More Clover
May 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie
More clover
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May 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie
More clover
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June 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie
There are two important things to keep in mind when you are an atheist (like me).
We all live in a highly spurious, highly partial world, most of which is probably fictional. But who gives a fuck. Try this. Listen to James Brown. Listen to Otis Redding. Try a little tenderness. Pretend you have a soul. (But don’t go to church).
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June 9th, 2006 Fred McVittie
The techniques of ‘Chaos Magic’ are designed to demonstrate and make evident at a deeply ‘embodied’ level the idea that large areas of reality (the abstract parts) do not consist of a singular objective phenomenon, but rather that this reality is an unformed undivided potential which can be ‘realised’ in many different ways dependent upon which particular perceptual framework is employed to organise that reality. These perceptual frameworks are, in turn, a product of a corresponding ‘belief’ system. In order to develop this sense, chaos magicians typically switch their belief systems on a regular basis, committing whole-heartedly to each in turn, before consciously abandoning each for another. With each change of belief, there is a corresponding change in perception; different connections are made, different patterns observed, different meanings and relevances found. These differences sculpt the serial realities occupied by the chaos magician. (c.f. James: Principles, vol. I, ch. IX, p. 288). This technique results in a mind set which accepts the limits of each perceptual framework and, crucially, intuits the existence of the undivided potential from which these realities emerge.
This system is effectively a kind of ‘model agnosticism’ in which it is tacitly recognised that, at least in the area of abstract conception, reality is the result of a pruning or sculpting process. This is not dissimilar to the approach of the true scientist (even though she would would be loathe to admit themselves a magician). For the true scientist, a ‘theory’, a structured model of the workings of part of the world, whilst it may be deeply felt, possibly even ‘believed’, is nevertheless always contingent, always partial, and may at any moment be replaced by another theory or model.
Posted in Belief, Copenhagen Interpretation, Magic, Science | No Comments »
June 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie
In order to perform efficiently it may sometimes be necessary to behave as if one believes in things that are not objectively true, (but may nevertheless be subjectively ‘real’). For example, there is no good evidence for the existence of ‘the self’, in fact there is a good deal of evidence from psychology and neuroscience, as well as less scientifically from certain branches of cultural theory, that the self-concept is a fiction or fabrication. Nevertheless, it would be suicidal to live one’s life in accordance with this belief and immoral to regard others as similarly lacking. A more extrapolated example of this might that of belief in the existence of the human soul. There is clearly no evidence for the existence of a soul, yet a belief in the concept of a soul is a useful tool for optimising performance in key areas associated with the arts, morality, ethics, relationships, etc. It is hard to imagine how soul and gospel music could have developed without this totally groundless, but nevertheless useful belief.
This approach reflects that suggested by Hans Vaihinger in his Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911; The Philosophy of “As If”), and later taken up by the American Pragmatist philosophers.
Posted in Belief, Fiction, Performance, Philosophy, Self, Soul, Vaihinger, Hans | No Comments »
July 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie
All psychogenic, psychosomatic, and meaning-response based processes work better in the presence of belief. For example, the so-called ‘placebo’ effect in which therapeutic affects are attributed to non-active substances, only functions when the patient believes that the placebo is actually active. A placebo administered without the patient’s knowledge has no effect at all. In double blind trials, in which some patients are given active substances and some the placebo, the placebo effect still operates, but at a reduced level. This is because the patient is aware that they may have been given an inactive placebo and therefore do not invest the treatment with the same level of belief than if there was no such possibility. Belief, in double blind trials, is therefore a kind of ‘attentional resource’ which is in limited supply and must be distributed carefully for maximum effect. Presumably the same is true for other activities which require the careful management of limited belief resources, including performance.
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July 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie
Organised theoretical edifices, including scientific theories, metaphysical systems, and belief complexes, often contain entities which we may have no direct evidence of, but which must be posited to exist if the theory/belief is to maintain coherence. Such entities may be inferred circumstantially and may eventually turn out to be valid and ‘real’, or may be found to be purely fictitious. Non-real historical examples of such entities include epicycles, luminiferous ether, caloric, and ‘muelos’. An example of such a postulated entity which was subsequently acquired reality status is the planet Uranus, discovered not by observation but by inference, based on perturbations in the orbits of other heavenly bodies. It is tempting to assume that scientific progress and the dominance of rational physics in formulating evidence about the real world would reduce the reliance on such speculative entities, or at least that once an entity was found to be fictional that it would cease to appear in discourse (in the way that caloric does not routinely appear). However, this is not entirely the case, sometimes such fictions are allowed to survive in the language and in conception because they provide a particular human function related to the embodied nature of subjective being, as opposed to the disembodied nature of objective knowledge. Examples of such fictional entities might include: energy (as a substance or force), colours (as distinct, bounded entities), weight (as a property of substances and objects).
