The Body as a Vehicle of Telepresence

June 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It has been demonstrated that the sense of being present within a virtually simulated environment, a phenomena usually referred to as telepresence, correlates with the ability to effectively carry out a task in that environment. That is, the more one feels present the better one performs.(1) Given this, it may be useful to consider the unaugmented human body not as integrated with psyche but rather as a vehicle for the psyche to occupy. In this understanding, the psyche becomes ‘telepresent’ through its immersion in the environment and sensorium of the body. A performer working with this conception of the relationship between mind and body should be able to better understand the need for presence, as well as being able to interpret exercises and information for the enhancement of that presence (a term which is often shrouded in mysticism) in terms of an immersive somatosensory experience. The radical Cartesian dualism that this implies is distinctly unfashionable (although it is an axiom of ‘human science’ and apparently a ‘human universal’) but may prove useful in explaining and potentially enhancing the sense of presence which, in theatrical performance contexts, correlates with the carrying out of tasks which increase charisma and the ability to attract attention.

1. Welch, Robert B. - How Can We Determine if the Sense of Presence Affects Task Performance? Presence, October 1999, Vol. 8, No. 5, Pages 574-577

Posted in Charisma, Dualism, Exercises, Performance, Presence, Telepresence, Training, Welch, Robert B. | No Comments »

Poetic Dualism

July 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Despite the best attempts by philosophy and science to deny the dualism which is such a part of folk science, a tendency unfairly attributed to Descartes, but actually deeply entrenched in the human psyche, such dualism still dominates much debate. As Paul Bloom suggests, we may be ‘natural born dualists’. Efforts to collapse this duality, whether it be termed as a duality of mind and body, or brain and mind, or matter and spirit, have tended not to provide an integrated model, but simply to deny the existence of one or other of the terms.

Part of the distinction between these terms, and which is used in the suppression of supporters of the one by supporters of the other, is the language which is used to talk about the concepts which form each part of the dualism. There is a perceived difference in the type of discourse which represents the brain, for example, and that which represents the mind. The former is objective, noumenal, scientific, whereas the latter is subjective, phenomenal, poetic.

Recent developments in the study of cognition, however, suggests that this distinction is largely unsupportable.Work carried out by Lakoff, Johnson, etc indicates that the only epistemological distinction to be made is between concepts which are concrete and those which are abstract, not between those concepts which are objective and those which are subjective. Concrete concepts are those which are directly available to the senses, which have tangible and physical attributes. Abstract concepts, which make up most of our thoughts and language, are not available to the senses and can therefore only be represented in cognition through a process of metaphorical mapping.Given that most conceptualisation about both the brain and the mind is necessarily abstract, the mind not being directly available to the senses, then all discourses on the subject of the mind are necessarily structured through metaphor.

Any integration between discourses, if such integration is desirable, must start with a recognition that both objective and subjective discourses around abstract concepts are ultimately poetic.

Posted in Bloom, Paul, Brain, Dualism, Johnson, Mark, Lakoff, George, Metaphor, Mind, Poetics | No Comments »

The Incredible Shrinking Man

July 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

Descartes is known for most clearly articulating a distinction which later became known as the ‘mind/body problem’, that is the radical dualistic distinction between mind and body. Prior to Descartes (and his contemporaries and immediate predecessors), dualist was very much in place (being, apparently a human universal), but this was a dualism of matter and (individual) spirit or soul. In other words, the corporeal body was part of the material world and it was this entire materiality which was contrasted with the soul/mind. Today’s dualism, 400 years after Descartes, tends to be located around a brain/mind distinction, or even a part of the brain; those tissues and circuits holding the ‘correlates of consciousness’, which is held in opposition to phenomenal self of the mind. History, then, has preserved the longstanding dualist term of of mind/soul/spirit, but has radically reduced its corresponding term in the material world. Whereas once the mind/soul was balanced by, and the equal of, the entirety of physical creation, now it finds itself reflected in a few ounces of grey meat.

