Direct Cognitive Encounter

Yesterday I was running south on Knox Avenue, past the middle school on my left and a park on my right. I became aware of a male voice yelling, the sound coming from in front and to the right. I looked toward the source of the voice: a guy is standing there looking at me. I keep running, looking toward this guy, when suddenly emerging out of the background visual array I detect an object flying through the air toward me at speed, just about to hit me. Immediately I recognize it as a frisbee. I could have tried to catch it in stride, but I figured that this guy who yelled and who had almost surely thrown the frisbee was probably playing frisbee golf, a game for which the park is equipped. I pulled myself back from the frisbee’s trajectory, letting it sail past me. I yelled to the guy “almost a hole in one,” and ran on.

In an earlier post I presented a brief case in support of the idea that minds and brains have direct access to themselves. Can a case be made that minds/brains have direct access to the real world as well?

Shaviro, in a recent post, writes:

I am unwilling to equate Kant’s argument for the cognitive inaccessibility to the thing-in-itself with the thesis that “objects never directly encounter one another.” This is because contact or encounter cannot be reduced to cognitive access. In Kant’s account, we are affected by things-in-themselves, even though we can never know them.

That’s fine as far as it goes: I can get hit by an object even if I never see it coming. If the object hits me without my knowing beforehand what it is, my encounter with it, though direct, will have been only partial: its color, the material from which it’s made, the cause of its specific trajectory — these and other properties of the object would not participate in the encounter. But what if I do see it coming, recognize it as a frisbee, realize that it’s probably going to hit me if both it and I continue on our current paths, decide whether to catch it or to take evasive action? Isn’t my cognitive interaction with the frisbee just as direct as if it had hit me without my knowing what it was? For that matter, doesn’t my cognitive interaction with the frisbee encounter more properties of the frisbee than if it had merely hit my body without my prior awareness?

If it is possible for objects to encounter one another directly, and if cognition is a form of inter-object encounter, then I suggest that it’s possible to have direct cognitive encounters with objects.

One could contend that cognition is indirect because it’s a higher-order processing capability, interpreting perceptual inputs which are in turn mid-level interpretations of raw sensory inputs. Arguably some sort of transformation or translation of inputs takes place at each hierarchical level of the organism’s functioning. However, the relationships between sensation, perception, and cognition aren’t entirely separate and hierarchical. When I see a colorful flat object sailing toward me from the direction of a frisbee golf course, I’m prepared, unconsciously and without sequential delay, to compare the pattern of sensory visual inputs with my stored cognitive schema for frisbee. Cognition emerges bottom-up from sensation and perception to be sure, but cognition also exerts top-down effects on sensation and perception. In fact, this top-down impact of cognition enables the sensory-perceptual apparatus to render even more accurate information about objects than would otherwise be the case.

There’s no reason to reduce cognition to lower-level brain activities like sensation and perception. Minds interact with the world cognitively: that’s what they do. Even if all sorts of transformations take place at lower levels to produce the emergent properties of minds and thoughts, these emergent entities are real in their own right. To contend that other kinds of inter-object relations like physical touching can be direct while cognitive interactions can only be indirect is seemingly to dismiss mind as something less than an object. Either that, or mind must be a qualitatively different sort of object that engages in qualitatively different sorts of encounters with the real.

Isn’t it a variant of idealism to view cognition as being not quite physical enough to touch the real? It’s a sort of inverted idealism, in that cognitive encounters are deemed incapable of accomplishing what raw physicality can achieve in the realm of the real. I am supposed to regard my cognitive encounter with the flying object not as a means of gaining more complete access to some real thing that’s about to strike me, but as a filter or screen that inserts itself between me and the real, blocking whatever direct access I might otherwise have experienced.

Shaviro goes on:

So I agree with Levi and Graham that an object never cognitively grasps any other object in its entirety. (This is what Levi calls epistemological anti-realism). My non-vicarious version of ontological realism consists in claiming that objects do directly encounter (or affect) one another — only they do so non-cognitively. This is precisely why our ontology can be realist, even when our epistemology is confessedly anti-realist.

Okay fine: let’s presume that it’s not possible cognitively to grasp another object in its entirety. But can’t knowledge, like other kinds of inter-object encounters, be incomplete but also direct? Knowledge isn’t only a mechanism for constructive interpretation of the real; it’s also a kind of recording device. If the object had physically struck me it would have recorded one sort of impression, a tactile one. Instead the object recorded cognitive impressions: it’s an orange frisbee, errantly thrown by that yelling guy in the park, aimed not at me but at one of the holes on the golf course.

Direct Access to Mind

This post is based on some comments I wrote to myself toward the end of an earlier post-and-discussion about cognition and empiricism. In my post I summarized some of the empirical evidence supporting the contention that much, if not most, human cognition takes place outside of conscious awareness. However, I decidedly did not propose that all of cognition is unconscious. We consciously attend to things, reason, solve problems, assemble stored memories, plan, evaluate information. And we’re self-reflexive about it: we are consciously aware that we’re reasoning, problem-solving, etc.

Doesn’t this mean that we have direct access to our own minds, at least to some extent? I’d say yes. If’ I’m aware that I’m solving a problem, and if both my awareness and my problem-solving are mental processes, then my mind has direct access to some of its own activities. If we’re consciously aware of the activities and outputs of our own consciousness, then that’s not just direct self-relation but also direct self-awareness of the self-relation. Consciousness is an emergent property of brain activity; unless we believe in the soul or some form of panpsychism there is no source of consciousness other than brain activity. So consciousness has to be in direct relation with the unconscious brain activity that generates it — doesn’t it? — even if that direct relation doesn’t take the form of conscious awareness of brain function. My hand is in direct connection with itself, even if  it can’t hold itself in its grip. A bridge is in direct connection with itself, even if it can’s support itself on itself.

What I definitely don’t have direct access to are the unconscious workings of the mind, which mostly have to do with the neural structures and synaptic firings from which my conscious thoughts arise. Similarly, I have some direct conscious access to my digestive tract — I’m aware of being hungry, or nauseated, or needing to pee — even if I don’t have access to the biological processes generating my awareness. If having access to the unconscious biochemical level is the only thing that counts for direct access, isn’t this to reduce mind from its emergent states and functions down to the biochemical brain functions?

But let’s go back to the issue of direct access. The brain is the source of both conscious and unconscious cognitive activity. Consciousness and unconsciousness together comprise mind. Just because I’m not consciously aware of unconscious processes doesn’t mean that my mind has no direct access to itself. My unconscious has direct access to itself, making and breaking synaptic connections, even if I’m not consciously aware of it. So too with my digestive tract: it has direct access to itself, enzymatically processing nutrients, shunting off waste products, and so on, even if my conscious mind has no direct access to these processes. Direct access of something to itself isn’t the same thing as direct conscious access to itself.

the unconscious and THE Unconscious

In a recent discussion of psychoanalysis, several commenters questioned the relationship between the empirically-supported unconscious and THE Unconscious of psychoanalytic theory. There is empirical support for the unconscious as a loosely-structured amalgam of neural nodes and connections, of memories and fragmented thoughts, waiting to be assembled into meaningful combinations by consciousness. But is there a place in the mind where hidden truths reside, a structure or process or event that speaks to consciousness with the intent of breaking through and revealing its secrets — THE Unconscious, if you will?

I don’t think so. In my view, the “breakthroughs” of analysis can be accounted for by the workings of the unconscious with a small “u,” without invoking this other repository of truth,  intentional revealer to consciousness, and portal to the Real that constitutes THE Unconscious.

In an earlier post (2½ years ago today!) I outlined Donnel Stern’s description of the unconscious. Stern, a psychoanalyst, offers an interpretation that aligns quite well with contemporary empirical psychology. The unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan famously pronounced, and in a sense that’s how the brain’s interconnections work. Language isn’t organized into prestored sentences that people retrieve as needed. Rather, the vocabulary and rules of language are only loosely organized, available as materials from which language-users can construct sentences on the fly. Brains are structured in this way too. Ideas, memories, and other stuff in the brain are widely but loosely connected to each other, available for retrieval when we need to solve a problem, remember how to get to Joe’s house, or talk about the weather.

Through repetition, certain interconnections become stronger than others — these are the ones most readily accessible to consciousness. But other connections are there too, operating below the threshold of consciousness. These weaker connections are usually overpowered by the stronger ones. This sort of “repression” may result from active effort to prevent certain neural connections from surfacing. More often, the weaker connections just never reach the synaptic “tipping point” which brings them across the threshold into conscious awareness.