Routine discourse which includes reference to abstract concepts which can only be understood through the use of these spurious constructions, which function largely through the application of metaphors.
Posted in Belief, Fiction, Metaphor, Substance, Theory | No Comments »
July 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie
D’Aquili and Laughlin (1979), give a cognitive explanation for the universality of myths, rituals, and ‘religious’ practices, citing three processes which the mind engages in, and which have identifiable cortical correlates. These innate and non-conscious forms of thinking, conceptualisation, abstraction, and binary thinking, are used by all humans to make sense of the world, to ‘organise unexplained external stimuli into some coherent cognitive matrix’ (1979: p.161). This idea is developed further in Newberg and D’Aquili (2002), which names eight of these ‘cognitive operators’ underpinning the organisation of psychological experience. This work further proposes a mechanism for how the functioning of these cognitive operators leads to mystical and religious belief.
This research suggests that all humans are universally determined to find explanations and produce ‘theories’ about the structure and operation of the world in which they are lodged and to invest these theories with belief. There is no evidence, however, of a cognitive operator, or any other cortical or cognitive structure, which corresponds to the protocols of rational sceptical science. This is presumably for good adaptive reasons: humans would be likely to evolve mental processes which organise experience in a way which optimises survival of the body, but the parsimoniousness required by evolution would not allow the kind of objective rigour that scientific process demands. Embodied cognition will tend to produce heuristics rather than laws.
Posted in Belief, Cognitive Operators, D'Aquili, Eugene, Newberg, Andrew, Religion, Science | No Comments »
November 2nd, 2007 Fred McVittie
Realist interpretations of physical experience and the material world entail the assigning of what appear to be direct sensory data to the category of the real and all else to some other category, that of the imaginary for example. This ‘real’ experience is so intuitively obvious that to claim not to believe in it would seem perverse, even nonsensical. How could we claim not to believe in the hardness of a rock as evidenced by our hands as we hold it, or disbelieve the opaque solidity of an object in front of our eyes. It would be a brave and stupid man who did not believe in the pull of gravity, even as it carried him toward the ground. In these embodied experiences grounds for doubt are not only insufficient but totally absent, and since doubt is a necessary corollary to belief it seems absurd to use the term believe to refer to such material certainties.
This self-evident obviousness of embodied experience provides the template for our relationship with other concepts which are not quite so evident, in which cases the term ‘belief’ seems more appropriate. We have a tendency to express our confidence in entities, concepts, and theories which are unavailable to the senses by normal perceptual means as if they had the same status as the incontrovertible verities of sensate being. By indicating that we believe in, for example, the invisible hand of the free market, the spectre of communism that haunts Europe, the one true god, or the invisible pink unicorn, we are staking a claim for the manifest existence of such entities which is equivalent to those embodied experiences which we cannot fail to have faith in. In other words, we are employing a metaphor which encourages us to understand one form of knowing (speculation, theory, confabulation) in which the object of that knowing is inevitably abstract, in terms of another form of knowing, direct sensory experience, in which the knowledge is concrete and part of the embodiment of our being, and indeed the embedding of that being within a wider material world.
Posted in Belief, Embodiment, Imagination, Knowledge, Rock, Sense | No Comments »
November 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie
A common metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge is that of ’seeing’. When we want to refer to such gaining of knowledge we might explicitly say ‘I see’, meaning that we have such an understanding. As noted elsewhere, this visual metaphor for knowing also confers object-like status on the knowledge itself and we intuitively begin to treat it as if it were some kind of object that can be ‘grasped’, ‘acquired’, and ‘transferred’, or might be ‘hard’, ‘robust’, or less positively ’slippery’.
