‘resources’ and make profits despite overt negative impacts." The endpoint is suicide. Nicole Rogers, in Law, Fiction and Activism in a Time of Climate Change, argued that being human now entails the recognition of non-human-beings within a framework of ‘universal inclusiveness’, a concept that runs counter to individual exclusiveness (privilege). Albrecht suggests 'ghehds' as an appropriate replacement term for ‘rights’. Instead of a hierarchy of competing rights among autonomous individuals or entities in a contested domain, ‘ghehds,’ would respect entitlements of coalescence, vagility, passage, movement and flow within organically and symbiotically unified wholes. [Per Iain McGilchrist, this is the right hemisphere's perspective, which is that of continuity]. The good of the whole is guaranteed by the protection of the ‘ghehds’ that connect and hold things together. Whereas rights assume division, competition and exclusion; ghehds assume unity, cooperation and inclusion. (The Indo-European root word 'ghehd' means 'to unite'; see Old English and Germanic words such as ‘together’, ‘to gather’ and ‘good’.) Ghehds thus function as a necessary corrective. Our contemporary over-reliance on the concept of rights must be balanced against communal responsibilities and obligations (cf. Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty": negative and positive liberty). Together, these notions can respect both autonomy and interdependence, by forming a pair of complementary opposites. [The left and right hemispheres must work together.] Misunderstanding the relevance of both has been at the root of many cultural conflicts. For example, the contemporary hyper-individualism of American culture, exported around the globe, has led to extreme inequality and ecocide. And this has only been partially resolved by the Nordic model, adopted by the welfare states lying at the intersection of the East-West ideological divide between communism and capitalism. (Partially, because these nations are not immune from the problems of the larger global cultures and economic systems in which they are embedded.)
Part 4: ...through intuition."I know that I know nothing." - Socratic Paradox
"Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it." - Huangbo Xiyun
The Chan Master Qingliang Wenyi was once asked: “What is the First Principle?” To which he answered: “If I were to tell you, it would become the second principle.”
"A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who's forgotten words so I can have a word with him?" - Zhuangzi
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." - Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics
In Daoism Explained, Hans-Georg Moeller analyzed Zhaungzi's Fishnet Allegory: "Just as one uses certain tools for fishing and hunting in order to get what is desired but hard to catch, so too does human communication make use of words in order to catch certain difficult ideas or meanings. What matters is getting it and having it in one's hands. Just as what matters in fishing and hunting is getting the fish and the game, what matters with words is getting the idea or the meaning. Traps and snares are just instruments for getting fish and rabbits, and that they can only be of no more concern once they have helped us to get what they are made to get. So the text is, first of all, about instruments and the conditions under which we no longer care or depend on them." This closely parallels McGilchrist’s description of the relationship between the hemispheres of the brain, where instrumentalism (corresponding to the LH) should be strictly in the service of bringing about the whole experienced world (corresponding to the RH). The Fishnet Allegory is about instrumental, rationalizing consciousness (the trap, snare, and words) and bringing us back to the implicit, intuitive, and embodied experience of life (the fish, rabbits, and meaning). In The Matter with Things, McGilchrist wrote, "A map may be very helpful in orientating you in the world, and helps you to understand aspects of it better; it can help you see further, but only when what it tells you has been returned to the world in front of your eyes. If you start to believe the map is the world, you are lost." In a recent interview with Jim Rutt, Terrence Deacon again echoed this point: "In many respects, conscious effort and attention is a process that’s trying to undo itself all the time, trying to make things unconscious. I like to think of consciousness as a process to try to destroy itself. Why? Because you can’t be conscious all the time. You’ve got to resolve this. You’ve got to set things up. You’ve got to adapt moment to moment, second to second. If you’re doing a good job you have made most tasks unconscious as fast as you possibly could precisely because we have such a tiny bottleneck that we can keep track of. And we can’t do many things at once, so we have to push it to this other level as fast as possible." In this light, these lines of the Tao Te Ching should take on new significance: "The pursuit of learning is to increase day after day. The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day." In Sanlun xuanyi, Jizang quoted the lines "The Great Sage preached the law of emptiness in order to free men from all personal views. If one still holds the view that emptiness exists, such a person the Buddhas will not transform." As if to emphasize this point, Jizang added dryly "If one is still attached to emptiness, there is no medicine that can eliminate the disease". Similarly, Shu-chou said: “There are only two diseases: one is riding an ass to search for the ass; the other is riding an ass and being unwilling to dismount. If, having found the ass, one is unwilling to dismount, this disease is most difficult to cure." In both cases the disease under discussion is the sort of hyperconsciousness of abstract, metaphysical thought identified by Sass and McGilchrist. In A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Fung Yu-lan wrote that, according to Linji, the reason why those who try "cultivation through non-cultivation" so often fail is because they lack self confidence (confidence in their own embodied intuition). "In the beginning one will need to exert effort in order to be without effort, and to exercise a purposeful mind in order not to have such a mind, just as, in order to forget, one at first needs to remember that one should forget. Later, however, the time comes when one must discard the effort to be without effort, and the mind that purposefully tries to have no purpose, just as one finally forgets to remember that one has to forget.”
Again, in The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist writes, “The best things in
life hide from the full glare of focused attention. Making things
explicit is the equivalent of focusing on the workings, at the expense
of the work, the medium at the expense of the message. Attention is
focused on the field of consciousness itself, not on the world beyond,
and we seem to experience experience. Elements of the self and of
experience which normally remain, and need to remain, intuitive,
unconscious, become the objects of a detached, alienating attention; and
levels of consciousness multiply, so that there is an awareness of
one's own awareness, and so on. The result of this is a sort of
paralysis. We need to get beyond what can be grasped or explicitly
stated, but the drift is always and inevitably back towards the
explicit. There is a lack of seeing through, to whatever there is
beyond. Engagement reverses this process. Wittgenstein's own
‘anti-philosophy’ is seen as an attempt to restore sanity to the
philosophical mind caught up in the hyperconsciousness of metaphysical
thought. He noted that when we act or interact – even, perhaps, if all
we do is to walk about in our surroundings rather than sit still and
stare at them – we are obliged to reckon with the ‘otherness’ of
things.” Ensuring that we are in fact attending to the terrain, not some detached simulation thereof, through the use of intuition, not the destructive paralysis of fragmentation, is foundational to our health. Like attention, intuition is another skill whose proper use can be taught. In Logic for Use, F.C.S. Schiller wrote that self-conscious thought becomes important when, due to the peculiarities of a particular case, "the guidance of life by habit, instinct, and impulse breaks down" (cf. Whitehead above). He continued, "Thinking, however, is not so much a substitute for the earlier processes as a subsidiary addition to them. It only pays in certain cases, and intelligence may be shown also by discerning what they are and when it is wiser to act without thinking... Philosophers, however, have very mistaken ideas about rational action. They tend to think that men ought to think all the time, and about all things. But if they did this they would get nothing done, and shorten their lives without enhancing their merriment. Also they utterly misconceive the nature of rational action. They represent it as consisting in the perpetual use of universal rules, whereas it consists rather in perceiving when a general rule must be set aside in order that conduct may be adapted to a particular case."
“Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. [Like all experts, good psychologists use their intuition and are able to draw from personal experience.] The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. In a culture in which computation was not grossly over-prized, an experienced individual would function in almost every aspect of life according to embodied skills, unconscious reasoning, and intuition, with, of course, incursions of analytic thinking, but only when an obstacle was encountered. And the passing on of these skills, through shared experience, attention and imitation, would be the whole purpose of a culture and its traditions. In our culture, all mores have been abandoned; and what should remain implicit and in the realm of embodied skill is foregrounded as a ‘problem’ to be consciously solved – with the result that we grossly simplify and omit what is beyond calculation.”