In the psychoanalytic encounter, the analyst encourages the analysand to loosen up the dominant, habitual mental connections — to “deterritorialize” the mind, using Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology. By drawing attention to slips of the tongue, metaphors, and dual meanings, the analyst pulls on those secondary neural connections between words and ideas in hopes of bringing them into consciousness. Exploring these alternative ways of organizing mental material may lead the analysand into formulating new insights about past and present experiences and ascribing different meanings to them.

Stern explicitly draws the implications for THE Unconscious of traditional psychoanalytic theory:

“If unconscious experience does not have a single, predetermined meaning, but remains to be interpreted in reflective awareness, the effect of clinical interpretation does not depend on objective accuracy and cannot be judged on that basis.” (p. 63)

It’s difficult if not impossible to verify the supposed truth claims revealed by probing the unconscious, as testified by the recent resurgence and critique of repressed childhood memories retrieved through hypnosis and such as the cause of psychological disorders. Even Freud didn’t believe that these retrieved memories were “true” objectively; rather, he thought they constituted projections and wishes. Stern contends that bringing unconscious material into consciousness usually entails reformulating the meaning of memories that are already accessible to consciousness rather than uncovering previously repressed memories.

Stern continues:

“If unconscious meaning is an objective fact, and the clinical function of language is to label it, then the purpose of interpretation is the accurate matching of facts and labels. The only interpretations we can possibly make of objectively existing unconscious content must be — like their objects — objective, scientific, and nonphenomenological. Under these conditions, the analyst would be expected to explain the patient’s conduct and experience on the basis of nonintrospectible, but theoretically conceivable, abs0lute unconscious phenomena. The analyst would then be expected to convey these explanations to the patient in the form of objectively accurate interpretations.” (p. 164)

Stern doesn’t believe that analysis produces this unveiling of objective truths hidden in the unconscious. (It should be noted that none of what Stern says here would change if the patient rather than the analyst were doing the interpretations.) What is the alternative?

“Psychoanalysts and analysands do judge the goodness of their interpretations, of course. They do that continuously. But the accuracy of our portrayals of unconscious meaning is virtually irrelevant as a truth criterion. ‘Accuracy’ is not really even a meaningful term in discussing the interpretation of unformulated experience, because the term cannot be defined by reference to an observable relation between itself and its object. We know the object (to repeat the essential point) only by means of our interpretation of it. That means clinical interpretation is not objective and scientific, but subjective and phenomenological. And it spells the end of correspondence theory in psychoanalysis. We can no longer hold that the nonverbal unconscious meaning is the ‘real’ one that our words simply clothe or represent, or to which they correspond.” (p. 165)

Stern insists that it’s not necessary to deny the existence of a structured reality outside of awareness or language. He’s only contending that the meaning of the real isn’t fixed, either in the world or in the unconscious mind, waiting to be discovered. In psychoanalysis, interpretation leads to the conscious construction of meanings on material that had previously either been locked into an inadequate meaning or had remained unformulated, uninterpreted, personally meaningless.

“Interpretation has an organizing function. It is not a set of correct labels, but a redescription of the patient’s experience at a level of differentiation and articulation higher than the patient had heretofore reached. In this process of redescribing, an interpretation may bring together pieces of experience, or even of logic or emotional argumentation, that have never before appeared in the patient’s mind in a single configuration. An interpretation is a new Gestalt.” (p. 171)

Is Psychoanalysis Empirically Supported?

In a recent discussion at Perverse Egalitarianism regarding the relationship between ontology and politics, Asher Kay went off-topic to question the empirical validity of psychoanalysis. Asher had a book in hand casting strong doubt on the empirical basis for analysis. Bryan Klausmeyer countered by saying that clearly the unconscious exists, just as analysis asserts. Levi Bryant contended that the empirical support for psychoanalysis comes from clinical practice. Here’s my view of the situation, which I previously relayed to a few people via email.

There’s strong empirical support for the existence of the unconscious. This evidence isn’t generated only by analysts either. Social psychologists devise all sort of ingenious experiments for exploring ways in which our minds play tricks on us, where what people consciously say and believe are at odds with what they do and decide. Cognitive psychologists design problems intended to expose cognitive processes and intermediate results that happen in brains beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. Neuroscientists look at brain structures and functions that operate far beneath consciousness. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg of brain/mind activity, which is evident to all of us. E.g., what will I write in my next sentence? I don’t know yet: I’ll assemble it from components of knowledge and language that’s distributed in my brain but that I’m not consciously rehearsing. What was the name of my next door neighbor’s dog while I was growing up? I know it, but I have to retrieve it from unconscious memory in order to answer the question. As I wrote in a post a couple of months ago:

“Based on a count of receptor cells and their neural connections, neuroscientists estimate that the human sensory system takes in more than 11 million pieces of information per second. Based on studies of processing speed on tasks like reading and detecting different flashes of light, cognitive psychologists estimate that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second. What happens to the other 10,999,960? It’s processed unconsciously.”

Is there empirical support for the metapsychology of psychoanalysis? Here I’m referring to things like the id/ego/superego distinction, the Oedipus complex, the oral/anal/genital/phallic stages of development, the divided self centered around lack, the imaginary/symbolic/real, the unsatisfiability of desire, and so on? I’ve not read A Final Accounting, the book Asher cited, but I’d agree with the author’s general conclusion that the evidence is either weak or nonexistent. For what it’s worth, psychoanalytic theory plays virtually no role in contemporary empirical psychology and its investigations of cognition, memory, the unconscious, personality, and even psychopathology. Awhile back I wrote a post critiquing Lacan’s supposed empirical support for a “mirror stage” preceding language acquisition leading to the development of the “specular image” of the self. This situation follows what seems to be the typical pattern: despite claims to evidentiary support for the theories, the evidence typically doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny.

Regarding the therapeutic outcomes of psychoanalysis… I know, I know, analysis isn’t therapy. However, people tend to be motivated to come for analysis because they’re suffering from symptoms, and I daresay that they expect analysis to alleviate their suffering. Many empirical studies point to the same conclusion: pretty much any therapeutic intervention is far better than no intervention, but no particular technique seems to work any better than the rest. Also, the amount of experience on the therapist’s part seems to have no impact on outcome.

One implication of this finding of similar results across modalities is that all modalities achieve their effects pretty much the same same way. So even though psychoanalysis and cognitive behavioral therapy espouse different praxes and theoretical rationales, they might be wrong regarding the cause-effect connection. It seems likely that establishing and maintaining a supportive relationship between therapist and client is the most important criterion for obtaining good symptom relief.

It should be noted that cognitive behavioral therapy gains no greater empirical support for therapeutic outcomes than does psychoanalysis. The constructs of CBT seem fairly common-sensical, even managerial, which suits some people better than does the quasi-mystical language of analytic theory. And there is some empirical evidence that people who believe in the particular treatment praxis they receive are more likely to benefit from therapy.

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Though I’m not persuaded by the empirical evidence supporting psychoanalysis, I find it more fascinating than ever. Empiricism in psychological research is mostly a matter of averages. But it’s a pretty squishy field of research, with even strong correlations between variables typically overwhelmed by the statistical variation. Clinical practice opens up the exploration of the variations, the individual differences that get lost in empirical averaging. Two people scoring the same on a depression inventory can have very different subjective experiences of their depression, different causal trajectories, different ways in which their symptom affects their lives, and so on.

I found as a therapist that the empirical evidence had very little to do with the way I engaged with clients, because for the individual it’s the unique trajectory through life that’s important. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that after seeing multiple clients I found them all blurring together into something like an average client. Some therapists probably find that comforting: I know what to do with this case. My reaction was that I began losing interest, feeling unengaged and mechanical and distant in dealing with the clients. That’s why I quit doing therapy.

To illustrate the value of psychoanalysis, Levi Bryant described on Larval Subjects his experience of repeatedly breaking the chalk on the blackboard when he was a new teacher. His analyst’s intervention was to repeat a phrase that Levi spoke during a session, something about “pressure on the board.” The analyst’s restating of Levi’s remark triggered a cascade of insights, and shortly thereafter the chalk-breaking stopped.