The visual metaphor for knowing also has a number of significant entailments which figure within the structure of the metaphor but which may be less obvious. Firstly there is the requirement that these ‘objects’ of knowledge exist in some kind of conceptual ’space’, usually external to the body (obviously, or we would not be able to ’see’ them), and secondly that this space be illuminated. This latter point is evidenced in our references to being ‘in the dark’; we use this and similar phrases when we want to indicate that we know that certain facts (knowledge objects) are ‘out there’ but we cannot see them.
Some types of knowing are conceptualised without the use of the visual metaphor, and in these cases some other sensory mode is usually referred to. So for example, when we want to indicate that we understand what a person is saying but do not want to simply agree with their viewpoint (sic) we might say ‘I hear what you’re saying’. By using an auditory rather than a visual metaphor we have acknowledged the existence of the facts the other person is claiming sight of but have not awarded those facts the full objective status that would be implied by saying that we also ’saw’ what they meant. We are acknowledging the existence of their words, but holding back on accepting the truth claims that those words make. To this extent we might say that (metaphorical) seeing is believing, whilst (metaphorical) hearing has something of the status of rumour; a good indication of what the other person thinks they know, but no guarantee of authority.
Other metaphorical senses used as labels for knowing have similar partial status; ‘felt’ knowledge is usual personal and tacit, and the defining feature of that form of knowing we call ‘taste’ is that it is not ‘out there’ in interpersonal space at all but is inside the body, inside the mouth. Strangely, these up close and personal (or even internal, interoceptive) forms of knowing, whilst they may not have the interpersonal and social authority of ’seen’ facts often have a feeling of personal authority which exceeds the objective. Whilst we may rationally understand that ‘feelings aren’t facts’ as the AA mantra goes, at the same time there is an undeniability of this type of felt knowledge which is often lacking in the objective. Many of us will have had the sense that, whilst all the (objective) facts about a certain phenomenon say one thing, our guts say something else, and that ‘gut feeling’ has a authoritative quality which is hard to overcome.
Obviously these acts of knowing that draw on non-visual metaphors have different, and usually lower social status than the objective knowledge of the seen. In any official context, or in any claim for the authority mentioned above, it is visual, ‘objective’ knowledge which holds sway. For this reason it is not surprising that when we wish to imply that our ideas should be treated as authoritative we tend to use visual metaphors to frame those ideas. Any politician who argued that his opponents ideas were invalid because they were ‘not to his taste’ would get short shrift from those who argued that the truth of such ideas ‘could easily be seen’.
Occasionally the visual metaphor is used to articulate a belief about the status of knowledge which is not easily shared, or which has ambiguous status, and this is most clearly revealed in the language around enlightenment and spiritual experiences. Typically, a person experiencing some kind of epiphany or divine revelation would claim that this experience constitutes the gaining of knowledge or insight, usually a particularly significant or transformative insight which seems to have something to say about the external world. To this extent it requires an objective explanation. Also, such experiences tend to have a quality of undeniability about them; it is rare for a person having such an experience to doubt the reality of it, in the way one might doubt the reality of a contestable fact. To this extent such experiences also demand an explanatory form which indicates the felt certainty of that knowledge. For these reasons, any desire to communicate this experience and share the knowledge thus gained would require that this communication use sensory metaphors which convey the most authority, which as already noted tend to be visual metaphors with all the entailments of space and light that go along with them. (This paragraph has already mobilised some of these metaphors as exemplified in words like ‘enlightenment’ and ‘insight’). They would also require the use of metaphors which convey the ‘felt’ sense of the experience, with all of the self-evident undeniability of the closely-held belief, (again the idea of a belief being ‘closely held’ indicates the mobilisation of an appropriate metaphor, and the unavoidability of using such metaphors in writing and thinking about these concepts). The requirements of a form of expression and conceptualisation appropriate to these experiences inevitably lead to paradox; one must find a way of thinking and speaking which simultaneously evokes the metaphorically exterior space in which objects of knowledge gain their interpersonal authority, a space which is illuminated and translucent, but one must also suggest the darkness and contact of the internal space which give an undeniably sense of phenomenological truth. This necessary paradox may help to explain why some authors, when trying to articulate the enlightenment state (or cognate conditions) use apparently oxymoronic terms such as ‘the dazzling dark’, or possibly in the case of alien abduction, a strange set of (probably confabulated) experiences in which similar symptoms to enlightenment are featured, the light emitted by the aliens or the ships has been described as ‘white, but dark white’.