Zooming in to the Individual, and out to the Collective
How can we incorporate our intuitive nature into ecological relationships, to guide and inform decisions? Much of contemporary policy reproduces the same cerebral and alienating abstractions that led to neglect in the first place. Policy should be designed to make the explicit implicit and the conscious intuitive. It should be designed to support the social and cultural institutions and processes that function in this manner. And correspondingly, what is implicit and intuitive should not be abused or unfairly taken for granted by the explicit and conscious (the LH, after all, is the "faithful servant"). For example, unpaid work must be appropriately valued and compensated. In so many words, this was Laozi’s advice, and his wuwei approach to policy: "[Though] the pursuit of learning is to increase day after day, the pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day. It is to decrease and further decrease until one reaches the point of taking no action. No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone. An empire is often brought to order by having no activity. ...Let the people again knot cords and use them (in place of writing). Let them relish their food, beautify their clothing, be content with their homes, and delight in their customs."
We can certainly do a better job of addressing educational deficiencies, teaching concepts, and introducing them earlier in primary education. But McGilchrist's specific criticism is the "ratiocentric" emphasis that is reflected in formal education and the wider Western culture. Undeniably, in many situations the use of consciously explicit reasoning is necessary. But the conscious intellect is limited in its capacity in very real and measurable ways, and these limitations are both contributing to ecological disruption and preventing us from responding appropriately. We recognize this at some level intuitively, and those sober moments lead to feelings of despair and helplessness. Blinded by our ratiocentric bias we cannot easily see alternatives, and so we double-down on what we know, advancing command and control policy approaches, generating new studies and meta-analyses, etc. All of which are necessary, but ultimately insufficient. People aren't rational decision makers because ratiocentrism has tended to be evolutionary suicide. In an unpredictable world, the animal that hesitates to flee in the face of danger is the first to die. Any social institution, whether politics, economics, or education, that elevates a hyper-conscious analytic approach to the exclusion of more implicit and intuitive solutions will likely not succeed. In our uncertain world (growing ever more uncertain by the day), policy must be both clever and nimble, reflecting the values of reason and intuition.
The intuitive mind, as I've suggested, shares much in common with wuwei, and these in turn are not unlike the concept of sunyata (emptiness) in Buddhism. Describing sports competitors who are completely absorbed in the action, McGilchrist writes: "The ideal state described is one in which attention must be far from the immediate point in space and time; the passing of time and the presence of the body are not noticed – not because they have gone away, but precisely because they are so completely inhabited that they are no longer available for inspection, no longer ‘objects’ to which focused attention could be drawn. They are no longer in the field, they are the field. This enables being in the flow. All anxiety, which narrows attention, all analytical thinking or interpretation, all distracting, obtrusive detail, must be banished. It is not unlike some aspects of both a trance-like meditative state and the mental state described by practitioners of Japanese martial arts... The essential point is whether what we ‘see’ is paralysed by focused attention and self-conscious awareness, such as the left hemisphere applies, or freed up by attention to the field as a whole, as is the case in the right hemisphere."
Continuity through (and empathy with) evolving frictions, habits, and embodiments
Existentialists have claimed that anxiety is produced by a dizzying sense of freedom, by the complete absence of compulsion from acting on an inherently free will. Is it any wonder that existential angst was a product of ratiocentric Western philosophy? But this disembodied conception of human agency has been shown to be false. In fact, there are numerous sources of spatiotemporal friction that continuously buffet us, like the wind buffets falling leaves. Gusts might just as well come from the north as they do the south, though because it blows from the south, the leaves' path of descent is influenced accordingly. And so we have free will only to the extent we can harness the forms of friction (enabling constraints, implementation intentions, cues, etc.) that affect us. From this perspective, individuals who are apparently capable of great acts of self control have merely learned to structure their surroundings in such a way as to reduce the possibility of exposing themselves to temptation to begin with. They shape the contours of the adjacent possible in their lives. Thereby their good choices become inevitable, "preordained", and implicit; they are part of the very structure of the world, on a "structurally fixed" course. According to Hassenzahl and Laschke, environment and person form an implicit motivational system and perform their tasks together. This is a system of smart, responsive frictions (or a cognitive tribosystem). To provide a contemporary example, though a maladaptive one, David Roberts wrote that the economy is "a path-dependent accretion of past decisions and sunk costs", with status quo interests, monopoly control, barriers to entry, and asymmetrical information, among many factors that exert a strong influence. This of course echoes Foucault's notion of environmentality (governmentality).
Wendy Wood suggested that the solution to common problems for executive functioning and self regulation is to utilize spatiotemporal friction, what Cristina Viganò called "positive friction". Shankar Vedantam summed it up: "Friction is incredibly important to understand how habits work. You can decrease friction to build good habits, and increase friction to dismantle bad habits. You can make healthy behaviors automatic and mindless, and make unhealthy behaviors conscious and effortful." Friction shifts the locus of agency from the individual to the environment, asking us to give our trust and attention to embodied agencies/ relationships/ processes, and learn to rely on and work with their capabilities. We achieve situational control and sustain good behaviors not through willpower, but by finding ways to take willpower out of the equation by restructuring our environment, editing/shaping a complex network of psychological (agent) and physical (environment) frictions and affordances for what should be attended to and what should be ignored. The economy is not a frictionless machine, which might be why the ideal of a single “economic graph” hasn’t been realized yet, let alone a “free market”. The economy is like other human relationships, which involve more than just simple utilitarian transactions. We don’t list marriages and friendships on a frictionless “social graph” (despite the apparent success of Tinder) where relationships are perfectly fungible. Everything is structured with complicated dynamics of power and emotion that are hard to disentangle and transparently smooth out, for good and bad. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche was also lured by the possibility of creating a relational model. Whether we create a genealogy of economics, occupations, or morality, the result is an historical perspective on frictions and habits within an environmental milieu. So instead of idealized utilitarian graphs, we need to understand how usually positive frictions (values, aesthetics), often negative frictions (asymmetrical information, barriers to entry, monopolies, status quo interests, path dependence, sunk costs), and generally neutral frictions (history, context) operate. In his 2016 article, Tristan Harris wrote that "instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction [conscious effort and attention] required to enact choices". The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day. Vedantam made it clear that friction aligns with the effort/ease pair of polar opposites, and also with McGilchrist's left/right hemisphere opposites, insofar as what is conscious and effortful to some extent tends toward the left hemisphere's narrow attention (and schizotypal) tendencies, whereas what is felt to be easy and habitual to the conscious mind tends toward the right hemisphere's reduced need for willpower in order to be effective, and its embrace of what is implicitly understood.