What’s the common-sense response to this example? You’re tense. It’s natural to be nervous when you start out doing anything; most people fear public speaking; give it some time and you’ll start relaxing. And in most instances the common-sense response would be accurate: the nervousness would abate in time, the new teacher would stop pressing (literally and figuratively) so hard and relax into a comfort zone. One could imagine different sorts of interventions for accelerating the process. Relaxation exercises. Systematic desensitization — think about the chalk, pick it up and set it back down, pick it up and press it on the board and set it down, etc. CBT — it’s irrational to think that you’re less competent than your students, or that they care more about your performance than about their own grade in the class; become aware of your bodily and mental sensations leading up to the chalk-breaking and try to short-circuit the event by taking a deep breath and relaxing the hand holding the chalk; etc. We could even imagine a Freudian drawing analogies between the piece of chalk and the penis, handling the chalk and masturbation, breaking the chalk and self-castration for trying to take the place of the father in the classroom, and so on. Every one of these specific interventions might be useless in causing new teachers to stop breaking chalk, but the chalk-breaking would probably stop anyway over time. In all likelihood, though, Levi would attribute his lighter touch with the chalk to whatever sort of intervention technique he happened to undergo. And empirically speaking, just having someone there to support him would likely have reduced Levi’s anxiety more quickly than if he’d just dealt with it on his own.

But Levi’s analyst encouraged him to deal with the chalk-breaking symptom not just as something to overcome but as a sort of exploratory window. Looking through the window, Levi was able to see various ways in which this chalk-breaking symptom might relate to other experiences in his life, other symptoms, past experiences that caused similar reactions. The loosening of rational consciousness thought encouraged by the psychoanalytic context opened up the window even wider, bringing in less obvious, less well-rehearsed interconnections in memory and affect. The analyst’s interventions serve not to foreclose further exploration through expert judgment but to loosen the strictures even further, to deterritorialize the neural net with little schizzy interruptions in the usual flow of associations. Levi might have stopped breaking chalks at about the same time if he’d gone for CBT instead, but almost certainly he wouldn’t have had as rich and unique an experience along the way.

To me this is the great thing about psychoanalytic praxis: it regards symptoms as opportunities to open up windows rather than as cracks in the walls that have to be patched up. The kinds of discoveries a client might make are liable to be some combination of the ordinary and the idiosyncratic, just like all human experience tends to be. But for that particular client the discoveries add depth and texture and meaning to life. In this sense analysis is more like watching a great movie, or perhaps like writing a novel, than like going to a repair shop. What are the measurable outcomes of reading Crime and Punishment? You might pass a knowledge test, you might write a good interpretive essay, but ultimately it’s some sort of (trans)formative experience that contributes something intangible and distinct to who you are and how you experience the world.

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Is psychoanalysis worth the money? I suppose the question is: compared to what? It seems self-indulgent, but so is buying a new car every few years or remodeling the kitchen. Those shopping-cart comparisons point to something fairly obvious: it’s hard not to think of analysis as a bourgeois luxury good. And yet, even in the go-go borrow-and-spend years leading up to the latest meltdown, those who could afford analysis rarely made that purchase. Is it because of the lack of empirical support? Doubtful. After all, consumers know that a new car loses a few thousand dollars in value the minute you drive it off the lot. There’s just something sort of decadently impractical about analysis. Besides, who intentionally wants to pick at the scabs of old wounds and open up cans of worms?

Civility

I’m finished with discussing people’s personal shortcomings on this blog. I’d sworn off it long ago but then, for what may have been good reasons or bad, I encouraged and jumped back into the return of the repressed rage. Maybe it really was a good idea at the time, served some useful function. But I’m done with that now.

I don’t deny the rage. If someone wants to talk about what an asshole someone is, or what an asshole I am for that matter, send me an email (portalic@gmail.com). I’ll be happy to listen, to gossip, to commiserate, to argue, to offer my opinion, maybe even to lend personal support for whatever that’s worth. I’ll probably even agree with you, inasmuch as these days I find myself routinely disappointed by and pissed off at practically everyone. But I’m done with the public airing of private grievances here, regardless of how justified or who started it. You say I’m standing in the way of freedom of speech, that I’m repressing the expression of the unconscious, that I’m schizzing the flows of creativity? Yes, I’m aware of that.

Disagreement, debate, argumentation? Not always my favorite sort of discussion, but it’s got a legitimate and honorable place in public discourse. And I’m still prepared to discuss publicly, and to write posts about, and to renounce, the dressing-up of private interpersonal disputes in abstract theoretical terms. But Dejan is right: there’s a lot of free-floating malevolence sluicing through the blogs. Civility might be a poor substitute for genuine love, but I prefer it to the direct or indirect public expression of genuine hatred, no matter how heartfelt.

The Reality of Blogging Identities

Recently there’s been some discussion, here and elsewhere, about whether fictional characters are real. Here’s a related question: are fictional blogging identities real?

In a heated exchange on another blog, the host “outed” a commenter as “really” being someone else with whom he’s previously engaged in at-times acrimonious discussions. Ah, the heck with it: Levi Bryant on Larval Subjects inferred correctly from his blog’s telemetry data that “A. Tuffini Denouferchie” is actually the same person as “Alexei.” Levi then chastizes Alexei and other commenters for not using their real names on the discussion threads, hiding in bad faith behind pseudonyms in order to write disingenuous and inflammatory comments without their snarky or trollish attitudes redounding negatively to their real reputations.

I acknowledge that I share Levi’s frustration with not knowing who’s on the other end of a blogging exchange. Though formerly I signed my comments as “Ktismatics,” right from the beginning I’ve always identified myself by my real name on this blog. As a consequence I suspect that I’m somewhat more cautious, more civil, in my blogging interactions than if I adopted a fictional blogging identity. In a sense one could say that, by posting as who I “really” am, I’m actually distorting the “real” me.

People choose fictional blogging identities for a variety of reasons. Some do it to hide themselves; others, to reveal themselves. Some probably adopt fictional blogging personae in order to “try on” different identities, voices, and attitudes. I have no problem with any of these reasons. “Tuffini” deploys a writing style and philosophical point of view that’s quite different from “Alexei.” Was Alexei wearing the Tuffini disguise in order to trick Levi, to blindside him, to hide like a coward while taking potshots at Levi? I have no idea, but I wouldn’t assume so. Fellow bloggers are always curious when a distinctive new commenter arrives on the scene. Last week I received an email from someone who tried to guess — incorrectly as it turned out — Tuffini’s “real” identity. The unmasking brings with it a kind of sadness, a loss of the sense of intrigue and possibility, a sense also that the unveiled person has been publicly disgraced.

But even if Tuffini really is Alexei, who is Alexei really? I don’t believe it’s his real name. Maybe the continental philosopher who is Alexei is no more — and no less — “real” than the analytic philosopher who is Tuffini.

I’ve written fiction under my own name, but I know others who write under a pseudonym. Are they cowards, hiding behind a false front so they can write zombie porn without their business colleagues knowing anything about  it? Did Stephen King know all the real reasons he began publishing as Richard Bachman? I didn’t self-consciously present myself as John Doyle on the blogs as some sort of authenticity gambit. I’d never even read more than a handful of blog posts before I started my own blog, so I had no idea that people tended to create semi-fictional identities for themselves. Also, I launched the blog as part of a PR campaign which I hoped would make the ideas I’d recently written in a book more visible, thereby enhancing my chances of scoring a publishing contract (didn’t work btw).

In an object-oriented ontology, any difference makes a difference. A fictional character is different from other fictional characters; real things are written about her on the page; readers think real thoughts about her. Thus the fictional character is arguably “real” even though she isn’t a real person, even though she is in fact an artifact of the author’s, and the readers’, imaginations. In my view, it’s OOO-consistent to regard Tuffini as real separate from his identity as Alexei, just as Alexei is real separate from the name and persona he goes by in his (or her?) off-line “real” life.

Writing under my own name does potentially expose me to real-life consequences I might not otherwise face. Does this give me the moral high ground? I don’t believe so. Again, I became John Doyle on the blog in part as a self-promotional device, so I have to live with the consequences if not all the publicity reflects well on my cleverness or my character. Still, I do share a kind of camaraderie with others who post under their real names. And I always do feel that my exchanges with pseudonymous bloggers are always somewhat more fictional, more artificial, than with those who go by their real names, even if I don’t know these people in any context other than the blogs.

Do I regard it as my ethical obligation to “out” the pseudonymous bloggers? Quite the opposite: I feel that I should respect the other person’s secret identity, regardless of the reason s/he has put on the disguise. What about when the pseudonymous blogger starts taking potshots at me? Certainly it’s a form of retaliation to reveal something about an enemy that the enemy would rather keep secret. But I don’t think one can claim the moral high ground to expose the other person, unless it so happens that the person is performing criminal acts, in which case exposing him/her is a civic duty even if that person is your friend and ally. Obviously we’re not talking about that situation.

