BEING ABOUT Conclusion: Constructing persons as knowledge
Anomalous knowingI have described changes in our sense of cognition that have occurred at two scales -- the scale of the whole creature, and the scale of the brain. The framework I have constructed to accommodate an artist's sorts of knowing is based on emphases at these two scales. The first is an emphasis on the aboutness of entire bodies in environments. The whole-body intelligence of the dancer or action painter is accommodated in obvious ways by an account with this emphasis, but so, more unexpectedly, are many things about forms of knowing more central to our paradigms of knowing. Complex verbal or numerical forms of cognition may also be understood as built around a basic core of spatially engaged perception/action structure. This vision allows us to think of even literacy and mathematics as forms of bodily play and skill. The second emphasis is on the widely distributed and recurrent nature of cortical activity. The wide net vision of cortical activity is related to the whole body vision of organic aboutness in that a complex body tuned to its environment will need to have many parts and functions adjusted both to different aspects of the environment and to each other. The organ of this integration is of course the nervous system, in conjunction with the rest of the body and the environment. This view of an integrating net allows us to begin to account for the integrated nature of the experiences of knowing. Edelman's vision of recurrent synchronization, subnet integration and segregation, and a distributed but synchronized core dynamic subnet responsible for sentient function, enables us to think of the moment of sentient response as both differentiated and integral. Damasio's vision of the backflow organization of linguistic and other simulational structure in sensory areas allows us to conceive of perceiving, imagining, thinking and representing as activating networks that overlap in part. Knowing as experienced does not fall into columns in accord with classical contrasts of mind and body, sensing and perceiving, thinking and feeling, language and the nonverbal, concrete and abstract, literal and metaphoric. Nor does it support hard divisions of perception into separate senses. If we make the unified single body and its widespread network of integrated neural function the sites of aboutness and knowing, we have a means of thinking that these functions may happen simultaneously and may include one another necessarily. Wide net principles can be particularly illuminating in relation to kinds of knowing that have been thought anomalous in classical epistemologies. These include obscure, unusual or 'expanded' forms of perception. Some kinds of perception are obscure because they are of facts that don't need or can't be given joint attention, and therefore are not easily named or brought into cultural development. Proprioception of body states would be an instance. Response to bodily states would presumably be included in the wide net of the moment's cortical response, and there it could alter what occurs in many other parts of the net, but it might normally be excluded from the core dynamic subnet. Eugene Gendlin (1962) describes a nonverbal felt sense of something or someone, an experience that is "many-stranded" and "more fine-grained, more finely organized than linguistic resources can indicate." It is possible, he says, to intensify this form of knowing. A technique he calls experiential focusing begins with self-questioning. One then attends carefully to what occurs as a response to the question. Response may be somatic, emotional (if that can be said to be something different than somatic), or a flash of simulational seeing or hearing. These responses may themselves be addressed with questions, or one may simply feel oneself into them more. At some point there may be an involuntary sigh, after which the feeling will be found to have shifted. The process of constellating a felt sense is familiar from art, from writing, from theory. What is this really? one asks. Then one listens to what forms. Experiential focusing and the self-interactive processes of art are presumably ways of increasing structure in a core dynamic subnet. By attending, one allows circuit activity to stabilize, intensify, make other connections, and then restructure. Edelman's vision of larger global mappings distinct from but dynamically related to core dynamic subnets also gives us a means to think about cognitive structure that is non-sentient but nonetheless influential. We have seen that sensory response ties into distributed networks that include action circuits, other senses, visceral and somatic circuits, and many levels of association cortex including language-related convergence zones in temporal cortex and self-monitoring zones in the prefrontal. Much of this associated structure may be active but not normally sentient. It may set up a sense of knowing or a sense that something should be done, without the sentient structure usual in perceptual knowing. This ordinary experience of self-prompting may be unusually developed in those who give it unusual attention. Some artists experience a collaboration with unconscious knowing so extensive it may be felt as dependency on another being whose decisions are made in darkness and communicated in various ways. Writers' experiences of dictation are an example. We may be able to understand these experiences as unusually developed forms of the backflow