There's much nuance here, for "once the situation is complex or new the right hemisphere needs to set to work, and the left hemisphere needs to take its lead from the right hemisphere." McGilchrist explains that this is the "right to left to right progression. First of all experience in the immediacy of its unknownness is taken in by the receptive right hemisphere, and then when the brain thinks it understands what it is, it takes it apart and categorizes it in the left hemisphere, but then we have to reintegrate all that information back and make it whole again." (cf. "Reversion is the action of Tao.") He goes on "What worries me is that we stop at that intermediate phase. It would be rather like having a lot of experience of life and making some digital formulas about it that you think a computer could work on. It gives you interesting information about the situation, a social situation perhaps, or a complex situation of a personal kind, or of a societal kind, just feeding the data into the computer and thinking the printout tells you the answer. But the printout is only something that an intelligent human being can understand by taking it back into the context out of which the original questions came." Much of this occurs outside of our explicit awareness. Attending to frictions in this way, as the second step in the progression, could shift the locus of agency away from the hyperconscious mind and place it more in balance with the body, but only once it is reintegrated. So there's no reason why we shouldn't engage in the pursuit of social physics, or the creation of intricate economic hypergraphs and maps, etc. But to quote Deacon above, this is "a process that’s trying to undo itself all the time", or to quote Zhuangzi, it's a snare that should be forgotten once you've got the rabbit (or in this case, achieved the goals of public health), or to paraphrase Shu-chou, once one has found the ass, one must then dismount. The map or hypergraph is not the terrain in which we live, it is not the flow but only the dead mechanism, and so in order to be effective these processes should eventually lead to something that is reintegrated, embodied, implicit, and habitual as practicable. Fung Yu-lan wrote "This is described by the Chan Masters as "rising yet another step over the top of the hundred-foot bamboo." The top of the bamboo symbolizes the climax of the achievement of Enlightenment [or the left hemisphere, in this discussion]. "Rising yet another step" means that after Enlightenment has come, the sage still has other things to do [that is, reintegrate with the right hemisphere]. What he has to do, however, is no more than the ordinary things of daily life. As Nanquan Puyuan said: "After coming to understand the other side, you come back and live on this side." This is the meaning of the common Chan saying: "To eat all day and yet not swallow a single grain; to wear clothes all day and yet not touch a single thread." Karl Popper noted (compare with Rosen above) "The evolution of language and, with it, of the products of the human mind [models, theories, and hypotheses] allows a further step: the human step. It allows us to dissociate ourselves from our own hypotheses, and to look upon them critically. While an uncritical animal may be eliminated together with its dogmatically held hypotheses, we may formulate our hypotheses, and criticize them. Let our conjectures, our theories, die in our stead! We may still learn to kill our theories instead of killing each other. If natural selection has favored the evolution of mind for the reason indicated, then it is perhaps more than a utopian dream that one day may see the victory of the attitude (it is the rational or the scientific attitude) of eliminating our theories, our opinions, by rational criticism, instead of eliminating each other." It is said that Linji also told his disciples, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
It might now be possible to suggest that behavior change progresses through three stages. First, one elevates murky and mostly unconscious frictions into the glaring mental spotlight of consciousness. Second, these are analytically reflected upon, making us question our habits and received ideas, and intentionally intervened upon to modify their structure. This can be done with "subversive troublemaker" technologies, which Evgeny Morozov contrasts with "trivial problem-solver" technologies. Then third and last, having intervened on our frictions we must once again submerge them into the unconscious patterns of habit. This progression recalls C.S. Peirce’s penchant for "triadism" as well as his finely articulated notion of habit-taking. He held the view of "inveterate habits becoming physical laws". To him the relationship between habit and law was similar to what McGilchrist described as existing between motion and stillness: "motion is foundational to existence, and stillness merely the limit case of motion, not stillness primary, and motion some form of aberration or disturbance of the foundational inertia." Here, law is the limit case of habit, or more precisely, law is the limit case of chance. Just as motion is foundational for McGilchrist, for Peirce it was chance and spontaneity that had an objective status in the universe. "Tychism" was his word for this. Nature is not a static world of unswerving law but rather a dynamic and dicey world of evolved and continually evolving habits that directly exhibit considerable spontaneity. Nothing is exactly fixed by exact law, just as nothing is exactly still. (This insight supports Peirce's notion of fallibilism, and Schiller's notion of rational action consisting in perceiving when a general rule must be set aside. It also would appear to undermine any claims of the LH to primacy over the RH.) But everything is constrained to some degree by habit, that grey area between freedom and determinism, and these habits always appear in varying degrees of entrenchment or "congealing". At one end of the spectrum is the nearly law-like behavior of larger physical objects like boulders and planets. At the other end of the spectrum, in human processes of imagination and thought, is almost pure freedom and spontaneity. And the quantum world of the very small appears to be almost pure chance. For Peirce, the entire universe and everything in it was an evolutionary product. Even the most firmly entrenched of nature’s habits that we call "natural laws" were themselves evolved. Today this view has been called that of an "autodidactic universe", and it has been argued for by Stephon Alexander, Lee Smolin (friend of Rovelli), Louis Crane, Jaron Lanier, and others.
You are the same person today that you were yesterday, with the critical caveat that the system of frictions affecting you today are different, and to that degree, so are you. As Lisa Feldman Barrett put it "brains must efficiently ensure resources for physiological systems within the body (i.e. the internal milieu) so that an animal can grow, survive and reproduce (i.e. allostasis). This "body budget" exerts a strong influence on our affective state and is the source of many sensations that we interpret as emotion. As a result, Barrett emphasizes the importance of food (when not used as an opiate), exercise, sleep, and physical surroundings to help keep our body budget in balance." This makes journals, prior commitments, and so on, the views of a slightly different (and sometimes more sane) person. Can this other person impart to us any wisdom or insight? If so, then it emerges from their self awareness of being embodied as a spatiotemporally unique tribological system The ability to share that particular tribological perspective with our current embodiment, as a different tribosystem whose mosaic of agencies may now be unconsciously subverting the goals of the former, is a precious gift. It's why Buddha told Kisa Gotami, as recounted by Roger Ames: “begin
again, rekindle your roles”, that is, your frictions, habits, and
embodied ways. To that degree, you can return to your former self. Sharing in the views of one's former self occurs through communication, by which the past imports its perspective to the future. Communication re-creates or imitates the earlier, slightly different, mental state, with its unique agentic assemblage, allowing us to imaginatively inhabit it once more. And thereby long term goal pursuit, teleonomy, and the formation of habits, is possible to achieve. If that goal is to develop the habit of “cultivation through non-cultivation” (Linji), a “a process that’s trying to undo itself” (Deacon), then one must, as Linji said, first exert effort in order to be without effort, and exercise a purposeful mind in order not to have such a mind. And in this way, by engaging our embodiment as an institution of historically contextualized frictions (Salthe), purposeful effort will be manifested... and then forgotten once it becomes habit. This oscillation between conscious and nonconscious phases may not only characterize an individual life, but the the universe itself. As Stephon Alexander asked in Fear of a Black Universe, “What is the [historical] relationship between consciousness and the fabric of the universe?... The cosmic mind is contained in the local minds, though hidden from our everyday local experiences.“ (205, 212) Perhaps we should not see ourselves as confined to the time between birth and death. This is only what we can access by memory. Instead, through empathizing with the continuum of our transforming embodiment, through phases that are conscious and nonconscious, that are at times hidden or revealed (or both, depending on what it is in relation to), we might see how life has no definite or definable beginning or end.
We must "walk a mile in another person's shoes", especially if that other person is oneself, because empathy requires embodiment and understanding the context in which one is (has been, and will be) embodied. As Ed Yong wrote “self-control is just empathy with your future self”, and with your past self as well. It’s recognizing the processes of continuity and change. Knowing now what you will know then, or knowing then what you don't know now (and so on), would you do anything differently? Steven Pinker wrote on the relationship between compassion and perspective-taking drawing from Peter Singer's "circle of empathy" (described in Singer's book The Expanding Circle). It's similarly important when combating the rigidity of BAU and the "sunk cost fallacy". Like the "original position" thought experiment proposed by John Rawls, this promotes a sort of transpersonal perspective. Ed Yong again: "Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self - a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person, as portrayed, quite literally, in the film Swan Song (2021). Selfishness and impulsivity, two halves of the same coin, are just the opposites of empathy and restraint." Humans are adapted to read the minds of others while at the same time assisting those others in reading our own minds. McGilchrist argued that fundamentally this is the capacity to imitate, and it is the defining characteristic of humanity. It allows us to escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of others. Understanding our embodiment, whether this is done implicitly, or if that's not possible, explicitly as a spatiotemporally unique tribological system that evolves over time, is the way we empathize and bridge the gap.
N. Katherine Hayles' notion of "cognitive assemblages" extends our understanding of how some assemblages of matter (not limited to contemporary biological definitions) can be an active force, co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and human life and experience. She attempted to formulate the idea of a "planetary cognitive ecology" that includes both human and technical actors. As she wrote, "We live in an era when the planetary cognitive ecology is undergoing rapid transformation, urgently requiring us to rethink cognition and reenvision its consequences on a global scale. My hope is that these ideas will help move us toward more sustainable, enduring, and flourishing environments for all living beings and nonhuman others. Then the question becomes, how will networks of non-conscious cognitions between and among the planet’s cognizers transform the conditions of life, as human complex adaptive systems become increasingly interdependent upon and entwined with intelligent technologies in cognitive assemblages?" We can understand Hayles's vision in several ways, one of which might be as a way to avoid the hazards outlined in McGilchrist's description of the schizoid-autistic spectrum. These "non-conscious cognitions" are exactly what we've ignored, both within ourselves and in the larger environment. The cognitive spectrum spans from non-conscious to conscious, and we must be capable of navigating its full breadth without fetishizing either extreme. Stanley Salthe concluded his paper Energy and Semiotics with "This institution of frictions is the major physical effect of evolutionary (historical)-semiosic (meaningful) processes." Through niche construction, agents meticulously curate a choreography of environmental frictions. Over time, the system of frictions results in coupled agent-environment relationships with mutually predictive information that can assist us in following through with implementation intentions, bring individual agents into better alignment with collective long term goals and values, and help determine which components become psychologically salient (and which do not), steering the course of behavioral events (a stigmergic cognisphere, perhaps?) and allowing us to "extend the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" (Whitehead).
