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Mind and land III: Theoretical aspects Series premise: Preservation of a sound and beautiful natural world, and of full contact with that world, is essential to the well-being of human minds; the forming of sentient persons through contact with the world is the specifically human part of environmental value, and the core of value in cultural creation. Mind and land III question: What kind of academic support can there be for landed mind and a culture of organic high intelligence? This session is about four kinds of academic change happening already:
1. Epistemology based on perception Inuit culture same word for "world; outdoors; weather; universe; awareness; sense." Awareness not of but in the whole. Narwhal tusk was for a long time thought to be only for fighting - has recently been found to have 10 million nerve endings that tunnel from the tusk's core to tiny tubules on the tusk's surface. These nerve endings measure subtle changes of temperature, pressure, particle gradients, salinity, and more. It is the body - the organic, sensitive body itself - that perceives the world and, ultimately, thinks the world. Merleau-Ponty sought a new language which could ground the various disciplines in an awareness of perception as radical participation. In doing so he began to uncover, hidden behind our abstractions, a sense of the Earth as a vast, inexhaustible entity, the forgotten ground of all our thoughts and sensations. - David Abram in Merleau-Ponty and "the primacy of perception" Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge, or better said, knowing. The first thing to say is that it matters what we call it. If we say 'knowledge' we imagine something that is outside us, that we can acquire and store. But if we call it 'knowing' we have the option of imagining knowing as something that is done by a body - knowing as something a body can do. (Then we could say knowledge is a body structured for knowing.) There have recently be important shifts in epistemology that support a description of knowing more able to supports peoples' ability to be and stay in contact with the world.
She understood that the colors and textures of the world we live in are body to our sense of self. - Djikstra of Georgia O'Keefe, 1998, 3 The first one isn't really new, though its implications are becoming clearer. It's evolutionary theory, which says that the universe, rather than being created from outside, by some outside guy or some outside force, is self-creating. It's self-creating from the beginning, and we are part of its self-creation. Human beings have this lively and minutely organized, not at all chaotic, but exquisitely complexly organized, history and actuality as self-structuring entities in a universe which is also that. What it amounts to is that we are made by the world, we are made as part of the world. The implication then is that perception is the complement of the world. It is the complement in human beings, of the world. Perception is how the world itself has constructed us capable of being in contact with it. 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.
In the last twenty or so years a lot has happened in neuroscience, and subsequently in the philosophies and psychologies that track these findings. We have discovered things about the brain that have instantly revised centuries of error in the ways we've talked about perceiving and about the relation of perceiving to thinking and knowing. There are a number of new ideas that seem as if they can be really helpful. > A very old misunderstanding about perception - it goes back to Plato or before - says that perception is simple, animalistic and primitive, and that the really sophisticated, evolved and important capabilities of human beings belong to some other faculty, like 'Reason'. In fact perception in any organism is as complex as that organism is. A human brain in the act of perceiving is probably the most finely organized kind of complex structure in the world. (Perception doesn't even have to be specialized to be virtuosic. Think of a day when you drive for twelve hours through landscapes you haven't seen before, sixty miles an hour on two lanes with oncoming traffic, different colors of light and times of day, towns, all kinds of terrain. Think how much you've seen in such a day. Think of how much you've had to do, as an organism, to see so much. We get it right, we get it right in the most complicated circumstances, and the ability to get it right is stable through hunger, sickness, lack of sleep, great changes of locale. We get it right because we're aboriginal to this planet; we're all aboriginal to the real.) > The misunderstanding that says perception is simple is usually the same one that says that other capabilities, which are thought to be the truly human ones - like thinking, speaking and imagining - or doing math or designing jet engines - are accomplished by 'faculties' or parts of the brain other than perception. The recent evidence is that all of these abilities necessarily and centrally depend on structures formed in the processes of perception, for the purposes of perception. What we see in PET scan and magnetic resonance imaging is that when we think, imagine, speak and dream, it is sensory cortex that lights up. When we talk about a bird we're using some of the same tissue we use when we're seeing a bird. Reasoning and imagining, rather than being apices of some hierarchical progression are actually sub-abilites of a more general ability to perceive. > Another related misconception is that perception is only of particular things, and we need a 'higher' faculty to give us categories and other kinds of abstraction. Kant for instance said categories have to be applied to the materials furnished by the senses by the faculty of Understanding. But the world builds the brain so we see things immediately as kinds of things. Eleanor Rosch, a perceptual psychologist who was first