Posted in Belief, Darkness, Feeling, Grasp, Hearing, Knowledge, Light, Metaphor, Objectivity, Seeing, Sense, Space, Taste | No Comments »
December 12th, 2007 Fred McVittie
At the level of direct sensory experience we are all practical realists in David Sloane-Wilson’s use of the term (2002). A factual realist approach to what we call solid physical matter, for example, would have to acknowledge that such matter is mostly empty space, or in some formulations, entirely empty with the subatomic particles that occupy that space being more ‘geometrical’ than physical. Such a factual realist approach might then go on to consider the relationship between the forces within this space and the forces which make up, for example, the material substance of our own body, possibly arriving at a conclusion to do with the non-penetrability of such substance by such body. Alternatively, one might take a practical realist approach (in fact such an approach is unavoidable) in which we understand physical matter such as a wall as ’solid’ or ‘hard’, and we have a deeply-held belief, confirmed by experience, that any attempt to walk through such a solid wall would result in pain and damage. That both practical and factual realist approaches lead to the same conclusion, that a person cannot walk through walls, illustrates that, in this case at least, there is no advantage of one approach over the other at an explanatory level. In terms of lived experience however it is much more efficient and adaptive that the ‘fact’ of non-penetrability be understood firstly through a practical realist strategy, which is, of course, how the body and the senses do present that information. If we had to invoke a factual explanation for every interaction with the material world our ability to operate effectively in that world would be substantially diminished.
Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral : evolution, religion, and the nature of society. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Posted in Belief, Psychology, Reality, Sense | No Comments »
February 15th, 2008 Fred McVittie
The holding of a belief is a cognitive mechanism which allows us to carry out certain mental activities which, without that belief, would be either impossible or extremely resource intensive. If, each time we looked over the edge of a cliff, we had to assess the likelihood that stepping over the edge would result in our death, then we would be incapable of acting. The firm belief that we have in the inevitability that this action would lead to our death relieves us of this arduous assessment process and allows us to use our limited cognitive resources elsewhere.
This process is analogous to the mathematical technique of ‘carrying over’ when adding up large numbers. In this technique the numbers to be added are placed above one another and the columns of numbers formed are added one column of digits at a time starting with the units, then moving up to the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, and so on. When a column of digits adds up to a number larger than ten then the first part of this product is ‘carried over’ by being included in the next column of digits. When this next column of digits is then added the number which has been carried over is also added. The significance of this is that the number carried over is not usually checked at this point, it is simply taken as a fact of the mathematical technique. The number represents an element of the earlier calculation and is given the same status as the rest of the numbers in the column. In a sense, therefore, the number carried over is ‘believed’ to be a relevant and accurate part of the addition process, a belief which could in fact turn out to be fallacious if the previous addition was shown to be inaccurate. Such a fallacious belief would affect the total calculation resulting in an incorrect final answer.
This analogy serves to indicate the status of beliefs within the cumulative and interconnected processes of cognition. Given that we cannot fact check every single perception and conception, we must rely on the carrying over of beliefs from earlier parts of the thought process, or the history of our thought processes, if we are to function at all. When I see a tree in front of me I do not have sufficient cognitive resources to always confirm this perception using another sensory mode, nor can I always call on another person to confirm this perception. I am obliged to believe the evidence of my unalloyed and individual eyes. More abstractly, if I am to make sense of many of the complex and ephemeral experiences which typify human existence then the sheer number of beliefs which I would have to mobilise in order to live these experiences would far exceed my ability to confirm them ‘on the fly’. Again, I would be obliged to trust in the numbers carried forward from earlier parts of the calculation. I would have to use beliefs laid down earlier in my life, possibly in childhood, and possibly even laid down in the biochemistry of my being itself, just to get through the day.
I would anticipate that, if the aim of the establishment of beliefs is to minimise the drain on cognitive resources such that these resources can be spent on more life-supporting activities, then there would be a natural resistance to the revision of such beliefs. Going back over a calculation is an arduous and resource intensive process, and the earlier in the calculation an error is made the more effort would have to be spent having to correct it. By analogy, the earlier in one’s life, or in the life of one’s species, that a belief is laid down the more difficult it would be to muster the effort to go back and check the figures.
Posted in Belief, Cognition, Energy, Mathematics | No Comments »