organization that we have seen is normal when we dream and hear or read speech. It is possible also that there are ways to extend a core dynamic subnet into regions normally excluded. Global mappings might perhaps be hyperenergized in meditation or drug states, or as an effect of training or practice. Perception/action circuits in the parietal, which seem normally to be non-sentient even when they are active, might be the source of experiences of abstract spatial intuition reported by mathematicians and physicists as well as artists. Hyperactivation in these or other areas may, in general, be what is meant by the 'higher' states of visionaries. ("The intelligible, which we see with great difficulty", Plato says of the initiate's intuition of the forms.) My description of artists' ways of knowing included the remarkable fact of recognition knowledge, by which we know but do not know how we could know. Some forms of recognition knowledge may be like blindsight. When people with a severed corpus callosum are asked about the hidden object their nondominant hand is touching, they will often answer correctly although they do not know that they know. In their own sense of it, they don't see but they guess. Our current understanding of blindsight in patients with V1/V2 lesions is that visual areas in the dorsal stream are being activated through a route that bypasses V1/V2. In callosal patients, the explanation seems to be that there is isolated activity in the hemisphere not specialized for speech. Recognition knowledge is related to the experience of symbolic force. An artist's ability to recognize resonance or unusual emotional force in some situation, or to invent situations that communicate such force, is sometimes called imagination or vision. Objects, events, or situations felt to be inexplicably or unusually charged have traditionally been called symbols, emblems, or the like. They may be encountered at random; they may be emphasized in scenes intended to promote cultural transmission; they may felt in dreaming or daydreaming; and they have often been thought to be the primary business of art. The structures by which we see, feel, and know anything have a deep history. They were being built when we were a fetus, an infant, a child. Cognitive structure forming now may reconstitute aspects of our structure in those earlier times. An object seen or imagined may then be felt as having a power to move or inform. If we perceive our childhood landscape by means of structures originating when we earlier perceived the sheltering inside of our mother's body, for instance, that landscape could go on being felt with gratitude and trust. A unified epistemologyAnd finally we reach the point where there is virtually no separation between science, observation and philosophy. The new artist works like a scientist. Youngblood 1970, 174 The current scientific revolution will synthesize the whole intellectual discourse of the species. Abraham 1994 Since body in world is the locus of all the kinds of knowing there are, a vision of knowing based in situated aboutness becomes the basis for a comprehensive unified epistemology. Forms of knowing supported by the representational artifacts and practices of a human community may be thought of as a nested subset within this comprehensive prior aboutness. A unified general epistemology with its nested cognitive theory of representation is a theoretical base for both science and art, in as much as both are social practices using representational systems. This sort of vision continues the project of Susanne Langer, who, writing about how art is made and used (Feeling and form, 1953), was led to study the biology of cognition (Mind: an essay on human feeling, 1967). Langer's approach made philosophy of art or representation part of a general biologically based theory of mind and knowledge, but it also made art or representation central, because she considered representationally organized feeling and imagining the means for cultural development of minds. Work with cultural materials is always at the same time work with the cognitive effects of arrangements of those materials; this is where artists come in, but human artificing of every sort must also be seen as dependent on the eons of evolutionary innovation that are its original and continuing preconditions. The beginning is not at all the word. A philosophy that understands how biological bodies use representations is a radically revised philosophy -- Philosophy in a new key (1957). A unified epistemology such as this also gives us a unified theory of representation itself. Within such a theory we can see all representational media as manifesting characteristic blends of presence and simulation, and as sharing evolutionary origins in joint attention and a continuing inherent sociality. A cognitive philosophy of the new media would fall out of such a comprehensive and integrated theory of representation. Cultural practices being set up to use new digital technologies -- video games, the web, cyberspace, hypermedia, virtual reality programming, digital scientific visualization -- are new social facts, but they are also uses of long-established representational possibilities. Their novelty gives us a chance to rethink the ontology and epistemology of representation generally. What we rebuild will connect the new media with media as old as speech and clay figurines. Further, to understand multimedia arts like film and cyberspace, and complex multimedia contexts like art, scientific