Posted in Brain, Descartes, Rene, Dualism, Mind | No Comments »

Dissolving Objective/Subjective Dualism

August 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

When working with an acknowledgment of both rational objective knowledge (as exemplified in the principles of scientific enquiry) and personal subjective knowledge (as exemplified in human universals and human science) the challenge is to maintain an equal regard for both these knowledge systems. There is an ever-present need to prevent one of these terms from collapsing into the other. Prioritising objectivity reduces personal experience and human-centred knowledge to psychology, whilst prioritising subjectivity reduces interpersonal and non-embodied experience (scientific data) to the imaginary and ultimately solipsistic.

Posted in Dualism, Knowledge, Objectivity, Subjective | No Comments »

Space Mind Metaphor

September 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Space is a key concept, perhaps the most important key concept, in Naive Physics. Remembering that Naive Physics is an extended field of knowledge that includes mental entities such as consciousness (Smith 1994) it is not surprising that our understanding of the mind itself in turn draws on spatial metaphors to structure that understanding. In other words, the Naive Physics of cognition imagines the mind as spatial. We talk of consciousness being ‘raised’, (following a general metaphor GOOD IS UP), and we may think of ourselves and other people as being ‘broadminded’ or ‘narrowminded’. Techniques, experiences, and chemicals for altering the state of one’s mind positively are routinely referred to as ‘mind expanding’. Generally these metaphors rely on two further assumptions about the mind, both of which are also features of naive science.

Dualism - that the mind is radically separate from the brain, possibly to the extent that it can have independent existence (as in the pre-psychological notion of the immortal soul).

Vitalism - that the mind is composed of a non-material, ‘ethereal’ substance which is often conceptualised as gaseous or liquid, (c.f. ‘flow’, the ‘oceanic’, ’streams of consciousness’ etc).
In this formulation when we talk about the mind we conceive it as a vital substance existing within Newtonian/Cartesian space, centred on the person.

With these two features in place, when we use spatial metaphors to talk and think of the mind we imagine this fluid mind-stuff, centred behind the eyes, as expanding and contracting; flowing from one part of the body to another and capable of extension outside of the body through processes we refer to as concentration, focus, attention, etc.

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Space and Dualism

September 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

As Bloom (2005) says, we are all ‘Descartes Babies’, or ‘natural born dualists’, believing in spite of the evidence in some kind of ineffable soul, spark, or spirit to contrast with the material body and physical world. However, we can only conceptualise this soul through through the meagre (but powerful) tools provided by evolution, which includes an inability to conceive of abstraction except through the use of embodied metaphor. As Lakoff et al demonstrate, we understand the abstract in terms of the concrete. Since the mind is pehaps the ultimate abstraction; we can only conceive of it by analogy to embodied experience. In other words, whilst our naive psychology may provide the experience of a cartesian duality, we can only think of the ’spiritual’ component of this duality in terms of the physical, the Res Cogitans in terms of the Res Extensa.

Posted in Bloom, Paul, Dualism, Soul, Space | No Comments »

Being Telepresent

January 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In order to optimise one’s performance of an activity it is useful to increase the extent to which one is (subjectively) ‘present’, i.e. ‘in the moment’. One strategy for aiding in this process is to re-establish the relationship between self and body such that the automaticity of embodiment is avoided. This involves an initial distancing of oneself from the body through the identification of self with some core, non-corporeal entity such as ‘essence’, ’soul’, ‘core self’ etc, followed by a conscious and whole-hearted re-inhabiting of the body and the senses. Through this process one becomes effectively telepresent in one’s own body. This technique draws upon the intuitive dualism noted by Bloom in ‘Descartes Baby’ in which he notes that the conceptual separation of self and body, however much it may be denied by science and decried by much philosophy, is nevertheless a part of the human condition of consciousness.