In his book "Earth in Human Hands" David Grinspoon documented the long
historical development of ideas such as Gaia, emerging from related
thought by Vernadsky on the biosphere and noosphere. The noosphere was
the "sphere of reason", and there's echoes today in Hayles' cognisphere,
or Hoffmeyer's semiosphere. If the Earth is living, and has some
non-conscious agency, then Gaia may be the most fitting term. She is
alive and has a microbiome (increasingly dominated by us), and very
likely a sort of animalistic, vegetative, or ecological intuition. If
indeed unconscious, then she has no left hemisphere perspective. And
that would make sense since, as an autotroph like plants, she has no
need for a predatory, narrow focus of attention. In Timaeus, Plato wrote
"A being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent
than one which depended upon anything." That was his description of
Earth. Grinspoon asked "in analogy to our new understanding of human
health, rather than assuming we're the disease, can we seek to play the
balanced and mutually beneficial role that would make us part of the
commensal microbiome of Gaia? We have, unconsciously, been making a new
planet. Our challenge now is to awaken to this role and grow into it,
becoming conscious shapers of our world." However, before we do that, we must recognize the planetary non-conscious cognitive ecology that is already present and active, as described by Hayles and supported by McGilchrist. In short, Gaia has grown a
left hemisphere, which is us. And we must no longer neglect our right
hemisphere, but re-integrate it with all the embodied wisdom that she contains. In Swarm, Bruce Sterling delivered a tight story (it's only 18 pages long) about a very different sort of superorganism, and through his characters he's chastising us for our ratiocentric bias: "Intelligence is a great bother. It makes all kinds of trouble. It interferes with the business of living. Only useful up to a point, it is not a winning strategy. Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well." This echoes what A.N. Whitehead wrote (above) and what F.C.S. Schiller wrote regarding the proper use of the intellect, "perceiving when a general rule must be set aside in order that conduct may be adapted to a particular case". Sterling's characters epitomize this sort of approach. In the course of their evolution they exchanged their hyper-conscious individualism for a more specialized commensalism. And in the process they gained the advantage of survival. But is such a trade-off really worth it? And more importantly, is it even necessary? Sterling partially addressed this question. The same character that chastises us for ratiocentrism says "there are fail-safes within me that prevent me from falling into the same trap of progress as other intelligent races." In other words, intelligence itself may not be the problem so much as those times in our cultural development when we are unable to check our nihilistic excesses. This is the whole of Iain McGilchrist's message as well, conveyed through the metaphor of a wise master and a faithful servant.
But a developmental perspective is as useful at the individual level as it is the cultural level: "When you're young, you're relatively early in the business of picking up information that will help you build a picture of the world. So you need very precise faculties and precise sensory organs to be able to give you precise data. That is really a sort of left hemisphere thing, which can be developed quite highly in young people so they get a theory or schema for how life works. It's like looking at the map and understanding the territory without having been to the territory yet. As you grow older you find the territory is far more rich and complicated than the theory you had when you were young, and that is the right hemisphere being able to contact experience, and trying to put together a vision of who we are, what we're doing here, and what the world is."
Akomolafe and many others have noted that we must acknowledge limitations, and question what appears to be 'certain', 'obvious', or accepted because it is 'tried and true'. This is exactly how fundamentalism gets us into trouble (and not the good kind of trouble that posthumanists like Haraway and Akomolafe frequently refer to). As Schiller noted, rational action is all about "perceiving when a general rule must be set aside"; the intelligent person understands that every rule has exceptions. However, as Iain McGilchrist points out, the left hemisphere doesn't like limitations or exceptions, and it never 'knows when to stop' (which the Tao Te Ching advises us to be cognizant of). "Fundamentalism is an expression of left hemisphere thinking... and indeed, we're going into an age of new puritanism." So as contemporary culture falls increasingly under the spell of the left hemisphere's perspective, and we enter an age of new puritanism, there will invariably be more 'tricksters' pointing out our woeful state of affairs via paradox. It's up to us to listen and learn.
At the movies
Lana Wachowski did some interesting stuff in Matrix: Resurrections. The Matrix symbolizes narrow instrumentalization, utilitarian analysis, and control. If we were to cast this in terms of Iain McGilchrist's Master and Emissary, the Matrix is clearly the Emissary. Neo and Trinity symbolize the Jungian archetypes of the coincidentia oppositorum, a mysterium coniunctionis. When the first Matrix film came out in 1999, it symbolized the metaphysical "simulation hypothesis" to many people. How do we know what's real and what's fake? This last film in the franchise poses a different question, and is more psychological. The audience is no longer confused about what's fake and what's real. Now we're faced with the need to choose between the two. Although this choice was presented in the first film as well, Resurrections rests it's entire plot on it, while increasing the stakes. Key moments in the dialogue include when the character Bugs tells Neo, "If we don’t know what’s real we can’t resist. They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial. That’s what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us." Though the audience may not be aware, the weaponization of supernormal stimuli is everywhere in contemporary consumer culture, and saturates advertising and propaganda. The character called "The Analyst" also delivers some key lines: "Here’s the thing about feelings. They’re so much easier to control than facts. Quietly yearning for what you don’t have, while dreading losing what you do. For 99.9% of people, that is the definition of reality. Desire and fear... The sheeple aren’t going anywhere. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty." We know that feelings, such as desire and fear, are central to defining our humanity. Ironically, though we don't deny they exist, they do tend to exert more control over our lives than we'd admit. And that lack of awareness makes it easier to exploit us. There really is no need to change the facts, just the way we feel about them. The binary distinction that The Matrix plays with, between what's real and what's not, becomes a metaphor for two different ways of looking at the same world that betray radically different sets of values. We need to ask ourselves: if freedom means the loss of certainty, how many people would want to be free and uncertain at the same time? More than 20 years ago the first film was a powerful metaphor for a cultural moment. Resurrections is as much an unapologetic action film as the first, but the tension is now generated by an internal battle, perhaps familiar to many of us.
A Dream
At about five years old I had a strange dream. Perhaps it has changed
slightly each time I recall it. I was in a large cavity, roughly
spherical. Imagine perhaps what it would be like to be inside a womb or a
stomach, and yet not quite that. Anyway, from my perspective it was
over a hundred feet in diameter, although perhaps I was over a hundred
times smaller. Who knows? I clung precariously to a ledge near the side.
Was it almost vertical, or just sloping toward the center bottom? I
don't know. I had a friend there with me. He or she (I can't recall now)
was wading into the lower center of the chamber. I say "wading" because
there was something like a pool of viscous liquid slowly circulating. The entire chamber
was, like a living organ, imbued with a pinkish dim glow, and the fluid
had a similar cast as it was illumined by this light. But the fluid
slowly disintegrated this other person and absorbed them into whatever
it was. I begged and pleaded in desperation for them to get out, to get
out of whatever it was, to see what was happening, to resist. But they
did not, and slowly they slipped away, almost unaware of what was
happening. To whatever extent they were aware, they denied there was a
problem. It was torturous to me to watch the process slowly unfold,
perhaps all the more for the way in which it wasn't resisted and even
apparently welcomed. ...I haven't forgotten that eerie dream since I had
it. Looking back now over the years, I have at times wondered if maybe
it was a memory from before my birth, potentially the unconscious
awareness that I had a twin who wasn't born. Who knows. Now, having read
the ideas of Iain McGilchrist, I have another interpretation.