Now, how about publishing information in private emails written by pseudonymous bloggers? My first instinct is to say “no harm, no foul” — no adverse consequences can accrue to a person’s real-world life by exposing private correspondences of his/her fictionalized persona. But when it’s the fictionalized persona whom we in the blogging world encounter, then I think that persona deserves to maintain the private/public distinction. The blogosphere is a social reality in its own right, and the characters who populate it merit respect being extended to them within the bounds of that reality. By the same token, I don’t regard pseudonymy as cart-blanche authorization for the semi-fictionalized blogger to dissociate him-/herself from ordinary civility developed within the “real” social world.

Both of these last two points are, I admit, controversial. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned. The blogosphere is a semi-fictional social reality: isn’t it legitimate to experiment with variants on ordinary-world civility in these semi-fictional social exchanges?

Knowledge/Speculation

There are things about the real world that humans do not and cannot know. Purportedly the continental antirealist strain of philosophy has restricted itself to what humans can know and how they know it, turning philosophy into epistemology and hermeneutics and phenomenology. The new breed of continental realists speculate about what the real world might be like outside of human awareness.

Scientific realists explore the real by means of human knowledge. They assume that humans can know something about the real, even if that knowledge is distorted and incomplete. In the absence of knowledge, speculation is the only recourse. The scientist values speculation because it opens up new possibilities for seeking knowledge. The scientist wants to put speculation to the test, incrementally replacing imagination and ignorance with knowledge. For a scientist to ask “but how do you know?” isn’t to substitute epistemology for ontology. The scientist isn’t asking how humans acquire knowledge; the scientist wants to know that your speculation has some basis in the real.

There will always be aspects of the real that are beyond the reach of human knowledge. The more we know, the more we realize that we don’t know, and so the future of speculation is assured. From a scientific realist perspective, the first big mistake is to regard some aspect of the real as permanently insulated from human knowledge and thus permanently consigned to the realm of speculation. An even bigger mistake is to substitute speculation for knowledge as the basis for engaging reality in general: that’s the way of the rationalist, the idealist, the mystic, the fideist.

The scientist’s question is a refined version of what any curious child wants to know. “The kitty will find a good home,” the father asssures the crying child as they leave the stray at the pound. “But how do you know?” Well, you don’t know really:  you hope, you count on the odds, you speculate. The only way you can know is to come back to the pound in a month, find out what happened to the kitty, go interview the kitty’s new owners, inspect the kitty visually. Of course even then you aren’t 100% certain that the kitty has found a good home. But at least you’ve replaced some of your speculations with knowledge.

Some Thoughts on Phase Space

Hey, it’s just a blog, right?

Citing my favorite source, Wikipedia, phase space is

“a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space.”

A particular system might occupy only a fraction of its possible states during its existence. The phase space can be described as an array of probabilities that the system will actually occupy any particular state. So if an object is to include the entirety of its phase space, then the object contains not just its actual state in a given moment in time, nor even all the states it occupies during its lifetime, but all the possible states it could, with probability > 0, achieve during its lifetime.

This is a rather abstract description of an object, including a whole array of potentialities that are never actualized. So, e.g., the chair I’m sitting in would include in its objecthood all the possible physical places it could occupy in the universe. The probabilities are highest for its someday occupying some other space in the living room, but the probability is greater than zero that someday it might find itself sitting someplace in upstate New York. The chair’s potential to be pretty much anywhere on earth at some point during its lifetime could be regarded as an important aspect of the chair that doesn’t participate in its interactions with me or with the other stuff in the room it currently occupies. But I don’t see how the chair’s potential to be elsewhere is withdrawn from its current interactions here and now. The chair is indifferent to being moved; it resists only in a purely mechanical sense of being stationary and, as an inanimate object, incapable of autonomous movement. But if the moving men came and put the chair in a truck, the chair will cooperate. Potential doesn’t withdraw from its own actualization. Rather it’s a matter of probabilities, which seem neutral rather than withdrawn.

The quarter sitting on my nightstand is currently in the heads-up position, but it contains within itself the potential to be tails-up. If I flip the quarter it’s not going to resist coming up tails.

The probability approaches 100% that I will still be an embodied living human being when I post these thoughts on the blog. The probability approaches 100% that I won’t still be an ELHB 60 years from now. The possible trajectories I could have taken in the past are withdrawn save for one: the actual path that I took. The further into the future I project my potential existence, the greater the likelihood that one day I will visit Ulan Bator or  any other remote location on earth that’s part of my low-probability geographical phase space. Some day though, all my futures will join my pasts in being fully used up, fully withdrawn from actualization.

Some Thoughts on Difference

Just thinking out loud…

“Difference” implies “different-from.” Something that is is different from what it is not. Doesn’t it follow that the discrete uniqueness of an object, its essence as “different,” is defined in relation to everything else from which it differs? This isn’t just a language game, where the word for an object is defined as its difference from all other words. Nor is it just an epistemological matter, whereby an observer recognizes a discrete object relative to its surroundings. If something isn’t different from other stuff, then it’s the same as the other stuff, no?

If a reality is entirely uniform and stable, then any sort of change that emerges in this reality is differentiating. If a reality is entirely chaotic, random, noisy, unstable, then any sort of stability that emerges in this reality is differentiating. If a reality is comprised entirely of discrete things, stable yet distinct from one another, then any sort of unique pattern is differentiating. In any case, difference is different-from.

If difference is that which distinguishes a thing from the rest of the reality it occupies, then the uniqueness of a discrete thing is the combination of differences it contains. This n-dimensional differential vector might manifest itself in a variety of ways relative to other things in its larger reality. So, for example, a distinct genetic pattern will generate an organism that exhibits various kinds of distinct phenotypic differences in the ways it interacts with its environment. Whether one regards genotype or phenotype or both as the definitive “difference that makes a difference,”  in any case the essence of the discrete organism is still embedded in the vector of differences-from, which are intrinsically relational.

Suppose the essence of some discrete thing withdraws from all relations. If difference is always relational, then difference makes no difference to this discrete thing: it could hypothetically be identical to anything or everything else in its reality and still be a discrete thing in its withdrawn essence. Conversely, a thing’s difference-from other things can be multiple and extreme yet still not make any real difference for establishing its distinct reality. The only alternative I can think of is to propose a kind of difference that isn’t difference-from. The interior of a discrete thing into which its non-relational essence retreats: it would have to be a place outside of the reality in which relations occur, wouldn’t it?

Object-Reality Interdependence

Developmental systems theory emphasizes the interrelationships of organisms and environments. Genes aren’t regarded as predetermined trajectories that will inevitably unfold unless some environmental glitch gets in the way. Rather, genes and environments interact in complex ways, leading to any number of outcomes. The same genotype can manifest itself in very different ways phenotypically depending on variations in the local situation. Individual organisms don’t develop in isolation as autonomous entities; they must occupy a particular niche within their species, their local community, their family. Environmental variables like climate fluctuation, food scarcity, and population densities of one’s own species as well as predator/prey species can exert profound effects on the individual organism’s life course. But organisms don’t just adapt to their environments. Organisms actively shape their environments, building nests, laying down trails, pollenating plants, affecting the populations of predator/prey animals in the vicinity. While many kinds of organisms might share a common space, they don’t really share a common environment. Features of the world that afford safety and nourishment for one species might present a threat to another species while being met with complete indifference by a third species. In short, neither the organism nor the environment can be considered in isolation; they are interdependent.

The same sorts of insights hold for objects and realities. Objects aren’t hard-programmed to become that which their component parts and primal causative forces predetermine them to be. They follow idiosyncratic trajectories, based to a large degree on local differences in the texture of the reality they occupy. Each object is different from every other object. Still, objects do cluster themselves into categories that reflect real shared similarities with one another and real systematic differences from other kinds of objects. While all objects occupy the same material universe, they don’t all occupy the same reality. Some objects are affected by differentiating forces to which other objects remain invulnerable. Similarly, different kinds of objects can effect different kinds of differences in their surroundings. If an object is a “difference that makes a difference,” then a reality for that object consists of those sorts of differentiating forces in which it participates. A real object and the reality it occupies are interdependent.

Moby Dick Sub-Reality

Certainly we can agree on a few things. Fictional characters are real in the sense of being the subject matter of real books, the focus of real human conversations and literary analyses and flights of imagination.  But fictional characters aren’t real people. Fictional worlds too might be real, but they aren’t the real world. So where does that leave us?