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Good Dualism (other people’s bodies)

January 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One of the reasons for the widespread rejection of Cartesian Dualism in the form of the body/mind split is the perceived differences in value which historically have been assigned to body and to mind (or soul). Because there has been a tradition of the body as something ‘fallen’ and corrupt and a corresponding tradition of the soul as transcendent and divine any acceptance of dualism which seems to embrace these traditions is tainted with this difference, which most people today find unacceptable. However, we routinely have a wide range of different relationships with other people’s bodies which do not include such negative evaluation, including relationships of identification and possession, so the dualism inherent in the redefining of oneself as a non-corporeal entity ‘inside’ one’s body does not necessarily lead to alienation, or to a negative value being assigned to the flesh in contrast to a higher more ethereal ’spirit’.

Posted in Dualism, Morality, Soul | No Comments »

‘Empty’ Space

May 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The division into inside and outside that is created by the inscription of the circle, the making of the mark, must be preceded by an earlier state. The void, or nothing from which the somethings of the world emerge. Modern vernacular intuitions about the nothingness of the void are coloured by the version of empty space formulated by Newton and which is still the most common way of conceiving space and nothingness.

In the Newtonian universe, space in the inactive and inert substrate on which the events of the universe are enacted. In this emptiness, Newtonian space has no other role than to provide this arena for action, and is essentially a simple measure of the distance sparating the really significant material of the cosmos. Even the fact that objects are themselves extended in space and have the dimensions fathomable as height, width, and breadth, this is simply an indication that the components of the object, or different parts of the object, have some kind of empty measurable distance between them. This distance or extension in space has no other significance than that of separation. It is not even possible to claim for Newtonian space and the kind of ‘nothingness’ that it signifies that it is the binary opposite of ‘something’. For Newtonian nothing to be part of the binary pair with substance or materiality would be an important promotion. As the opposite of something, that kind of nothing, that kind of empty space would be and indispensable part of any cosmic creative story. But it cannot be said of Newtonian space that is is the opposite of something. It is not even the lack of something, marked by the paradoxical but significant presence of absence. It is simply an inauspicious blankness, devoid of relevance, power, relationship, history, and meaning.

This understanding of nothingness, exemplified by our concept of ‘empty space’, is prevalent in much of our thinking, and when we talk about ‘nothing’ it is the inert and featureless nothing of the impotent concept of space that we refer to.

Posted in Dualism, Space, Zero | No Comments »

Empty the World into Yourself

July 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The work of Korzybski on General Semantics is one source for the linguistic/psychological exercise referred to as ‘e-prime’. In e-prime one adopts a way of speaking in which the verb ‘to be’ is consciously suppressed, forcing one to use circumlocutions in order to express ideas and share observations which would otherwise use that verb. From personal experience, I can say that the long term adopting of this way of speaking does undoubtedly have an effect on thought and ultimately on worldview.

A possible interpretation of the reasons for the effectiveness of this strategy in offering alternative ways of being is that it contributes toward a breakdown of the habitual dualism which characterises modern thought and individual philosophy. Our routine existence is dominated by a sense, largely unspoken, that experience is divided into two parts, the object of that experience, which is detached, external and ‘over there’, and the subject of that experience,which is personal, hidden, and ‘inside’. This duality is often spoken of in terms of ’self’ and ‘other’, and is probably formed at a very early age. As Paul Bloom notes in ‘Descartes Baby’, we may all be ‘natural born dualists‘.

An aspect of the natural dualism which is so familiar to us is that, both conceptually and linguistically, we talk about the world in two different ways, one which is grounded in objective properties, and one which is grounded in subjective perceptions. When we are striving for a sense of objectivity we talk about the objects of the world in terms of the properties they possess independent of our perceptions. So for example we might say that the leaves of this tree are green, suggesting that there are some objects in the world, call them leaves, existing independently of ourselves, and these objects possess a property which we can identify as greenness. Alternatively, if we are not trying to achieve this objectivity we might say instead that the leaves on the tree appear green to me. This subtle difference relocates the property of greenness back where it belongs, inside the body of the perceiver. This relocation has been effected by the suppression of the verb ‘to be’ which is present in the first sentence but absent in the second. Being is transformed in ’seeming’.