McGilchrist
wrote that insight is not the keynote of "increasing left-hemisphere
domination... Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the
sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss". In
nightmares, there's only one thing scarier than impending destruction,
and that is not heeding advance warnings of impending destruction as a
result of denying, neglecting, failing to understand, or not seeing
things clearly for what they are and what they will do to us when they
arrive. Otherwise called the "Cassandra curse", it's as much a failure on the part of another to
understand context, to synchronize, understand, and harmonize ourselves
with our surroundings. Watching someone slowly lose themselves, while
being ignorant of that very process as it unfolds, is traumatic. Dreams
are messages from the unconscious mind, generated predominantly within
the right-hemisphere. So what was that dream telling me? In a flooded
cavern, the water occupies the majority of the floor area and only a
narrow shoreline is available for rest. A siren sings from the pool of
water. Is it Freud's death drive (Todestrieb), the promise of
reification? We cannot give in to the siren's call, but we can never
travel far from it either. If we forget context, abandon caution, or are
otherwise drawn to her voice, then we sink under the surface and slip
away. Helpless and confused, we see every detail in horror
as it unfolds before our eyes. In my dream, the blindness of my friend
to their predicament spelled their demise, and my awareness of the
situation meant my survival. The left-hemisphere is precisely so blind,
and the right is by comparison attentive. Perhaps this dream is, like
many legends of twins with opposite qualities, amenable to such an
interpretation. ...Or perhaps not.
In recounting this dream, I'm returning to those forms of neglect, such as anosognosia and anosodiaphoria, mentioned at the top of the article. (The other part is all about dreams, the imagery, the insight they can reveal into our thoughts.) The thing about neglect that makes it dangerous reminds me of the saying "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Those who neglect do not appropriately appreciate the effect of their negligence, assuming they are aware of it at all. This presents an obvious problem: How can we ever really know whether we are neglecting to heed an appropriate warning? Basic humility can help a little, but does it actually help us to see that which we appear to be constitutionally incapable of seeing? I think we need a cultural tool chest to overcome that sort of neglect. I hope I've got the tools for that, but I doubt I have enough yet. There is an Iroquois legend that warns “there are two minds in human beings… two creative forces that are seen by one of those forces as opposed, but are brought to work together by the other”. Which of these minds is more likely to lead to neglect? Socrates famously said "I know that I know nothing". Where other people saw fewer possibilities and more certainties, he saw more possibilities and fewer certainties. Which mind is more likely to see fewer possibilities? MLK said that the majority of people prefer the “absence of tension” to the presence of justice. Which of these minds is more likely to prefer the absence of tension? This is a part of the same warning I echo: that the joining of things that appear opposed, the role of generative tension, and the openness to possibility, are qualities often lacking where they should be present. This both contributed to our contemporary problems and prevents us from effectively addressing them. How many people today think they have changed their mind, but have merely exchanged one set of biases for another? How do we really change our minds to stop neglect? The relationship between the two minds cannot be ignored.
Meditation and emotionsThe practice of mindfulness meditation involves watching the flow of attention “freely, without abiding anywhere or in anything” (Diamond sutra). Is this somehow special or unique? No, for while “Buddhist exceptionalism” is defended by Sam Harris and Robert Wright, it is more capably criticized by
Evan Thompson, who notes that Buddhism has a rich intellectual and philosophical tradition, and provides a radical critique of our narcissistic preoccupation, but so does Islam, Christianity, and Brahminical Hindu thinking. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1885–1975) went a futher step and wrote “Buddha and Jesus are men of the same brotherhood”; he believed Jesus was heavily influenced by Eastern, especially Buddhist, ideas, and a dialogue has long existed in both directions. Regardless, the key benefit of mindfulness for Iain McGilchrist (and in many Buddhist traditions meditation is essential to cultivating bodhicitta) consists in attending to the continuity and flow of life as it is presented to us, not as it is re-presented, static and isolated. This "cultivation" is the sort of attention that leads to "rising yet another step" and completing the "right left right" hemispheric progression. The intent is to guard against the narrowing of attention that leads to misery, the constriction of our circle of empathy, and the devitalization of the world that these in turn produce, which occurs through excessive reliance on the left hemisphere. (This is echoed in a text called Majjhima-nikaya (Questions Which Tend Not to
Edification) wherein Gotama is asked if he has any theories, and his answer in
part is that theories concerning the eternity of the world or one's
existence after death are "a jungle, a wilderness, a puppet-show, a
writhing, and a fetter, and are coupled with misery, ruin, despair, and
agony, and do not tend to aversion, absence of passion, cessation,
quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and nirvana." Whereof we cannot speak we must keep silent.) Shantideva (685-763) wrote: "All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for oneself" (Bodhicaryavatara 8:129). There’s a dynamic tension between expansion and contraction, Heraclitus’ metaphor of the bow maintaining a taut string. We need happiness both for ourselves and others, but the asymmetry must be in the direction of expansion, the greater inclusiveness that Shantideva encourages.
Thich Nhat Hanh elaborated: “In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that their suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is their happiness. ...Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love... If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like?" When we broaden our attention and expand the circle of empathy, when we understand interdependent mutual causality, we see the continuity, how our lives are inescapably intermingled, and recognize ourselves in the other. In the Winter 1999 issue of Tricycle magazine, the article "A Sangha by Another Name", written by Charles Johnson, was published. Johnson wrote "After Siddartha Gautama had abandoned experiencing the world through concepts and representations, after he realizes the cessation of mental constructions, he perceives the interdependence of all things, how - as Thich Nhat Hanh says - "Everything is made of everything else, nothing can be by itself alone" (anatman) in a universe of ceaseless change and transformation. Then and only then is it possible to realize Dr. King’s injunction that we "Love our enemies" in the struggle for justice because once one approaches the "enemy" with love and compassion the "enemy," the Other, is seen to be oneself. All things, we learn, are ourselves. Thus, practice necessarily leads to empathy, the "Feeling Heart" W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of, Jean Toomer’s sense that all is sacred, and the experience of connectedness to all sentient beings." The Neo-Confucian perspective of Wang Yangming on fragmentation, continuity, and extension is notable for several reasons. He wrote about the "danger of [the mind] becoming fragmentary, isolated, broken into pieces, mixed, or confused" (662) and in contrast asserted that "all things form one body". He formulated a doctrine of the "extension of the innate knowledge of the good" since, for him, the Principle of Nature (T’ien-li) is the principle that naturally extends. For example, the mind naturally knows the principle of filial piety when one sees one’s parents, and naturally extends it into action. (“A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy” translated and compiled by Wing-tsit Chan, p656).
As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." We can attend to the continuity of transforming physiological systems within our body (i.e. the internal milieu) that exert a strong influence on our affective state, the source of many sensations that we interpret as emotion. Meditative practices encourage this sort of attention to implicit continuity, and they can further expand that attention to include a much broader and more inclusive understanding of our spatiotemporal embodiment. All of this importantly guards against the fragmentation that the "jungle" of ratiocentrism can produce when left unchecked. In short, the spiritual community, both East and West, may have always shared this one single motivation with two sides: prevent fragmentation and preserve continuity. Rising yet another step, we can even see, via the coincidence of opposites, continuity through fragmentation.
According to Whitehead, the affective feeling of aesthetic beauty is more fundamental than the cognitive understanding of truth, in fact, we create theories in order to feel more enjoyment, purpose, and satisfaction. This is why he believes that “the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of beauty” and an aesthetic drive for depth of satisfaction in the harmony of patterned contrasts. The logic of teleology, because it is goal oriented, proceeds from the top down. It begins with a singular truth: our awareness of beauty and love, which we experience under specific conditions. This affirms our existence as embodied creatures who are capable of realizing these states. How do we enhance this awareness? By caring for others and creating the conditions for greater enjoyment and satisfaction in living. How is that done? By synchronizing our needs with each other and the environment around us. We are wired for this affective resonance, for attunement within cognitive ecosystems. Barbara Fredrickson also described love as a kind of resonance, coherence, or complementarity between embodied agents (in a way, not unlike Karl Friston has when referring to the coupled agent-environment relationship). “A connection in which you come into synchrony with another.” As Rachel Carson wrote: "I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel.