In a recent post I acknowledged that I had written a particular fictional character in a very sketchy way, leaving the reader plenty of leeway to imagine what this character is “really” like. But creating characters wasn’t my main concern in writing the novel. Mostly I was trying to open up a window onto an alternate reality. The fictional characters serve as proxies, stand-ins for real people who might occupy this alternate reality. The characters also function as lures, attempting to draw readers into this alternate reality.

I could go into some detail describing the dimensions and contours of the reality I tried to open up in that book. The characters and events occupy pretty much the same time and space as the real material world we live in. What’s important in establishing the alterity of that particular fictional reality are the strands of meaning that link the characters together, that motivate their actions, nad that shape the imaginary trajectories they trace through the world.

There is no reason why real people, occupying the real world, couldn’t find their lives shaped by these same forces. They may in fact be so shaped, at least in part, without their consciously being aware of it. This possible overlap between fictional and ordinary realities isn’t true just of my book. Anyone could become entangled in obsessive vengeance, even if he’s not the captain  of a ship and the object of his passion isn’t a great white whale.

Still, you and I aren’t characters in Moby Dick — that fictional story does not include us as characters. Ahab isn’t real in our world, but by the same token we aren’t real in his. This isn’t to say that, as people, Ahab and you are of equal standing: you’re not. For one thing, Ahab is a lot more famous and influential in our world than you are; for another, Ahab has no material human existence in the real world and he never did.

There are strands of meaning and motivation that link fictional with nonfictional worlds. In understanding megalomania, Ahab presents an excellent case study. Of course we understand that he’s a fictional character. But Ahab is entwined in strands of meaning that affect us just as firmly as he is wrapped up in the harpooneer’s rope.

Sure, ultimately there is only one reality, even if it turns out that we occupy only one among countless universes in the multiverse. In our universe everything came out of the Big Bang, eventually including Herman Melville, his books, the characters who populate them, and the abstract themes that link them to us still. But isn’t it useful for certain purposes to partition the one reality into many?

The fictional reality created  inside Moby Dick involves certain characters doing various things in certain places that have a direct correspondence to the material world in which Melville lived. Real people alive at the time the book was written, as well as real places not directly mentioned in the book, as well as everyone who has ever read the book, do not exist inside that fictional reality. We live in a world that can be partitioned into a sub-reality consisting entirely of every novel ever written. Melville, though no longer alive in the real world, occupies a place in this sub-reality as an author. The original manuscript of Moby Dick may well be lost, but millions of physical copies of the book exist in various languages, as do online versions that can be downloaded onto computers. From the perspective of our sub-reality we can disregard all the physical and virtual copies, focusing on the single abstract object called “Moby Dick the novel.” Likewise we can disregard all the copies of Ahab residing in all the copies of the book, focusing on the single, abstract, never-alive but fictionally-real sea captain. And the theme of megalomania, though it’s never written in so many words in the book, emerges from the book as a theme that links Ahab to other fictional characters, to those of us who choose to occupy the sub-reality of all novels ever written.

In some other sub-reality, consisting of all printed documents, all those hard copies of Moby Dick do count as real. And in another sub-reality the megalomaniacal theme is real even to those who have never heard of Moby Dick.

Right-Brain Psychoanalysis

Last night I attended a presentation on learning styles at my daughter’s school. The speaker, an educational psychologist, pushed the left brain-right brain asymmetry as the source of two different cognitive styles: auditory-sequential and visual-spatial. I’m left-handed, so presumably my brain has more cross-wiring than right-handed people’s brains. Even so, characterizing the left hemisphere as “auditory” is misleading.

Briefly, the argument is this: Empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that (for right-handers especially) language is processed mostly in the left hemisphere. This is true for both spoken and written language. Language is processed sequentially, and sequence is a function of time. There is some evidence suggesting that the left hemisphere is more sensitive than the right in detecting short time intervals. What the right hemisphere adds to linguistic processing is the awareness of affect, attitude, interpersonal context: connotation rather than denotation, holistic rather than sequential. Many of the relevant connotational cues are visual: body language, facial expression. And there is independent evidence supporting right-hemispheric dominance in processing visual-spatial information.

However, other connotational cues are auditory: tone of voice and inflection, so-called “melodic speech,” which is also predominantly a right-hemispheric function in most people. The right brain is also presumably better at conjuring up mental images of what a string of language is talking about: the objects, events, and scenes being described, the array of signifieds toward which the linguistic signifiers point. The right brain is also better at divergent thinking: coming up with alternative ways of imagining or thinking about or representing something, which I believe implies the ability to generate alternative linguistic descriptions of something.

So now I find myself thinking about implications for psychotherapy and analysis. Language is the dominant medium for pretty much all techniques, suggesting a left-hemispheric bias. Cognitive-behavioral praxis involves a systematic parsing of thoughts and behaviors in an attempt to identify mismatches: irrational perceptions and attitudes and beliefs, inappropriate behavioral-linguistic responses. Treatment involves breaking into the sequence that links environmental cue, thought, and action, then consciously attempting to restructure this sequence in a more rational way.

In contrast, psychoanalytic technique deals primarily with the unexpressed, the repressed, the unformulated. As the person speaks, the analyst looks for clues to what is not being said: slips, tone of voice, facial tics, bodily movements. Through free association the client begins producing linguistic strings that haven’t been structured consciously into appropriate and rational discourse. Guided imagery encourages the client to picture memories or events or situations in the mind’s eye. Progress is made by bringing more and more unconscious material into awareness, playing with it, integrating it with conscious but discrepant thoughts, and eventually letting it settle into a holistic scheme of coherent personal meaning.

In short, doesn’t it seem that cognitive-behavioral therapy is a left-hemispheric praxis whereas psychoanalysis emphasizes right-brain activity?

Still, psychoanalysis focuses on linguistic expression. In part this is an artifact of analysis being an interpersonal process: it’s hard to know what someone else is thinking without their putting it into words. Also, though, there is a presumption that consciousness is inherently linguistic. Thought and language seem inextricably linked, such that thought is a kind of unspoken linguistic process and language is thought made accessible to others. Thoughts which cannot be expressed verbally aren’t really thoughts, it is argued. Further, analysis has historically depended on the analyst’s ability to interpret the client, and interpretation is always verbally communicated.

But what about images, pictures, physical structures? To create visual-spatial things requires conscious attention, contemplation, imagination, and manipulation. Collage, haphazard rearrangement of components, even demolition: these activities both embody and generate meaning, even if that meaning cannot be put into words. Must the analyst insist that the client drag the right-brain stuff across the corpus callosum into left-brain language processing? Why not just let the client express the non-linguistic stuff non-linguistically, through image, movement, intonation, manipulation? The explicitly analytic role of the analyst is regarded as less important than the client’s self-analysis. And even if the client never explicitly formulates his or her insights in words, the changes in perception, affect, energy, desire, proactivity, freedom of expression, personal integration, and so on are the most important outcomes.

On the other hand, perhaps because I’m left-handed I value bilateral integration. Being able to express divergent and holistic thoughts and images verbally seems like a good thing. And being able to deal with images and structures and intonations and affects without having to talk about them also seems like a good thing.

Who Is She Really?

“When Mrs. Dervain reached her hand out to me I thought she was extending a common kindness.”

That’s the first line of a novel I wrote. Mrs. Dervain is a central character, but I purposely revealed very little about her. I wanted to see what sort of person readers inferred her to be — likable or not, physical characteristics, and so on — based on the minimal information provided in her words, gestures, and actions. Those few people who have read the book seem to find Mrs. Dervain fascinating, even though they tend to ascribe very different characteristics to her.

I began writing this novel, abandoned it for maybe a year and a half, then came back to it. The other two main characters had prominent roles in the earlier fragment; Mrs. Dervain I introduced as a new character. I had passed the halfway point in the writing when I read again part of the older manuscript. It included an extended section featuring another woman character. I wondered: what if I turn this other woman character into Mrs. Dervain? With only the slightest forethought or planning I created a big piece of Mrs. Dervain’s back story simply by assigning her name to this earlier character.

Immediately I began seeing Mrs. Dervain in a different light. Now that she had been merged with this earlier character her gestures and remarks seemed to resonate more deeply, revealing greater complexity in motivation and attitude. But her deepened character resulted from an arbitrary, even capricious move on my part. Had this earlier textual fragment involved a very different story line, merging the woman character into Mrs. Dervain would have turned her into a quite different person.

