Divide and Compress

August 2nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Two competing or complementary operations are at work in the formation of memory, awareness, and identity. These forces are expressed by the action of Dividing and the action of Compressing.

Dividing is the making of distinctions, as described mathematically by Spencer Brown in ‘The Laws of Form’, and artistically/anarchically by KLF in the philosophy of ‘Divide and Kreate’. It is also the impetus that is behind the success of reductionist approaches to science and technology, the strategy of taking things apart, reducing events, materials, etc to their compositional element/organs/moments. The strategy relies on a sensitivity to difference and to boundaries, to the break points in phenomena and the transitional stages in processes. To divide is to focus on the individual links in chains of causality, to see the trees and not just the wood.

Compression is the opposing tendency in which we look for ways to generalise experience and reduce difference. To compress is to seek out and eliminate redundancy, to step back and try to see the big picture, to find shortcuts and commonality, to strive for singularity and holism. We see this in our search for unifying theories of science, in the use of symbols and metaphor and synecdoche in poetry and the arts, and in the psychology of archetypes, stereotypes, and narrativisation.

This paper will argue that these competing/complementing tendencies are key elements in the construction of human awareness and the construction of human cultures. In the spirit of Bateson, these two forces form one of the ‘pattern that connects’.

Posted in Bateson, Gregory, Conference Abstract, Spencer-Brown, George, Synectics | No Comments »

Adaptive Attention

December 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Studies by Spelke and Baillargeon have established that babies and very young children look longer at events and objects which are unusual than at those which are behaving ‘normally’. This finding is used extensively to investigate what expectations about the world are hard-wired into the human brain and which are the results of acculturation. It has been found, for example, that babies look longer at events which seem to contradict the permanence of material object (in contrast to earlier experiments by Piaget), implying that the basic heuristic ‘objects persist’ is present at birth. Other findings suggest that such elements of knowledge as (Newtonian) gravity, inertia, momentum, agency, and energy conservation also appear to be built into the repertoire of innate human understanding. (This particular cluster of ‘facts’ seems further to underpin the Innate, Naive, or Folk Physics described by Smith, Hayes, etc).

The success of this experimental method depends upon the fact that babies pay greater attention to events that seem to contradict such ‘facts’. This behaviour, in which the unusual and the unexpected is awarded greater attentional resources that the usual and the expected itself requires some explanation. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology it is perhaps inevitable that, given the existence of any kind of innate or default model of the world, then an animal which was able to quickly detect variations from this model would have greater survival potential. After all, it tends to be the unusual events of the world that kill you, or conversely, provide rare opportunities for enhanced survival possibilities.

This tendency to be attracted toward and to pay preferential attention to unusual stimuli not only plays out within the field of visual attention (although given the massive processing power awarded by the brain to the visual system it is undoubtedly dominant). Unusual sounds, or combinations of sounds, attract the attention of babies also, as do irregular and unpredictable patterns of touch, e.g. tickling. It may be that the ‘invisible’ or ‘default’ actions, sights and sounds, those rhythms and patterns which do not demand attention reflect some aspects of the natural environment which our ancestors recognised non-consciously as unthreatening; the low murmur of a calm sea, the regular creak of breeze-blown trees, the predictable movement of clouds across the sky. Events which varied from these patterns would indicate the presence of unpredictability and possible threat; the faster rhythms and discontinuities of storm-blown trees, the crashing of a high sea, the dysrhythmia that signals agency and human or animal intentionality.

It would seem logical that, in addition to attracting and holding the attention of the senses literally, through the extended capture of eye-gaze direction for example, unusual stimuli would attract and hold the attention of mind; a kind of metaphorical gaze in which cognition is ‘focussed’ or ‘concentrated’ upon some non-standard aspect of the environment. Difference, and what Bateson (1979) refers to as ‘news of difference’, should be one of the most long-standing occupants of mind and consciousness.

Posted in Attention, Baillergeon, Bateson, Gregory, Consciousness, Evolution, Naive Physics, Physics, Spelke, Elizabeth | No Comments »