writing in the 70s, worked something out that has been used a lot since. Her discovery was that, at a base level, which is to say at the level most relevant to the survival of animals and humans, perception is automatically categorical. In other words, we see categories before we see particulars. Categories are the easy part of perceiving. The world builds the brain so we'll run away from all tigers. As we get smarter and more experienced we're able to see differences within a category. As we get to know someone better, we begin to see that although they're still them, they look different every day. It's the same with the land, anything. The deeper we get into something, the more we are able to see the particularity of it, so that the higher function, the more experienced or the more educated or the more evolved function, is to see particulars as particular. Rosch E 1978 Principles of categorization, in Cognition and categorization, E Rosch and B Lloyd eds, 27-48 Lawrence Erlbaum Lakoff G 1987 Women, fire and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind University Of Chicago > Our notions about the relation of perceiving and abstraction also need to be turned around. The new evidence is that abstraction has to do with using parts of the brain in a segregated or dissociated way - literally abstracting from the normal completeness of perception. For instance, the parts of the cortex we use to see are quite widely distributed. Primary visual cortex is in the occipital lobe, right at the back of the skull. Premotor cortex, which controls eye movements, is in the frontal lobe. Color vision and visual object recognition happen in temporal cortex, behind the ears, but the parts that have to do with space perception are in parietal cortex, higher up and more toward the back of the head. So in ordinary vision there is a kind of wide net of interconnected activity, which I sometimes imagine as a kind of tree or 3D lacework made of light. As we see different things the light structures shift. If we are thinking about space in an abstract way, when we're doing math, for instance, we use the area in parietal cortex that's used for space perception, without using the other vision centers; we're using just one quadrant of the tree. Color field painters presumably are isolating the temporal area that does color perception. We can learn to segregate sensory areas in endless different ways, but none of these ways are 'higher' than perception. They are just culturally supported ways of using parts of what in every day perception is an integrated whole. > Another misdescription of perception is that we perceive with our outside edges, that we see with our retinas, feel with our skins, hear with our ears. That isn't how it happens. Perception starts at the sensory surfaces, but goes on being accomplished by structures at all levels all the way up to the cortex and then looping back down into the muscles. And the senses aren't functionally separate from each other on the way up: vision, hearing and muscle proprioception are collaborating as early as the midbrain, and they go on feeding back onto each other all the way to the cortex and beyond. Space perception in the parietal for example is heavily visual but also has converging fibers from auditory and motor cortex - which is why blind people can do math. So it's not that there's one place in the brain where it all comes together and perceiving happens. We see and hear and touch with our entire nervous systems, and any moment of ordinary contact with the world will be a standing texture of simultaneous microperceptions, normally integrated but sometimes, transiently, separable. > Another thing that isn't generally known is that our brain can change quite a lot depending on what we do. People who practice playing an instrument, for instance, massively increase the number of neural connections available for fine finger movement. We customize our brains. Someone interested in certain kinds of perception can actually increase the amount of cortical tissue they use for that kind of perception. This explains how people can develop unusual kinds of skill. A physicist called Evelyn Fox Keller wrote a wonderful book called A feeling for the organism, which is about a corn geneticist, Barbara McLintock, who got the Nobel a few years back. It is the story of the development of McLintock's ability to perceive the genetic structures she was tracking. Out in the field, she knew the plants individually. She knew the shapes of their leaves and their growth habits and the colors of their kernels and so on. So then, when she looked at slides under her microscope, she got so she could see the individual genetic components of a plant. She could tell which plant the slide was from. McLintock did science by working up an always more informed integration of theoretic knowledge and eyesight. Keller called it erotic science, because it was science based on contact. It was not science done as if by aliens: it's science as done by someone who knows the land has made scientists as well as corn plants, so a scientist can adapt herself to a corn plant well enough to be able to really know it. Summary of new body-based epistemology:
Some resources: Abram, David (1996). Merleau-Ponty and the voice of the Earth. In: David Macauley (ed.) Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, 82-101. New York/London. Abram's Merleau-Ponty and "the Primacy of Perception" is a section of The perceptual implications of Gaia, which is at: www.webcom.com/gaia/percept.html. - Readable introduction to Merleau-Ponty on embodiment and environment. Langer Monika 1989 Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of perception Macmillan Epp Ellie 2001 Leaving the land: perception and fantasy, in Land, relationship and community, a symposium, S Semchuck ed, 10-18 Presentation House Gallery