visualization or science itself, we will need to understand how representation works in individual media and in interaction. The later chapters of this work have suggested a shared use of spatial metaphor as one way of thinking about commonalities across media and media contexts. The Kantian stories in Chapter 9 showed how the theoretical restructuring offered here can be applied across media and within various sorts of cultural arena. Perception and reason, language and pleasure, art, science, freeway driving, love, therapy and theory: I am all of those things by means of one brain. Given our histories as theorists, though, that organ will have to reorganize itself deeply before I am able to think of myself in a unified way. The neuroscience is not all in, but if we begin by imagining all the sorts of cognition as functions of the same, or adjacent, or interdigitated fibers, we can begin to revise the conceptual habits that make us think them in different vocabularies. Structured personsWhat is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? Coleridge 1967 II, 12 I don't need a system, I am a system. Michael Snow in Shedden 1995 In my introduction I said that if the effective site of a representing practice is not so much the representational object as it is the person being structured by that practice, it changes how we think of theories, models, languages, and entire disciplines like philosophy or mathematics. They are not shared or public objects so much as they are the creation of structured people by partly shared means. Since the structures that are our means of knowing will be custom-built by our encounters and behaviors, the project common to science and art -- and to philosophy and every other cultural enterprise -- may be seen to be the construction of persons as knowledge. We have thought of knowledge the way we think of wealth, as something that can be put away in treasuries or concentrated in precious objects. If knowing is something I am, not something I have, an implication is that knowledge as such is not storable outside bodies: knowledge as effective cognitive structure can only be constituted and reconstituted in individual bodies. Middlemarch and the Philosophical investigations cannot hold knowledge -- they can evoke, build, organize it, but only in bodies already capable of reorganizing themselves to fit, and only in a world able to produce such bodies. Cognitive ecologyShe understood that the colors and textures of the world we live in are body to our sense of self. Dijkstra of Georgia O'Keefe, 1998, 3 If the necessary conditions of human aboutness include the human body and its environment, our paradigm of knowing should no longer be the self-conscious ponderings of a man shut away dreaming alone in a room. Manners of speaking founded on alienation and incapability rather than contact and efficacy become suspect. Taking it further, an evolutionary account of knowing and intelligence seems to me to imply an ethical imperative within which the arts and every other human enterprise would share an interest in the conditions needed for excellence of contact.
Our evolved origins imply the central value to persons of contact with the world in which we are native. If there is a real world, contact is gold. If we are structured to succeed in that world, abilities to be present, perceiving and acting, are of primary value. Perception and action in the real world is our cognitive base. There are depths of order in the natural world -- many scales of order coherently co-present. Color, texture, smell, timbre, motion, and shape are all aspects of this order. Our ability to perceive order is our ability to respond with order of our own. Perceived complexity of order always implies that we ourselves are complexly ordered in perceiving. We can see only as much order as we are capable of embodying. When we imagine perception as perception of an image or other mental representation, we imagine it as a sort of skin of appearance projected onto objects. Perception understood as responsive structure, and, further, as multiple, simultaneous, interactive, differentiative, self-organizing response in a widely distributed structure, can be imagined as deeper and wider than sentient perception. There can be responsive structure that is not part of sentient structure, and it can also be more or less accurate, more or less complex. 'The unconscious' can also be more or less responsive, more or less accurate, more or less complex and ordered, and above all more or less integrated with sentient structure. Perception must be understood to be knowledge and it must be understood that there are degrees of excellence of perceptual knowledge. Learning to perceive more builds out from a core or base of evolved ability. Perceiving becomes more particular -- we can become more able to perceive particulars in detail -- and it becomes more general -- more deeply, widely, exactly, and flexibly categorical. If we can think of perception as complex, there is less need to differentiate perception from what was called insight or understanding. The whole gestalt of response in the moment can be understood to be perception. We perceive not only the thing, but what it can do -- its effectivities -- and what we can do with it -- its affordances. Theoretical understanding may be built into the nets by means of which we perceive. With theoretical instruction -- theoretical structuring -- we may for instance become able to see principles of formation. When we see