Awhile back I wrote a post about “cyranoids,” — people who, in conversation, speak words fed to them via earpiece from someone else. The cyranoids’ interlocutors invariably ascribe a whole and integrated personality to a flesh-and-blood individual who is voicing the thoughts of two, three, even ten different people.

A reader could decide that I, the writer, should have last say in asserting what Mrs. Dervain is really like. But I was just writing the words, making it up as I went along. Editing tidied up some loose ends and eliminated some inconsistencies, but this was just surface polishing. I don’t know Mrs. Dervain any better than any other reader of the book.

Are Illusions Real?

Empirical psychologists frequently rely on deception and error in order to infer how cognitive processes work. When intersubjective agreement is total regarding some phenomenon, then it’s impossible to distinguish between the nature of that phenomenon and the way in which the human subject perceives that phenomenon. The research psychologist tries to open up a split. Optical illusions are common enough examples. In one well-known example, two perfectly parallel lines appear to bow apart from each other in the middle. The lines are constructed in such a way as to deceive the human perceptual system. Or researchers can construct deceptive problems for subjects to solve. If subjects tend to make particular kinds of errors on tasks for which the right solutions are well-defined a priori, then the errors can be attributed to quirks of human subjectivity that caused the subjects to misapprehend the nature of the problem.

In one study,  the researcher displays four brands of a particular product on a table, arrayed from left to right. The researcher asks the subjects to choose which brand they regard as best and why. Subjects make their choices and offer their rationales. In fact, all four displayed products are identical. Empirically, it turns out that, on average, subjects prefer objects on the right side of the display to those on the left. In explaining the basis for their choices, the subjects describe (nonexistent) differences in quality without ever showing any conscious awareness of what must actually have motivated their choices. The subject perceives differences in the individual objects, but these differences are illusory. They’re actually responding to an unconscious subjective preference for arraying objects that tends to be a characteristic bias of human subjectivity.

From the researcher’s point of view, subject’s errors in task performance and misattributions in accounting for their own behaviors are real enough. Errors and self-deceptions are counted, categorized, analyzed statistically, interpreted theoretically. Again, though, what motivates this sort of work is to use these errors as a means of distinguishing perceptual-cognitive processes from the external phenomena they’re processing. The errors are real in the paradoxical sense that they present real evidence of human limitations in discerning external reality accurately.

The physical sciences make progress by identifying and controlling for observational error caused by limitations and biases in human perceptual-cognitive capabilities. To the human eye, the moon and the sun appear to be just about the same size. But it turns out this is an illusion resulting from intrinsic human limitations in judging distance between the eye and the observed object, especially when the distances are enormous. The apparent size-equivalence of sun and moon to the naked eye is real enough, in the sense that it’s a real illusion pointing to real limitations in humans’ ability to perceive the external world accurately. What interests the astronomer, though, are the actual sizes and distances of the sun and moon.

I grasp the “object-oriented” contention that my perception of the size of the sun is just as real as the sun itself. Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t help finding this ontological equivalence rather dissatisfying when trying to distinguish illusion from fact, subjective from objective, the apparently real from the really real.

Bullying

Bullies play a critical role in coming-of-age movies, embodying the fear we all have of one another. The bully never goes away; eventually he must be confronted. It’s never a matter of brute force that overwhelms the bully, but a combination of wits, leverage, and teamwork. Most important is bravery — not bravado, but rather a willingness to confront one’s fears, risking humiliation in order to attain some new measure of autonomy and self-assurance on the road to adulthood.

Teachers have watched these movies, surely. Why, then, when the schoolyard bullies have been neutralized, do they have to fill the void?

Adorno, in his essay “Taboos on the Teaching Profession,” denounces the stereotypical teacher as a “classroom tyrant,” a “caricature of despotism” whose power only parodies that of other educated professionals. In knowing more than his charges and in wielding power over those obligated to obey him, the teacher is “not fair, not a good sport.” To be good, a teacher must set aside these advantages accruing solely to his function:

“Success as an academic teacher is due to the absence of every kind of calculated influence, to the renunciation of persuasion.”

So here’s the story. Our daughter Kenzie is a junior in high school. As a sophomore she took advanced placement American History, which entailed a huge amount of work. She got an A in the class and passed the AP exam “above expectations,” earning university credit. This year every class in which she’d enrolled is either AP or IB (international baccalaureate, if anything even tougher than AP). Three days into the semester she decided that the IB World History class, which by all accounts imposes an even greater burden than the American History, was just too much on top of everything else. She decided therefore to switch into a regular section of the history class. Anne and I supported this decision.

On Monday Kenzie, fairly certain of her decision but a little nervous about rocking the boat, goes to school trying to reorganize her schedule. She stops in to discuss her rationale with her teacher from last year’s history class, a tough old broad who is an excellent teacher and whom our daughter respects a great deal. The teacher listens patiently and agrees with Kenzie’s decision. Two other history teachers, overhearing the conversation, start talking to one another. “What’s with these kids? Did they lose half of their brain cells over the summer?”

Next Kenzie has to get a signature from her current World History teacher in order to get out of his class. She tracks him down in his office. The guy isn’t going to make it easy for her. “It’s hard for me not to take this personally,” he tells Kenzie. Kenzie describes her overloaded schedule. “But  art?” he asks disdainfully. Kenzie is an artist first and foremost; every other class is optional, but not art. Apparently the other two eavesdroppers had “discussed” Kenzie’s case with this guy based on what they’d overheard in the previous discussion. Clearly they had come to the conclusion that this girl is a slacker, taking art just to keep the grade-point average high without doing any real work.

Next Kenzie goes to the counseling office to find out whether any sections of regular-intensity World History have any empty seats left. Luck is with her: there’s an opening in the 6th period section. The counselor tells Kenzie that she has to go back to see her current teacher again, the one who takes it personally and who hates art. Why? Because they had given her the wrong form to be signed. Kenzie balks: “I don’t want to go back there.” At that moment this history teacher passes through the counseling office. Here, sign this, the counselor tells him. He looks at Kenzie and stands there, not signing. “You approved it,” Kenzie reminds him. “I didn’t approve it. I don’t approve. I’ll go along with it, but I don’t approve.” He signs and walks off.

Eventually Kenzie got it all worked out, having passed through this rite of passage bruised but not crushed. But I ask you, is this bullshit really necessary?

The Adaptive Unconscious

I just finished reading Strangers to Ourselves. It’s the second book by that title I’ve read. The first was written by Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, which deals with the place of the stranger through the history of Western culture. The book I just read is by Timothy Wilson, a psychology professor at the U. of Virginia where I went to grad school. Tim focuses largely on humans’ limited ability to gain conscious access to the unconscious. He’s not an analyst or a therapist but a researcher in social psych, so he brings a different sort of information and interpretive framework to the conscious/unconscious division.

Based on a count of receptor cells and their neural connections, neuroscientists estimate that the human sensory system takes in more than 11 million pieces of information per second. Based on studies of processing speed on tasks like reading and detecting different flashes of light, cognitive psychologists estimate that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second. What happens to the other 10,999,960? It’s processed unconsciously.

That’s how we acquire most of what we learn about environment, people, language, routine behaviors, and social interaction. We acquire this kind of knowledge not by assembling a series of discrete facts or events — the kinds of things consciousness is good at attending to — but by mastering complex patterns. The unconscious is particularly good at dealing with patterns, not through conscious calculations of algorithms but through intricate neural networks that compare already-stored arrays of information with new arrays continuously presented to it through broad-band environmental tracking systems. The 10 million bits of sensory input aren’t all lined up in a row, waiting for our perceptual systems to structure them. The sensory systems are broad-band matrices that are able to detect structure that already exists in the ambient environmental array.

Consciousness is useful when we want to pay particular attention to something: catching a ball, cooking dinner, reading a blog post. A lot of other stuff is happening around us that we’re not consciously attending to — traffic sounds outside, the breeze from the fan, small movements of the other people in the room. Still, we’re aware of the details of our environment even when we’re not focuing our attention on them. It’s adaptive to be in a constant state of awareness in case something happens that calls for us to react. It’s not adaptive, though, to pay conscious attention to all the little details, because then we lose focus on the main task at hand.

We can call much of this unconsciously-compiled information into conscious awareness pretty much on demand. The accessible stuff is mostly content: names of childhood neighbors, how to order a meal at McDonald’s, the color of pumpkins. It’s nearly impossible to retrieve unconscious processes: how we know where a baseball hit over our head is likely to land, why we take an immediate liking to certain people, why we suddenly feel apprehensive or giddy, how we usually come across to other people.