2. Anthropology of human-world embeddedness Increased interest in how aboriginal cultures orient themselves in the natural world, for instance what their cognitive skills and values are. Revisions of former beliefs that aboriginal cultures were unskilled and simple. Examples: The great dance - documentary about San hunter-gatherers, that is specifically interested in how they perceive and think their relation with the animals they hunt. Hugh Brody on hunter-gatherers as opposed to agricultural settlers: The hunter-gatherer mind is humanity's most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition. It is where direct experience and metaphor unite in a joint concern to know and use the truth. The agricultural mind is a result of specialized, intense development of specific systems of intellectual order . 306 Many people are torn between these two ways. 307 Hugh Brody 2001 The other side of Eden: hunters, farmers, and the shaping of the world Lawrence Hogue on southern California: Hogue Lawrence 2000 All the wild and lonely places: journeys in a desert landscape Book about the Anza-Borrego Desert that has been called a "near-perfect blend of anthropology, geology, human and natural history." [Europeans] thought they were entering a naturally verdant and thriving land; what they had really found was a carefully cultivated garden 110 This desert hasn't been a wilderness in the conventional sense for thousands of years. Two hundred years ago, it was the Indians' garden. Now it's a garden gone to seed. 71 Indians maintained the land at a level below climax by millennia of land management. Digging wells and ditches, clearing shrubs back from springs to conserve water while allowing one tree to grow over the spring to provide shade and reduce evaporation, planting a willow where it will hold a bank, aligning rocks to prevent slopes from washing out, burning old growth, laying rocks to increase groundwater absorption, burning palms to increase date yield and kill diseases, tip pruning, planting groves, transplanting, branch or root propagation, scattering seeds. Barry Lopez in fiction and non-fiction: Among the Navajo and . . . many other native peoples, the land is thought to exhibit a sacred order. That order is the basis of ritual. The rituals themselves reveal the power in that order. Art, architecture, vocabulary, and costume, as well as ritual, are derived from the perceived natural order of the universe - from observations and meditations on the exterior landscape. An indigenous philosophy - metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and logic - may also be derived from people's continuous attentiveness to both the obvious (scientific) and ineffable (artistic) orders of the local landscape. Each individual, further, undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. - Barry Lopez "Landscape and Narrative," in Crossing open ground, 1989 Craig Childs on the Anasazi Craig Childs 2008 House of rain: tracking a vanished civilization across the American Southwest Fictional anthropology, Ursula Le Guin: Le Guin is a science fiction writer of exceptional humane sophistication whose Always coming home is a fictional anthropology of the Napa Valley 20,000 years the future. It imagines a culture with both high tech and intensive connection with the land, a culture worthy of its landscape. Some of what she imagines are vision quests in adolescence, a festival cycle closely tuned to season and weather, a lot of land-based work, slow travel often by foot, limited use of computer networks, strong local communities, and architectural layouts that are symbols of interconnection. Also: Rose Debbie 1996 Nourishing terrains: Australian aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness Australian Heritage Commission Rose Debbie 2000 Dingo makes us human: life and land in an Australian Aboriginal culture Cambridge Riddington Robin - any of his work on the Beaver people
of northern Alberta. 3. Feminist psychology and ecopsychology working to understand disaffection Research on anti-environment anxieties and motives, the psychology of contraction against the world. Laura Sewell: The ecological crisis is ... a crisis in perception; we are not truly seeing, hearing, tasting, or consequently feeling where we are... In fundamental terms, our evolutionary challenge is a matter of perceptual development capacity to sustain observation ... a matter of grace. Are we able to open with ease when the occasion arises? Are we able to fine-tune the quality of our presence, shifting the form and degree of our receptivity? ( 246-7) ... here's the skill: In the face of the clearly not so beautiful, we do not look away or unconsciously close in a spasm of denial. Skillfully, we witness ... ... the Other is an opportunity for relationship... distinctions and differences that show us what is possible for a life. Most fundamentally, difference is a manifestation of potential ... The acknowledgment and experience of fear is the door that opens us to heightened presence and perception through which we learn to live in the world as it is 119-120 Sewall Laura 1999 Sight and sensibility: the ecopsychology of perception Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam Work to understand social, economic, psychological reasons for exploitation, alienation, and evasion in land use, scholarship, high art, and epistemology, with the intention of learning to intervene correctly, compassionately and to rapid effect in these interrelated fields. > Understanding dissociation Dissociation is when you don't feel and know what you feel and know. Separation of conscious response from nonconscious response, which may be in conflict with conscious. Feminist psychology has learned more about reasons for dissociation. Carol Gilligan has worked out a description in terms of object relations or attachment theory, ie in terms of early infant experience and later developmental trauma. Gilligan Carol 2002 The birth of pleasure: a new map of love Vintage Books Paul Shepard on adolescent initiation: The ecopyschologist Paul Shepard talks in terms of botched adolescent