The wholesale use of this technique eventually deprivileges the conceptual framework supporting dualism in favour of a monist understanding in which all experience, ‘external’ and ‘internal’, ‘over there’ and ‘in here’, is suffused with a single sense of active awareness.

This sense of awareness grounded in perception rather than in a putative set of objective properties also has implications for the self-perception of conscious awareness. When applied to an understanding of self one is obliged to interpret self-awareness not as an experience of human being but of human seeming.

Posted in Bloom, Paul, Dualism, Exercises, Korzybski, Alfred, Language | No Comments »

Seeing Double

August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The concept of ‘dualism’ involves an experience of being in which the world is separated into two parts or materials. These are variously designated as ’self and other’, ‘body and soul’, ‘body and mind’ and ’subject and object’. The normal experience of the act of seeing gives strong reinforcement to such dualism because of its structure. From a naïve standpoint, vision seems to involve the operation of two major component parts: the seer and the seen, together with conditional components which support the act, most notably the space which lies between seer and seen and across which seeing operates, and the light which must be present if seeing is to happen at all. The self-evident obviousness of such a structure, combined with the aid to this kind of thinking that some scientific support for its validity provides, inevitably forces one to conclude that the location of ’self’ within this system is with the ’seer’ and that everything else that is ’seen’ is ‘other’: that ‘mind’ only exists at the location in space occupied by this seer and the rest is inert matter, including the ‘body’ one sees when one looks down or indeed the body of another person. Here is the subject, there is the object. Vision, as described here, is the objectifying sense par excellence, and remembering that up to 40% of brain activity is comprised of the visual processing of information it is not surprising that, as Paul Bloom puts it, we are ‘natural born dualists’. Since so much of our brain activity is taken up with visual processing, a fact observable by noting how much of our cognition and language relies on visual metaphors, we have an inbuilt tendency to constantly reproduce the conditions under which dualism thrives.

Any move toward achieving non-duality must inevitably confront this difficulty or find ways to minimise its effects. Clearly one way is to develop a set of techniques which privilege non-visual ways of being in the world and which do not have this this tendency to spatialise and objectify. However, many traditions do attempt to offer ways of finding non-duality which rely on the concept of ’seeing’, or which make extensive use of visual and spatial metaphors despite the inherent difficulties. Such methods work because of a number of strategies which have been found which circumvent the duality-producing tendency of vision.

One way this has been achieved is through the building up of an identification or association not with the ’seer’ in the structure of vision but with some aspect of the conditions in which seeing operates, usually light or space. We intuitively associate ourselves with the position of seer, feeling our self as existing at the place where the looking is taking place or coming from. This intuition can be broken down however, allowing us to change the location of such identification, at least partially. In fact we routinely modify the location of our identification, extending it to cover our family, team, country, or species, swelling with pride when ‘we’ have taken our first step, scored a goal, turned green and pleasant as an English springtime, or evolved an opposable thumb. Alternatively we may shrink our identification to include only our head, our brain, our consciousness, placing the I deep inside and casting everything else out into the over-there-ness of objective space. We also habitually and non-mystically move ourselves away from ourselves whenever we see someone in pain; we wince in empathy, placing part of ourselves momentarily in their shoes and neuronally mirroring their being. It is a comparatively small step from these everyday resizings and relocations of the self to an identification with the non-self components of vision mentioned above. When we feel ourselves to be, not the subject or object in the visual equation, but the space in which these entities appear, we are adopting the space as ourselves and feeling the singularity and non-duality which comes with that territory. This is particularly potent if we have an understanding of space not as the emptiness which lies between the stuff of the world but as a continuous substrate which permeates every-thing and (so physicists would attest) at the deepest level comprises everything. Similarly, the development of a close association with light, the other great condition for the functioning of vision, can also allow one to avoid objectifying dualism which still utilising the power of visuality.