In contrast to the assumption that emotional, as opposed to rational, approaches to making choices leads to impulsivity, David DeSteno points out that "Emotions aren't the problem. Emotions don't always lead to impatience." He suggests that emotions such as gratitude, an authentic feeling of pride, and compassion in particular have beneficial effects. Why these? "A lot of Buddhism is about detachment from desire [McGilchrist's "grasping" left hemisphere and its propensity toward fragmentation]." Gratitude and pride suggest satisfaction with oneself in the world, and a reduced need or desire to aquire new things, be greedy, selfish, or feel unsatisfied and restless. Compassion means understanding that not all others share this equanimous feeling, and that we may be in a position to help. DeSteno: "A friend of mine who is a high ranking Buddhist lama told me that when monks first take their vows to be chaste, and to not gamble and to not drink, they fail a lot, just like the rest of us, because they're relying on willpower [consciously explicit, ratiocentric processes] to do it. But over time through meditation, it begins to unleash this feeling of compassion in them. And when they feel compassion, suddenly it becomes very easy [spontaneous and implicit]. Suddenly the temptations fall away. That's why meditation was created, to help end suffering, both for yourself and for other people, to make people more altruistic [and have the form of attention McGilchrist associates with the right hemisphere]. So how do you cultivate these feelings? You can do gratitude journaling or gratitude diaries. You can take pride in each little step along the way. Have compassion for yourself. Those are some easy strategies. Using these pro-social emotions actually addresses another big problem of modern life, which is the plague of loneliness [and depression, self loathing, and suicide]. So by cultivating these emotions, they not only help you achieve your own goals, they help you automatically build a social network around you." I guess we could call that the "cultivation of the cultivation of non-cultivation", but the "cultivation of non-cultivation" is shorter.
In "Advancement of Learning" (1605) Sir Francis Bacon wrote "Man has no power over nature in anything but motion, whereby he either puts bodies together, or separates them. And, therefore, so far as natural bodies may be separated or conjoined, man may do anything." In "The Matter with Things" (2021) Iain McGilchrist wrote: "The principle for division and the principle for union need to be brought together, not divided. We need not either both/and or either/or, but both both/and and either/or. We need not nonduality only, but the nonduality of duality and nonduality. However, as elsewhere, there is an asymmetry between the forces for division and the forces for union: ultimately they have to be united, not remain divided. The brothers must work together, as He Grasps the Sky With Both Hands sees, not against one another as Flint intends. The union of union and division, of love and strife, in the living world is a recurrent theme of Goethe’s: "Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the very life of Nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal coalescence and separation, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, and where our existence is woven." Oppositions are the ground of energy, if properly seen, as in the tautness of the bowstring: the primal form of opposition is that between two opposed tendencies, one for division (strife) and one for union (love). Civilisations also flourish when they remember this, and fail when they forget." (According to Robert Bringhurst, the names of the two brothers in current Onondaga orthography would be Tháęhya.wáʔgih and Ohá.æʔ.) This is about the value of integrating polarities, not the value of absolute, radical skepticism or nihilism. For example, corruption and pseudoscience are a failure to account for larger system dynamics. Justice, ethics, and the proper conduct of science owe much of their value to recognizing the limits on where our knowledge ends, or what actions we should not take, while at the same time providing us with the confidence to state what we know to be true and engage in meaningful relationships with others. So here McGilchrist is describing a Heraclitean tension (not a postmodern relativism) between our capacity for freedom of action on one hand, and the wisdom to exercise restraint on the other.
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I made this...
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Work rooted in the WorldWorrying over what future occupational role they'd like to have has caused numerous adolescents needless anxiety. Contemporary work culture has generated a proliferation of job titles, but these abstractions are socially constructed and do not exist in any real sense, and so youth should not be overly concerned with job titles, nor the narrowly defined lists of college majors that they are told will provide them entry into the job market. Analysis reveals that all of these professional roles are defined by clusters of scripts (actions or skills). The diversity of jobs seen today are merely various combinations from a single large pool of actions and skills. All the various job titles are really little more than abstractions, combinations of aggregated skills. They are useful as a kind of technical shorthand, but that utility quickly becomes a distraction, a LH fabrication, and is best ignored as soon as possible. Once we do, it becomes obvious that we can create new occupations that have never existed before by combining skills in new ways. Considerations such as these motivated Finland to provide "phenomenon-based learning", a process where new information is applied to a phenomenon or problem, so that students would not become fixated on job category abstractions. The benefit of a phenomenal approach is that not only can a student create new combinations of skills, but by "imaginatively inhabiting" the phenomenon they are learning about they are able to devise entirely new skills, which then may also be combined in new ways. Finland focuses less on the dichotomy of college-educated versus trade-school or working class. Both can be equally professional and fulfilling. The contemporary education model in America has imposed this artificial dichotomy upon our career options, however the most rewarding work reflects an interdisciplinary approach combining aspects of both academic and trade work, as each informs and enriches the other. There's another dichotomy that should be ignored, and that is the owner-employee dichotomy. Democracy is a cooperative, in a way, as Richard Wolff pointed out, which is why government jobs are often more stable and secure than private industry.
So which skills should a student seek to acquire? That is highly context dependent and impossible to answer in the abstract. But there are a few rudimentary considerations that might be considered at the outset, such as "basic needs and critical services", which became the focus of the pandemic response in 2020 for a few tense months. The corpus of skills necessary to a functioning society begins with those that provide essential services and make essential products. These may cover the ability to grow and make things, and to develop and maintain things, whether those things are our bodies, our dwellings, or our ecologies. From these implicit assumptions the analytic LH then springs into action. It asks: Can we create a comprehensive digital map of the world economy and the connections within it, an economic graph with data nodes that include companies, jobs, skills, volunteer opportunities, educational institutions, and content? Could this include all the job listings in the world, all the skills required to get those jobs, all the professionals who could fill them, and all the companies (nonprofit and for-profit) at which they work? Some people have tried to construct just this, to make the world economy and job market more efficient and transparent. Users could access the economic graph's data and search and filter it to better reveal the relationship between the basic needs within a community and the essential workers who are meeting them. The synchronous dance between supply and demand would be clear. Deeper analysis of the workforce model could also indicate unrecognized bottlenecks and vulnerabilities. And the data could be sorted to reveal invisible patterns, for example which skills are essential across large job families, and which elements are functionally unique or, conversely, interchangeable. All these analytic questions may be useful, but the essential point here is that before abstraction and analysis, job seekers should begin with the relevant implicit phenomena which jobs are intended to address and of which they principally comprise.