initiation. Paul Shepard says that in adolescence a hunter-gatherer culture initiates [its boys] into a way of thinking about nature that makes it and not a non-physical elsewhere the ground for deeper and wider thinking, so that it becomes inexhaustible of interest. Western cultures neglect adolescent initiation, with the result that development freezes at the adolescent stage. Shepard Paul 1982/1999 "Nature and madness" in Ecopsychology, T Roszak, M Gomes, A Kanner eds, 21-40 Sierra Club Books. Also online. Lucid discussion of reasons for and environmental results of desire for disembodiment. Great feats of sentient response and sentient invention become possible to us by construction and reconstruction of our bodies. Initiation into the human enterprise, the stage of adult responsibility, is initiation into knowledge of the ground of our possibilities, and knowledge of the possibilities themselves. Rich Adrienne, Of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1976. In terms of embodiment I think this is the most important book of feminist theory to emerge from the Second Wave. How to distinguish between experience and construct if not through the body. The book ends with a call for women to reject the culture and politics of abstraction, to "think through the body to connect what has been so hardly used; our highly developed tactile sense; our genius for close observation; our complicated, pain-enduring, multipleasured physicality. We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body." The ultimate result, she claims, will be the transformation of thought itself. (LW) > Pervasive cultural dissociation A lot of feminist scholars have tackled culture-wide symptoms and results of dissociation. Along with many others, Susan Griffin demonstrates how hatred and fear of body, feeling, women and nature are symptoms of a common cause. Griffin Susan 1978 Woman and nature: the roaring inside her Harper and Row Evelyn Fox Keller 1985 Reflections on gender and science Yale Theodore Roszak's summary of ecopsychology > Where he says "ecological unconscious," read "body."
T Roszak, M Gomes, A Kanner eds, 1982/1999 Ecopsychology, Sierra Club Books > Many new body-based methods of trauma intervention Gendlin, Eugene T. Focusing. New York: Bantam, 1981. Caldwell Christine, ed. 1997 Getting in touch: the guide to new body-centered therapies Wheaton: Quest Books
van der Kolk Bessel The body keeps the score: memory and the psychobiology of post traumatic stress Peter A. Levine, Ann Frederick 1997 Waking the tiger : healing trauma : the innate capacity to transform overwhelming experiences Babette Rothschild The body remembers: the psychophysiology of trauma and trauma treatment Don Hanlon Johnson ed. 1995 Bone, breath, & gesture: practices of embodiment Summary: strategies to defend a cognitive ecology of connected intelligence:
4. Revision of scientific paradigms The sense of the world that views nature as a mechanism that is enmeshed in mechanical forces has led to a profound disenchantment with the natural world. There is within these forces of modernism a loss of the sense of a wider cosmology in which human actions are embedded. - O'Sullivan Unless we live our lives with at least some cosmological awareness, we risk collapsing into tiny worlds. For we can be fooled into thinking that our lives are passed in political entities, such as the state or a nation; or that the bottom-line concerns in life have to do with economic realities of consumer life-styles. In truth, we live in the midst of immensities. - Swimme The hidden heart of the cosmos In the past 30 years science has been revising some of its dominant paradigms. > Complexity Important shifts are complexity theory and chaotic dynamics, which envisage the world as self-organizing in more subtle and multi-leveled ways than before. > Network paradigm A related change is that self-organizing networks have become a dominant metaphor. For instance nervous systems have been re-imagined as complex cooperative networks. Gleick James 1988 Chaos: making a new science
> Wave structure physics A movement in physics to re-imagine atoms, molecules, and their larger combinations as standing wave patterns. I saw the possibility of a visionary medium through which a common ground could be found in the pursuits of knowledge carried out by the various sciences and religions. Tarthang Tulku in Time, space and knowledge The common background of microphysics and depth psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature. Jung Mysteriam coniunctionis Collected Works para 768 More about this in a workshop handout online: http://www.ellieepp.com/mbo/bodies/workshops/sky1.html. Carver Mead 2000 Collective electrodynamics MIT A radical re-imagining of the atomic foundation of electromagnetism. An interview with Carver Mead, American Spectator http://laputan.blogspot.com/2003_09_21_laputan_archive.html Milo Wolff 2008 Schrodinger's universe: Einstein, waves and the origin of the natural laws Outskirts Press > Psychology/philosophy of science At the same time, the rational mastery paradigm science has had has been revised toward a more inclusive understanding of the psychology of science - that how we do science includes sensing, feeling, intuition, and the body in general. Evelyn Fox Keller 1983 A feeling for the organism Yale Physicist Evelyn Fox Keller writing about a corn geneticist,
Barbara McLintock, who got the Nobel a few years back. It is the story of
the development of McLintock's ability to perceive the genetic structures
she was tracking. Supplementary conclusion Value of perception 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. 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 excellence Do 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 / epistemology 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. - from Chapter 10 of Being about: perceiving, imagining, representing, thinking
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