something in the world we may be able to see how it is organized, how it functions, how it came to be. When we see differences of color of plants on a dry hillside, we can see the course of water in another season. Looking at streaks on a shell or spots on a giraffe, we can see the reaction diffusion processes that engendered them. Looking upward at the Milky Way we can see it as our galaxy's horizon (Churchland 1989). Looking at colors on an oil slick we can see the relative depth and the rapid reorganization of areas of a thin film. In perceiving objects, it also happens that we can perceive their relations, and even our specific relatedness to them, for instance our own emotional or other evaluative response as such. We may also momentarily be able to see them as they will look to someone else whose habits we know. Understanding perception as responsive structure implies something about perceived beauty too. Perhaps it implies a goodness of fit between the object's order and our own, a fit that makes it possible to respond well: clearly and vividly. The simplest way to talk about beauty is probably in terms of liking -- liking to perceive, liking to be that form of order. Beauty is thus not subjective and it is not objective. It is a structural fact of some sort, a co-determined fact: something about it, something about us. Cognitive excellenceDo we know what to mean by excellence of cognitive structure? There are clear cases of cognitive failure, structural disorganization, failure of aboutness. They include failure to thrive, failure of energy and health, failure to act in one's own interest. Madness, alienation, withdrawal, a life in fantasy. Incoherence, or coherence so fragile it can only be sustained within a contracted sphere. Narrowness, conformity, dogma. Imperception. Isolation, depression, anxiety. Irresponsibility. By contrast, good structure -- a good soul, psuche -- would show vital competence: energy, flight, detail, scope, autonomy, fertility, enjoyment, coherence, love, street smarts, vividness and trust, effectiveness in being alive. If there is such a thing as excellence of aboutness, we become interested in therapy/ethics, that is, we study how contact is spoiled and how it is restored. For example, we need an understanding of lying, of addiction, which is a form of biological lying, and of the ideological pathologies founded on evasion. An evolutionary epistemology suggests that maintaining a clear distinction between contact and simulation is important. We need to stay aware of the limitations and powers of simulational cognition. Excellence of simulation might itself be judged in relation to its perceptual origin. We might ask of imagining how accurate it is, how comprehensive, how integrated. If contact cognition is the gold standard and if abstract and simulation-based cognition is, structurally speaking, less secure, more prone to dynamical freewheeling, we should also be particularly aware of the fragility, the relative ungroundedness, the limitations of thinking structured simulationally. We could make conscious and provisional use of structural metaphor, for example. Such metaphors work, in a way. There is something we are able to do by means of them. Something about them feels right. But they are forms of fantasy and need to be understood as such. If the tendency to think in asymmetrical binaries is understood as fantasy, for example -- the deep necessity to think by saying ...on the one hand, and ...on the other hand -- the need to make one of the hands always preferred becomes less compelling. Excellence / ethics / aesthetics / epistemologythe issues are about epistemic responsibility, collective and individual, not about 'necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge' Lorraine Code, unpublished manuscript What does the biological sense of mind have to do with art: excellence in art, the value of art, directives for art? What could a biological sense of mind add to the practice of art? A new biological epistemology seems to me to be a base for an aesthetical ethics, that is, an ethics for the makers and users of representational artifacts. Accurate responsive self-construction, over time, and in the moment, seems to me to be a personal imperative implied by evolutionary realism. This is not to say that anything is simple. There are always interests to be balanced. There must also be provision for the self-construction of others. But these interests may at times be aligned rather than competing. Evolved effective structure comes into being through necessary mutualities: through epistemic reciprocity. Perception requires world structure and personal structure equally. Ordered persons require ordered communities. Excellence in art has traditionally been described as excellence of the art object. This description belongs to the tradition that thinks of the representational object as the locus of representational effect. Excellence of representational making needs cognitive excellence of the maker, however, and requires and creates excellence of aboutness in the people who use what is made. The excellence or value of an artwork, like the representational effect of any representational object, will depend on something about the maker and the user as well as on something about the object itself. What are the implications for art (or science, or philosophy) if they are seen as practices requiring and forwarding the effective formation of persons? Excellence in art can be thought of as a subset of representational