Among the many phenomena we can look at, relevant to "basic needs and services" referenced by Andrew Percy and Peter Corning, is reproductive labor and food security. Until very recently in human history, the majority of essential work revolved around securing food. And lately much of this has been in the context of farmers farming on farms. Now I'd like to note that distinguishing settled agriculture from nomadic hunting and gathering is useful, but only to a point, as these forms of living were coextensive in many situations (see The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow). There's been a lot of research suggesting hunting and gathering was both healthier, safer, and less labor intensive, among other advantages. I won't belabor those here. The fact remains that today, maintaining food production while stabilizing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases presents an enormous challenge to existing paradigms. Agroecology, as a field, is sometimes invoked to suggest that there is an important role for animal husbandry, but with the majority of animal biomass being invertebrate, how necessary are livestock? George Monbiot, in an article highlighting the horticulture of Iain Tolhurst, suggests they aren't necessary. Monbiot instead proposes a combination of localized, "open source" cellular agriculture, "precision fermentation", and greater use of perennial crops wherever possible to maintain soil structure and health. He didn't mention it there, but entomophagy may have played a more pivotal role in human evolution than is generally appreciated. How that could be, indeed whether it should be, integrated into modern food systems isn't clear. Food is both old and new. Permaculture saw early inspiration from Howard Odum (and the organic agriculture of Albert Howard and Masanobu Fukuoka), with popular contemporary proponents like Sepp Holzer. In "Solving for Pattern", Wendell Berry quoted Albert Howard when he said that a good farm is an analogue of the forest which “manures itself.” Maurice Conti said that in the future we will "move away from extraction to embrace aggregation", suggesting the organic processes of life (like phytomining). That would stand in stark contrast to today. Jason Moore wrote that "Wall Street is a way of organizing nature, differently but no less directly than a farm, a managed forest, a factory, a market, a financial center, or an empire." Think of that. The self-manuring food forest that aggregates and re-distributes food to the larger ecosystem, of which it is a part, is quite nearly the polar opposite of Wall Street, which tends to extract and lock away the majority of wealth into the hands of Adam Smith's "masters of mankind". To be a part of the living world, to enhance beauty and value in a non-zero sum fashion, to recapitulate the same processes that have occupied us for millennia, but in ever new and imaginative ways, to engage one's embodied intuitive wisdom, with its understanding of context and that which is implicit, and its capacity for spontaneous responsiveness, all this is required of those who would be part of a living and nurturing food ecosystem. It requires the joining of both ways of attending to the world. And from the embodiment that food provides us flows the very capacity for imaginative life! As Tetsu Nakamura said, in reference to his work in public health, helping to ensure the people of Afghanistan had enough clean water to drink and food to eat, "A doctor treats patients one by one, but this helps a whole village." Though food production can clearly be transformed into an excellent example of "technologies of embodiment", there are also many jobs that engage our embodied nature in equally impactful, though less direct ways, through culture, language, and social sciences. Nakamura's work evolved over time. When he first started he couldn't have seen himself doing the work that occupied him in the later half of his life. It progressed naturally, wu wei, and became "cultivation through non-cultivation" or "work through non-work". He was led by the basic needs of embodiment and his innate, intuitive abilities to pursue the winding path his career led him on.
Further Thoughts on Intuition
About six years ago, on 7/16/16 I wrote "It is generally agreed that the Highest Truth or First Principle is inexpressible, like Buddha nature, it is unavailable to conceptual thought. We can only speak of it indirectly. And so in the same way I regard what I value most in life. This inverse relationship between values and knowledge should make me ever vigilant - anything that draws my attention, insofar as I can express it descriptively, is to the same degree less likely to be what I truly value in life, and therefore likely to distract me from what is most important. How often do I get distracted by issues that I have no real influence over, while the important things in life, like savoring momentary pleasures and investing in intimate relationships, are sacrificed? How can I recognize and prevent this from happening? I think the important things will always be at risk of slipping from my attention. They lie within my unconscious mind, forming my "primordial gnosis." They are the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," the "unknown knowns." I have had it all along, though I'm kept ignorant by a form of intelligent self-deception, the Buddhist samsara."
Donald Rumsfeld was the one who famously said
that there are 'known knowns', 'known unknowns', and 'unknown
unknowns', to which Slavoj Žižek added 'unknown knowns'. Rumsfield later described
this fourth category as well: "things that you know,
that you don't know you know", which is to say that it is tacit or
intuitive knowledge which we may act on, but not be aware of or able to
articulate. McGilchrist wrote that "we are much more than our conscious
selves; it is variously estimated that around 99% of all that our brains
take note of never needs to break into conscious experience. Most of
our knowing is ‘knowing without knowing you know’. This intuition is an
important part of expertise, which combines the application of rigorous
technique and the surrendering of the self to its most intuitive state.
The flexibility of the expert only becomes possible when one is
proficient enough to ban all thought of rigorous technique and respond
intuitively." This reminds me of the work and technique of artist
craftsmen like Masahiko Hashimoto.
"Intuition is what makes good judges, good physicians and good
generals, as well as good teachers, pilots, poets, artists and leaders.
Of course they need to have learnt and thought a lot – intuition is not
in conflict with that, but indeed depends on it. Nor is there anything
that says that intuitions have to work fast."
What else might be said of the unknown knowns? The notion that our brains make choices before we are even aware of them was popularized by Benjamin Libet, before it was cast into doubt by Aaron Schurger. But whether it has anything to say about free will or not, as Libet supposed, it definitely does make clear that "we are more than our conscious minds, and that most of our decision-making goes on at a level below consciousness". Most of what the unconscious mind knows never gets into the focus of awareness, but when it does so it happens some while later. For example, the unconscious shows signs of having solved a problem as much as eight seconds before the solution comes to consciousness. As McGilchrist puts it, Libet’s apparent findings are only problematic "if one imagines that, for me to decide something, I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind. Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much 'me.'" Why shouldn't your will be associated with deeper, less conscious areas of your mind (which are still you)?
"What separates insight from analysis is that it is seen ‘at once’, not
arrived at through a chain of distinct steps. Subliminal priming (cues
of which we are unaware) can spark a later insight after a considerable
incubation period. When an idea ‘hatches’ it is sudden and utterly
convincing. The seventeenth-century Japanese poet Bashō wrote: "Once the
space between one's mind and the object has disappeared, the essential
nature of the object can be perceived. Then express it immediately. If
one ponders it, it will vanish from the mind... When you are composing a
verse, quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment.
Composition must occur in an instant, like a swordsman leaping at his
enemy. (As Shelley wrote, "the mind in creation is as a fading coal.)
The Japanese have a healthy skepticism about language, and this goes
hand in hand with the rejection of a reality that must, or ever could,
be arrived at purely by reason. In general they place far more emphasis
on individual existing things than on generalities, are more intuitive,
and less cognitive, when compared with Westerners, and are not so easily
swayed by logic or system-building."
In the film The Croods (2013) the notion of 'thinking with your gut' is parodied by a character who is asked "Where do you get these great ideas?" He response was "Since I don't have a brain they're coming from my stomach, down deep below, and up again into my mind." But the brain-gut connection is not only real, but perhaps more relevant than we currently imagine, with connections to other distributed body systems. The decentralized mind-body connectome has neural pathways with direct lines to the stress control system. For example the axial muscle part (known to many people now as “the core”) of the primary motor cortex controls the secretion of adrenaline by the adrenal medulla. In short, this explains how certain exercises (or just fast walking) can reduce stress. “There’s all this evidence that core strengthening has an impact on stress", said neurobiologist Peter Strick, who incorporated these findings into his own exercise routine. We also know that circadian rhythms (eating, sleeping, and exercise) as well as the health of the microbiome, and even just the way in which we breathe, influences the vagus nerve and in turn our physical and mental health. "Research has shown sleep, during which the right hemisphere is dominant, helps produce insight. This
may explain why so many good ideas come to us on waking." Isn't it amazing how our “internal chronometer” can wake us up each morning at the same time? Astute observers might notice that many circadian processes either involve or are in close proximity to the axial muscles, so it might stand to reason that core strengthening exercises may impact a wide range of functions, including the enteric nervous system (gut-brain axis), and that this could have implications for the unconscious intuitive mind. Much of that remains speculative, however McGilchrist notes that "The gut and the psyche have close connexions. Anxiety, depression, and other disorders have characteristic expressions in gut behaviour – and the associations work both ways: diseases of the gut affect mind and mood. As well as containing 95% of the body’s serotonin, which also acts, as is well known, as a neurotransmitter in the brain, and is thought to be involved in affect regulation, the gut has some 200–600 million neurones, rather more than there are in the brain of a dog. And most of the neural traffic is from the gut to the brain, not the other way round. You can take it that they are not all just there to control peristalsis: ‘The system is way too complicated to have evolved only to make sure things move out of your colon.’" In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: ‘The body is a great
sage... There is more sense in thy body than in thy best wisdom.’
The connection between the gut and psyche is interesting and immediately might lead one into all sorts of other associations. The comedian Stephen Colbert satirized the demise of intellectual values in American society in this way: "That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut... I say, 'Gut, gut, does that feel true to you?'" Academic and intellectual culture is prudently skeptical of ideas that are associated with hippies, Gaia, and New Age movements. Yoga may be the most popular religion based on an attraction to mind-body intuition. And various alternative diets suppose a way to connect the mind and body. (Why do we say that we "digest" information after all?) Poor health can result not just from a lack of diversity within the microbiome, but also from dietary deficiencies, overeating, defecating by using the Valsalva maneuver to raise intra-abdominal pressure, or simply gut dysbiosis exacerbated by the inadequate consumption of prebiotics in modern diets. The coincidence of complementary opposites applies here. Healthy bowel movements require pelvic floor muscles that are toned enough to contract, relax, and support fecal transport out of the colon. The ability to relax and expel is proportional to the ability to contract and retain. Do global analogues to these situations exist? I'll leave that to the reader to decide.