Some practices, particularly activity-based ones, find a non-local location for self in an identification with the affordance connection between ‘here’ and ‘there’, between this thing here called ‘I’ and that thing there called ‘it’ (or ‘you’). An affordance connection draws on that faculty of our minds which synchronises our perceptions with the actions required of the object of those perceptions. So, for example, when we see a chair we do not simply see a collection of wooden geometrical shapes assembled in a particular way, we ’see’ the sitting opportunities offered by this object. Similarly, when we see a tool with a handle we ’see’ its graspability. According to Gibson, this recognition of affordance is not some rational act carried out by the conscious mind once visual perception has taken place, rather it is completely embedded within the perceptual act, preceding such analysis as geometry or the recognition of a particular material. When we see something, the first thing we see it how we should interact with it, and this seeing is an unconscious, embodied, felt sense. The other more formal aspects of objects relating to their shape, size, colour, etc follow this primary active perceptual response, and it is these secondary perceptions which most clearly separate seer from seen, subject from object, self from other. A form of ’seeing’ or ‘being’ which foregrounds these primary affordance relations between perceiver and perceived may reduce the dualism which normal seeing tends to promote. So Herriman, writing about Zen and Archery, can claim that non-duality is achieved when the archer ceases to exist as an individual separated from the bow, arrow, and target, and begins to exist as the action which coheres these disparate elements into a unity. This singularity is a result of an identification by the archer not with his self as distinct from the activity, but with the affordance structure which makes these elements one.

Posted in Affordance, Dualism, Enlightenment, Light, Non-duality, Space | No Comments »

Defending Descartes

September 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The philosopher Descartes is credited (or blamed) for introducing the concept of dualism to mainstream Western thought. His identification of the Res Cogitans and the Res Extensa, usually thought of as Mind and Body, is often considered to be one of the big mistakes in the history of ideas. This division, it is held, creates an artificial division in our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the environment. Descartes ‘artificial’ cleaving of soma from psyche apparently allowed for the development of other dualities, which were given an organisational logic by association with one or the other of this binary pair. A small selection of these might include:

It is passingly interesting to note that these binaries have been revisited more recently by feminist writer Helene Cixous, with the top terms of Body and Mind being replaced by Male and Female. She claims that the various divisions which we construct to divide experience in two are always associated, often unconsciously, with one or the other gender. So far, so stereotypically sexist, but Cixous goes on to note that the gender binary, like Cartesian dualism, is not neutral, and that invariably one side of the divide is awarded positive value and the other negative. In the gender binary the male side is good and the female side is bad. It has been argued that Cartesian dualism, at least as it has been used in the West, regards Mind as the positive term and Body as negative. An alternative take on the creation of difference produced by dualist logic is that one of the two terms comes to be regarded as the norm, and virtually invisible, and the other terms is seen as aberrant and is visibly ‘marked’ by this difference. So, for example, we hear about the achievement of artists and of female artists, the fact that we need to state the gender of the female artist indicates that we regard the norm as male. In this case, the male term in the binary is ‘unmarked’ and the female is ‘marked’.

This dualism, for which Descartes is somewhat unfairly blamed, is held by many as not only incorrect, but also destructive. Such division causes rifts in the smooth surface of an otherwise holistic universe, and whilst it may have the intention of explaining the ontology of being, it actually has the effect of rending the fabric of being beyond repair. If only Descartes had not invented dualism, we might cry in a wail of oversimplification, the world would be a much better place. Such is the accusation laid at the door of dualism, and particularly at the porte of Descartes.

Of course this is a gross injustice, and poor Descartes cannot be blamed for what might have been done in his name. If men have oppressed women, or ‘civilised’ societies have trod roughshod over ‘primitive’ societies, and if arguments which make appeals to the mind have won out over those which engage the body, then responsibility for any damage done lies with the actors in these two-handed dramas, not with some French guy who’s been dead for four hundred years.