excellence, but it is related also to excellence of nonrepresentational making, for instance excellence in the making of boats, houses, meals, gardens. It is further related to excellence in friendship, romantic love, child rearing, education, community activism, and other sorts of intervention in the making of persons. All are, like art-making, subsets of excellence of aboutness. Representation-makers are like magical operators in the sense that they use perceptible form to evoke illusion. Like magicians, artists have and rely on powers of seduction. If representational experience structures us, and if most representational experience is simulational, and if the simulation evoked is shallow or false, art can be used to disorganize, to ruin cognitive order. This is where aesthetics and ethics overlap. Artists need to understand the relation between artifact structure and human structure. A well-ordered thing will be more able to set up a well-ordered person. If the ordered thing that structures us is made by someone whose own structure is in wide, competent contact with the world in which we evolved, it will structure us in ways congruent with our foundation. In these ways cognitive value is added. Humans structured by art become more able to enact and to enjoy contact. The Vancouver Art Gallery has a painting by Gordon Smith, made in 1996 when the painter was seventy-seven. It is large, 8'x 10', acrylic on canvas, predominantly cream and black with touches of green, red, and blue. The strongest impression, from twenty feet, is of a twiggy hillside black and white with snow. At other distances, given long attention, small internal images appear: a carved profile like the profile on a totem pole, a patch of sky with two winged things in a light of their own world, a sort of white flower, a cave, an extraordinary future kind of human. At the same time as they are evoking these things, the slashes of black and dabs of color are very evidently painted marks that recall the brushwork in many other paintings in the gallery's many rooms. To have been able to make this painting, the painter must know a landscape: must have been formed by a landscape. The evidence is that his formation by landscape was deep and detailed, because this twiggy slope is not simplified or made pretty. There are messy bushes, fallen branches, the ungardened disorder of a rainforest slope. At the same time, the quality of the dabs and slashes show that the painter has been formed by many paintings, and that he has taken these paintings into his wrists and shoulders as well as into his eyes. At the same time, the little figures, their barely-suggestedness, their lovely strangeness of twilight sleep, say that the painter can be all this structure loosely, in a flux. What I see in this painting is cause for pagan post-post-modern hope. It is hope of intelligence that is grounded in contact with the natural world and at the same time the very opposite of primitive.
I have described new findings in the science of cognition and new ways to conceive of these findings. Do these new resources suggest anything we should be doing? We have much theoretical work to do, point by point and metaphor by metaphor, to rebuild the way we think about cognition and representation. There is much existing work to be remembered, defended, brought forward, revalued, in the course of this rebuilding. We also need a better understanding of its political situation, the motives and resources of its adversaries. In art the task is still the investigation of effective structure. Art has been one of the freer communities for discovering ways to modify the nervous system. Art criticism can recognize and further work that demonstrates excellence of contact. Some of this work exists already and has been undervalued. Some may come into existence as a result of new theory. We do not necessarily know what such work will look like.
My last word comes from Marjorie Grene, whose philosophical testament I found as I was finishing this work. "Here I am," she says,
This cheekiness is one thing coming at the end of a long, deep and distinguished career in epistemology, I realize, and is another coming from an outsider to the topics I have developed. And yet lucid, intrepid Marjorie Grene is the tutelary spirit I need at this moment. While I am of course not an outsider to reflective experience of aboutness, and while it is not true that I haven't read, since I have tunneled through piles of material in a number of disciplines, anyone dipping into neuroscience must be aware that it is not possible to have read enough. I have also hastened to take positions on many topics that are disputed local specializations. It is in the nature of synthesizing intuition to integrate globally and imply locally, and many of my decisions are at odds with those of many in the professions I raid. There is probably no way to defend my decisions within the terms of these local specializations. At the same time, since the assumptions running local disputes are often not adjusted to those running other local questions, the synthesizing outsider may be in a position to feel or see or construct what fits overall. There is little completely new in my formulation. The parts were there to be assembled: nearly every point has been suggested, investigated, thought through, by other people at earlier times. What may be new is their assembly as parts of a whole in which they seem self-evident.
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