During Supreme Court confirmation hearings Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson "Can you provide a definition for the word 'woman'?" Jackson responded "Can I provide a definition? No. I can’t." This was likely a wise response. As McGilchrist wrote "the attempt to substitute rules for tacit knowledge is doomed to failure and a sign of psychopathology," and in Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer, Dreyfus and Dreyfus wrote "The law always strives for completeness but never achieves it." McGilchrist again: "Reason’s progeny are abstraction, precision and linearity; intuition’s progenitors are embodiment, the intrinsically imprecise, and complexity." If we take abstraction, detachment and disengagement too far, they lead directly to a failure of the means to understand, and ultimately to philosophical nihilism. "To be wholly rationalistic, and incapable of knowing how to blend logic with all that emotional, social and embodied intelligence tells us, would spell disaster for a human being... Intuition seems to be a less exact but more dependable guide than a formally exact proof, just as the human brain can tolerate more error and indefiniteness than a computer."
"When I say I know how to tie a bow tie, my fingers can accomplish the task easily, but my tongue won’t offer a satisfactory account. That is not a ‘folksy’ failure of the human mind: it is a triumph of the human mind over engagement with unnecessary detail and the proceduralisation of what is not naturally proceduralised." I have marveled many times at how driving a vehicle is much the same. Unless one is in the driver's seat and operating the vehicle, precisely describing how it is done can be nearly impossible. This is related to what has been called "highway hypnosis", a fully embodied, altered mental state where habitual, repetitive behaviors become virtually unconscious and automatic. Notably, the driver continues to respond to external events in the expected, safe, and correct manner with no recollection of having consciously done so. "We make almost all decisions in life unconsciously, using a holistic,
parallel processing system that is aimed at producing the highest level
of consistency between an array of possible elements. ...the system is
unconscious, ceaselessly dynamic and recursive, making attempts to
recontextualise what information we have so as to make it cohere, and as
each element shifts because of its new position in this network, the
other elements too must shift however slightly, until a system of
optimal integration is achieved..."
The illusion of (and pursuit of) satisfactory comprehension and exposition torments many authors, most have felt it on occasion. The unrelenting and complimentary opposites of ignorance and wisdom govern our daily actions. We could never achieve anything like absolute certainty. Far from it! There are things we have forgotten, and there are things we never even consciously knew we could forget. And the second category is far greater than the first, though irrationally it is the first which torments us worst. Why should this be so? The grasping left hemisphere prefers to hold each isolated idea tightly and loathes nothing more than losing grip and letting go of notions once placed within its hold. That is the most grievous affront to its jealous power. That grasping is ultimately paradoxical and nihilistic, because when it's perfectly successful the iron grip squeezes the life from that which is held. Luke 15:4-6 reads "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.'" This seems reasonable as far as sheep are concerned. But of ideas we have millions, and daily we gain and lose hundreds. We cannot chase after each one that slips by. Our concern cannot be with individual sheep or thoughts, but rather the overall direction and patterns within the herd of ideas swirling in our mind.
See the second part of this article, which describes how the ratiocentric need to control can impede our relational attention and ability to 'resonate with the world' (in the words of Eugène Minkowski), thus highlighting the importance of less conscious intuitive processes of the sort described here. And see the third part, on the subject of embodiment, and the fourth part, on the need to address the social paralysis that prevents us from adopting more adaptive solutions to the problems we face.
Addendum: Had I read any of Iain McGilchrist’s ideas earlier, assuming they would’ve interested me at all, I probably would’ve dismissed them as incidental to whatever I had been learning about at the time. But at the particular moment I came across them I had been studying perspectivism, both in philosophy and physics, and so they resonated strongly. (Before that was biosemiotics, Active Inference, and network ecology. The connections to these fields are less obvious, although Arran Gare, who has written extensively on biosemiotics and process philosophy, made some of those much clearer in a well written book review.) Curt Jaimungal had interviewed McGilchrist less than a month prior to his interview with Karl Friston, which I felt obligated to listen to (it was an enjoyable conversation). So after Friston’s interview ended, Spotify automatically cued up McGilchrist’s interview on the same podcast. I found he had a lot to say about what gives shape to our perspectives. Specifically, what we attend to and how we attend to it. (As McGilchrist writes, “just about everything that is said about the hemispheres in pop psychology is wrong because it rests on beliefs about what the hemispheres do, not about how [with which perspective] they approach it.”) So although McGilchrist’s work was an accidental discovery, it is one which I continue to find relevant across many fields.
But after all the breathless praise has been given, there is certainly plenty of room for critiquing McGilchrist's style. Some people feel that it is patronizing. Here’s an overweight old white man who tends to lapse into a thick British accent and uses what often feels like an unnecessarily large vocabulary to speak at long length when simpler words and colloquialisms would often seem to suffice. Does this not simply exude the very image of superiority and condescension, and bring to mind colonialist and patriarchal associations? Why should I trust this sort of person, let alone elevate that image, when there are many minority and disempowered voices that are begging to be heard? If McGilchrist wants to be taken seriously at all, it will never be because of his style. Despite his efforts to resist it, McGilchrist's greatest enemy remains the perception of insularity that comes with inhabiting the highest eschelons of European culture. It’s probably accurate to say that his only hope lies in the integrity of his ideas (and the references and evidence they rest on), as well as his ability to communicate them to those willing to listen. If he can win over a few ‘intermediary messengers’ (such as Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Shaun Chamberlain, Elizabeth Oldfield, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Rupert Read, Dougald Hine, etc.) perhaps they will succeed in the style, visuals, and associations where he has failed. That said, I think he knows that this is his Achilles heel. And indeed, history is full of examples of deep thinkers who are nonetheless very disagreeable individuals in person. Perhaps Mother Nature has a sense of humor or irony to speak through such mouthpieces!
We can look at something, anything, and ask "What can this do for me that isn't already being done by this other thing (that I may like better anyway)?" As Elizabeth Oldfield pointed out, the same thing that many scientists may only now be coming around to is what indigenous peoples, poets, "feminist philosophers, black theologians, artists, and others whose intuitive, embodied, relational forms of knowledge have been sidelined, have been saying" for literally millennia. For example, who really needs a climatologist (like James Hansen or Michael Mann, for example) to tell us to take care of the planet? We already know that. But I think we should still welcome their ability to use more recently developed scientific tools to measure and analyze the rapidly changing chemical composition of the atmosphere. Yes, they arrive at the same broad conclusions for responsible stewardship of the air, water, and land. They just took a different route to getting there. And the good thing about this is that now, whenever anyone questions me, I have a new ally to the cause and new evidence to back myself up. I believe this is how folks such as Gail Bradbrook, Shaun Chamberlain, Elizabeth Oldfield, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Dougald Hine, etc. see McGilchrist. As Hansen was to the climate crisis, McGilchrist is to the metacrisis. Thankfully, these new allies to the cause do recognize that they owe an immense debt to the cultures and traditions that preceded them. That is what makes them so valuable. One of my goals is to celebrate these deep connections, and how we are learning that ancient wisdom really is validated using the tools of science.
Keywords: neglecting vs. attending, narrow vs. broad focus, re-presenting vs. presencing, blindness vs. imagining, detachment vs. absorption, alienation vs. engagement, map vs. terrain, explicit vs. implicit
Additional Resources:
Iain McGilchrist. The Matter With Things (2021)
Iain McGilchrist. The Master and his Emissary (2009)
Louis Sass. Madness and Modernism (1992)
John Ehrenfeld. The Right Way to Flourish (2019)
Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground (1864) “For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms... ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow minded. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought.” ...This well illustrates the difference between fragmented and unified (Gestalt) forms of perception.