It turns out that introspecting about unconscious processes isn’t a very useful retrieval method. These processes didn’t start out in consciousness only to be repressed or forgotten; they never appeared in consciousness in the first place. Human cognition is more adaptive when most of it takes place in background mode, out of our awareness. There just aren’t very many direct neural pathways hauling this stuff up from the sensory and emotional and pattern-matching activities going on in our brains. “Look out, not in” is an appropriate rubric. Often it’s more reliable to observe our own behavior in particular situations and try to reverse-engineer what might have motivated it. This is how other people infer things about our goals and motivations and biases — by watching and evaluating behavior. Consequently it’s also informative to ask other people what they see in us — if we can bear hearing the truth. Or we can invent situational scenarios and imagine how we would likely react. We’re unconsciously equipped to communicate with other people, so talking can be a productive way of getting the unconscious material out of our heads and into words. Writing works too, as a sort of simulated conversational medium. Still:

“Although it may feel as though we are discovering important truths about ourselves when we introspect, we are not gaining direct access to the adaptive unconscious. Introspection is more like literary criticism in which we are the text to be understood. Just as there is no single truth that lies within a literary text, but many truths, so there are many truths about a person that can be constructed. The analogy I favor is introspection as personal narrative, whereby people construct stories about their lives.”

- Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 162

Hammer in the Head

An artifact is an object that’s been intentionally designed and built by humans. From a purely material standpoint an artifact is neither more nor less real than a naturally-occurring object. Usually, though, humans recognize the difference between nature and artifice. People tend to use artifacts for purposes intentionally built into them by the artificer; e.g., when I want to hammer something I look for a hammer. The hammer emits information signaling its designed-in utility, and this information is received by the human would-be hammerer. But since necessity is the mother of invention, I could also pick up a rock I happen to find out in the field and use it for hammering.

The rock isn’t an artifact, but it affords hammering. Is the rock’s hammer-ness an emergent property of the rock itself, or is it a property of the way I perceive the rock? Do I pick up information emitted by the rock that wasn’t designed into it, or does my intentional mental state actively construct hammer-ness, which I then impose on the rock? It would seem that both operations are in play. The rock is a material object that conveys higher-order information to humans about its utility for hammering. It’s certain that found objects like rocks were the first human tools — that’s why they call it the Stone Age. Hard, heavy, but not too heavy: the same information is conveyed by the naturally-occurring rock as by the specially-designed hammer. The history of human artifice entails the progressive shaping of naturally-occurring materials in ways that enhance their natural utility. Tool use and tool construction progress in parallel. This all seems non-controversial enough.

The found rock is a hammer by happenstance; that thing in the toolbox called “hammer” was designed and built for hammering. The rock was a rock even before I picked it up and used it to pound something; the hammer wasn’t a hammer until it got made into a hammer. But does the rock convey its hammer-ness to every thing and creature it encounters, regardless of whether they ever intentionally want to hammer something? Or is the idea of hammer-ness an abstract artifact in its own right, a thought about a particular kind of intentional agency that was invented by humans sometime in prehistory, such that the rock’s hammer-ness didn’t exist until the idea of hammer-ness was imposed on it?

My cat doesn’t get it: the rock and the hammer are just two hard and heavy physical objects occupying space in his environment. Even for me, the rock’s hammer-ness doesn’t occur to me until I need to pound something and I don’t have a hammer handy. Why do I think about using the rock for hammering rather than some tuft of grass or the cat? Because the rock possesses the physical properties of hardness and heaviness that work best for hammering. These properties exist in the rock independent of my thinking about them. But when I need something to pound with, I receive the rock’s already-existing hardness and heaviness as information about the rock’s hammer-ness.

My cat never intentionally thinks about hammering anything, and so he never gets the message from the rock. On the other hand, my cat can use his paw to swat things, in effect wielding his paw as a hammer. Early humans probably used their fists for pounding before they ever started using rocks.

Before I picked it up, the rock might have been resting in roughly the same place for ten million years. Did it acquire its hammerish properties only recently, after a hammer-wielding species evolved on the planet? No: the rock’s hardness and heaviness — features that make it useful for hammering — already existed in the rock before anybody thought of using it as a hammer. The rock has always had hammerish properties, ever since erosion pried it loose from the mountainside, turning it into a separate object, and gravity and the mountainside used the rock to hammer the pebbles, earth, plants, and small creatures it encountered as it rolled down to its resting place.

My fist, the rock, the hammer: the information about these three objects’ hardness and heaviness can be quantified and written down on a piece of paper. This hammer-ness information originates in these objects, is already part of them. What’s in my head but not in my cat’s head is the ability to receive and interpret that information relative to my intention to hammer something. When I pick up a rock with the intention of pounding something with it, I recognize information already embedded in the rock and interpret it with respect to my own intentionality.

All of this is well known and generally accepted. At the same time we see the renewed enthusiasm for a “flat ontology,” where the rock and the artifactual hammer are equivalent as objects and where the cascading rock’s crushing of objects in its path is equivalent to my intentionally picking up the rock in order to pound something with it. Maybe that’s why I’m inclined more toward psychology than to ontology. Intentionality, hammer-ness in the head, extraction of hammerish affordances in found objects, conscious design and construction of artifacts: each of these distinctly human activities emerged from its counterpart in the non-human world. But the separation of the distinctly human from the prehuman still strikes me as remarkable. And while humans still occasionally face the risk of being crushed by rocks tumbling down mountainsides, it’s largely a human-crafted environment in which we spend most of our lives and in which we exercise our distinctly human tricks.

What appeals to me is to think about psychology not exclusively according to empirical and therapeutic/analytic paradigms,  but also in ontological terms. I have far less background and experience to operate at this level, but the prospect energizes me.

Ontology of Epistemology?

As far as I know, only creationists, panpyschists and solipsists content that outside reality is contingent on consciousness. Realists and antirealists alike distinguish between reality and epistemology, between what reality is and what humans can know about it. But the human ability to know is real in its own right.

What happens when some aspect of reality enters into my conscious awareness? Say I realize that it’s raining outside. It was already raining before I realized it. I might even have been subliminally aware of the sound of the rain falling on the windows. But now that sound has crossed the threshold into consciousness, and I think: it’s raining. The rain has now had an impact on my consciousness. I don’t have to create a mental representation of the rain, so that a mental image of the rain is created in my mind as a sort of shadow reality. My consciousness operates as a kind of rain gauge: its change of state — a new awareness that it’s raining — points to the presence of something real happening in the world. The rain registers its already-existing reality by changing the state of my conscious awareness, just as it did earlier to my window and to my auditory sensory apparatus. The rain has extended its sphere of influence, the extent to which it makes differences happen in the world.

The rain causes these changes of state in the world, but the changes happen to the window, to my audition, to my consciousness. The window is percussed and covered in water; my ear and brain hear new sounds; I think a new thought: these changes are real and distinct in their own right, apart from their common cause. In its interaction with the external reality of the rain, my consciousness demonstrates its own reality.

This description regards consciousness as a kind of object, a recording surface not unlike a window. And in many ways the brain is that sort of object — a congeries of neurons and synaptic connections physically located in the central nervous system. But consciousness isn’t just the static state of the brain; it’s more like a device that keeps track of changes in brain state. Some of these brain-state changes are triggered by changes in the state of the environment. Changes in brain state result from changes in brain processes: the auditory sensory input triggers activation of the “it’s raining” thought that’s already associated in the cerebral network with this kind of sound. Of course consciounsess often takes a more active role, but a major aspect of its own reality is its ability to detect external reality.

Does the Song Want to be Sung?

In our extended discussion on the previous post about memes, kvond and I focused quite a bit of attention on whether a song is an object unto itself and, if so, what sort of object it might be. Now I’m thinking about memic dissemination. It’s been proposed that memes, like genes, propagate themselves as a means of survival and domination of the memetic environment. Memes that successfully occupy people’s brains reproduce and thrive; those that don’t, don’t. In singing the song I am presumably cooperating with the song’s agenda for spreading itself virally through brains.

Certainly the song is a cause of my listening to it and singing it, inasmuch as I would never sing or play a particular song I’ve never heard. Repetition aids learning, so the more often the song is played in my hearing, the more firmly it gets inscribed in my memory and the better I can reproduce it in performance.  And the song may have affordances that attract my attention to itself: it appeals to my tastes, or it appeals to the tastes of others I hang with or admire.

But does the song want me to listen and sing? At first blush the premise seems ridiculous. Gravity is a cause of my not flying up off the ground, and gravity it attracts me to the earth, but it’s not personal, not intentional. Like gravity, a song is inanimate; it’s an abstract pattern of frequencies and intervals and rhythms: how can it want anything? I don’t believe it can. But maybe the song can serve as a conduit for conveying a human desire for me to listen to the song.

Suppose I want you to click onto one of my old posts. I could type an explicit request: please visit such-and-such a post. Or I could try enticing you by pointing out the post’s affordances: there’s something really extraordinary written in that old post that’s right up your alley. While the former tactic is more direct than the latter, they’re both indirect. I’m not forcing you to go see that old post, like gravity forces me down to the earth. Instead I’m using language as a mediator to convey my desire. And it’s not even an immediate mediation, as would be the case if we were talking face to face or over the telephone. There may be a gap of hours or days or even longer between the time I express my desire textually and the time you receive it. My message looks like a stand-alone textual “object,” but maybe it’s better to regard it as a delayed communique, conveying not just information but my desire.

A song could work the same way. The composer imbues a song with personal expressions of beauty and affect and maybe even truth, which he wants to convey through the song to the listener. For the communication to complete its circuit, the listener has to hear the song. And so the composer imbues the song with musical affordances for attracting the listener’s attention. Even if there’s a long delay in transmission, even if someone other than the composer performs the song, even if the performance is transmitted to the listener by electronic recording, even if there’s a delay of decades between composition and listening, the song still carries within itself the original communicative intent of the composer, including his desire that the song be heard. The song isn’t just an autonomous object; it’s an extension of the composer’s agency and intentionaliy. The song wants to be heard because it carries within itself the composer’s’ desire.

I recognize that this view is sort of old-fashioned. Next thing you know I’ll be proposing a hermeneutic of song that focuses not just on the song itself but on compositional intent. What is the composer saying? Among other things he’s saying this: listen to my song.

Memes as Abstract Artifacts

While I was enjoying a cup of tea at Larval Subjects recently, our host gracefully steered the conversation from emergence to memes. Recapping the basic premise, a typical meme is an idea or song or joke floating around in the environment. It can make innumerable copies of itself, but it’s essentially parasitic: each copy of the meme must infect a host organism in order to survive. This new meme “wants” to survive and to reproduce itself, which it does by lodging itself inside human brains. The meme manifests a certain property — cleverness or catchiness, say –  that the brain finds attractive or that lowers the brain’s resistance to infection, making memic reproduction more likely, just as sexual attraction makes biological reproduction more likely. The human “host” functions as a vector who, by telling someone the idea or singing the song, transmits the infectious meme to other brains.

Here’s my limited understanding of Levi’s position on memes. First, he regards the meme as an object. It’s essentially a material thing, consisting of a particular set of sounds or markings decoupled from their meaning. This conceptualization hasn’t quite stabilized though, and Levi vacillates between categorizing memes as material objects and as Aristotelian ideal objects that must be embodied in material form. The meme’s idea-ness or song-ness is an emergent property spawned by the raw meme’s physical properties but not reducible to them. Though idea-ness and song-ness were spawned by the meme, these emergent properties exist not in the raw physical meme itself but in the brains of people who see or hear them; i.e., the meme’s “hosts.” Similarly, the meme’s infectious properties — cleverness for the idea, catchiness for the song — emerge from the idea/song and likewise manifest themselves in the hosts, assuring that the idea/song takes up long-term residency. When the host states the idea or sings the song, the meme lodges itself in the hearer’s brain and the reproductive cycle repeats itself.

Rather than critiquing Levi’s scheme, I’m trying to work through the way I think about memes. It makes sense to me to regard a meme as an object. A song is a distinct thing separate from its singer; an idea exists independently of those who think it. I don’t, though, believe that the essence of a song or an idea is its materiality. But a meme isn’t ideal either, in the traditional sense of being perfect and eternal form or of existing only in minds. A meme is an abstract object. (I got this idea from Amie Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics, about which I previously posted.) An abstract object is a structured pattern of information that isn’t restricted to any particular space-time coordinates and that can manifest itself materially in a variety of ways: in a voice or a musical instrument, on a piece of paper, or in someone’s brain. Though, as Levi observes, the abstract pattern has to manifest itself materially somehow, the pattern is real in its own right.

[A visual illustration of an abstract object: The top photo looks like a random assortment of junk, but when you line yourself up with it at the proper angle you realize that the junk is organized according to an abstract pattern that conveys meaning to brains familiar with the rules of arithmetic and the content of selected works of 20th century fiction. The abstract information embedded in the junk emerges in our awareness when get ourselves lined up with it, but the information was designed into the junk assembly. This junk pile is an artifact.]

In essence the meme is its abstract structured pattern; its particular material manifestation is of secondary importance. But the pattern has to be received as information in order for it to be perceived as a song or an idea, rather than just raw physical sounds or markings. My cat can be exposed to the textual or vocal embodiment of an idea and miss the point entirely, focusing solely on the materiality of the piece of paper or the sound. My cat as it sits on the table can see me pointing my finger at the floor and it will look at my finger: the abstract information embedded in the pointing gesture is completely lost on the cat. I could write a memo outlining my expectation that the cat not get up on the table and the cat would likely sit on the piece of paper for awhile until it got bored, then jump back onto the table.

The meme’s abstract pattern isn’t an emergent property of the sounds or words or images in which it’s made manifest. That’s because the pattern is designed into the meme from the beginning. Almost all memes are artifacts. Composing a song or thinking up an idea isn’t all that different from weaving a basket or manufacturing a lamp. The main difference is that song-ness and idea-ness are more clearly abstract. A basket can’t duplicate itself in people’s brains; it has to be copied materially. Still, the idea of basket-ness and lamp-ness is abstract, and the idea can be made manifest in a whole host of different materials and shapes. The information that identifies something as a basket or a lamp is an abstract pattern that’s designed in to the material stuff of which it’s constructed.

A song isn’t inextricably connected to its composer, nor is an idea inseparable from the person who first thought it. It’s reasonable to count these sorts of abstract patterns of information as objects in their own right, decoupled from any particular material manifestation. But what happens when the song is materialized, say in its being played on a harmonica? Has the abstract song been transformed into a concrete song? Has it merged with the sounds produced by the harmonica to become a merged object with its own distinct properties? Surely it has: play the same song on a harmonica and on a bassoon: while the abstract pattern of songness is identical, the song sounds different on different instruments. Certainly the song is transformed in different ways by harmonicas and symphony orchestras and copies of sheet music, while still retaining the same abstract songness. I’m not sure what to think about it, but I suspect Latour’s ideas about translation will prove helpful here.

What about the idea of memes reproducing themselves by parasitically colonizing brains? I suppose you could look at it that way. What I think, though, is that consciousness is overemphasized in the way we pick up things like songs and ideas. Much of what we learn we acquire unintentionally, unconsciously. With practice I learned to hit a moving tennis ball back over the net. The information I need to accomplish this feat is abstract and calculable, but I don’t perform the calculations consciously — it’s an unconscious calculation. Did the hand-eye coordination meme reproduce itself by colonizing my brain? No: I learned it because I wanted to and because I practiced, even though the learning took place unconsciously. I learned to speak English as a child without consciously studying the grammar and syntax and vocabulary: I picked it up unconsciously. Did the language reproduce itself in my brain? No: I wanted to understand other humans and to communicate with them, and I learned to do so unconsciously. Even when I purposely read a book, I pick up bits of knowledge that I didn’t consciously commit to memory.

Knowing your way around the neighborhood, recognizing people’s faces, riding a bike, picking up tunes: most human learning takes place unconsciously. Consciousness is functions mostly as the attentional interface: the unconscious takes care of storing and organizing. I can call up the answer to 7 x 8 from memory without constantly rehearsing the multiplication tables in my head. It’s part of Freud’s legacy to regard the unconscious as a repository for things that were once conscious but that we’ve subsequently repressed. That happens, but it’s a relatively small aspect of unconscious thought. “All thought is unconscious,” Donnel Stern asserts; a thought becomes conscious only when we need to call it into awareness for some reason. If memes are self-reproducing parasites on our brains, then so is practically everything that we’ve learned in our lifetimes. I think it’s more plausible to say that we unconsciously pick up all sorts of brain content that amuses us or is useful to us because those are the sorts of abstract patterns that humans attend to in their environment.

Besides, memes are artifacts. Songs are written by people who want them to be heard and played and sung. Ideas are formulated by people who want them to be known and understood and accepted. The memes aren’t out there reproducing themselves on their own; they’re being actively disseminated by their originators and their “hosts.”