It is also more realistic to regards Descartes, not as the creator of dualism, but rather as the first to give it clear shape, to hold up to the light the duality which was always there. It is evident from the most cursory glance over the history of philosophy (East and West) that the notion of dividing experience into two parts was around long before the act of naming which Descartes took on. In fact, so prevalent is this basic act of subdividing the One into the Two is that it may be a universal human tendency. Experiments carried out on children support this notion, and this seems to be the case regardless of their cultural background or age (so no possibility of evil Western reductionist brainwashing). The ubiquity and the acultural nature of dualist thinking also gains some neuroscientific support in the work of Newberg and D’Aquili, who propose the existence of a ‘binary operator’ in the brain: a mechanism instantiated in neurons which carries out such elementary division as part of the routine cognitive processes of conscious and unconscious thought. As Paul Bloom puts it in ‘Descartes Baby’, part of the human condition is to be a ‘natural born dualist’, and in light of this dualistic inevitability, perhaps a better interpretation to give to the Cartesian project is not as the building of a wall across the world, but as the identification of (part of) the taxonomy of being. Whether we like it or not, the world really does fall apart before our eyes (although this need not mean that the centre cannot hold, or that mere chaos is loosed upon the world).

Posted in Dualism, Embodiment, History | No Comments »

Childhood Identification with the Body

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Identification takes place when we experience a felt connection between our cognitive awareness and some phenomenal entity. Individual cognitive awareness initially identifies with whatever entity is most ubiquitous in the environment, like a baby chicken forming a bond with the boots of the farmer. The most commonly ubiquitous entity in the environment of a baby and young child is the physical body through (in) which the sense of awareness is realised.
Therefore at the dawn of our individual consciousness we routinely identify ourselves with our own physical bodies. To this extent our ontogeny recapitulates (possibly) phylogeny, since presumably in evolutionary history there must have been a moment when such self-awareness as an adaptive trait, and this must have been within the context of embodiment.

We are also capable of identifying strongly with other bodies.
We can also identify with groups.
We can also identify with large entities such as nations or teams.
We can also identify with the planet
We can also identify with everything.

Posted in Dualism, Embodiment, Identification | No Comments »

Knowing One, Feeling Two

November 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

It is a fact of almost mundane obviousness that our bodies, including our brains, are made of the same basic materials as everything else in the universe. It is also routinely evident that our bodies are subject to the same forces and play of energy as the rest of creation. Lastly, it is no surprise that everthing we are and do is part of numerous chains of causality and parts of larger structures of material being. In short, no man is an island; we are all intimately connected to the overall fabric of the material world. As Fritjof Capra put it,
‘there is only one thing happening and we are all seamlessly welded into it.’

The incontrovertable truth of this statement does not necessarily reflect our phenomenological experience of the relationship between self and world however. On the contrary, we typically experience ourselves as somehow apart from the material world, as slightly removed or placed in the position of onlooker. We look out into the world from a consciousness which feels radically different to the phenomena we are looking at. There is a strong sense of separation and difference and this dualism seems to deny the unity and connectivity that is undoubtedly present. We may know that we are seamlessly welded into the world but our felt sense insists on breaking the weld and splitting the seam.

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Objectivity (Buber and Polanyi)

November 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The traditions of objectivity place the material of that objectivity in a shared interpersonal space in front of each and all possible viewers. The (arte)facts of such objectivity are rendered as knowledge objects in this imaginal conceptual space. There is a fact that both you and I can agree upon, and if put in the right light is self-evident to everyone else also, (the Earth is round, parallel lines never meet, all things must pass). The fact is an objective fact and has the same status as any other object.

The question then becomes, what is an appropriate relationship for me to have with that object? What is your relationship? Is yours the same as mine? A number of options are possible; if we are fresh from reading Martin Buber we might have a choice of striking up a relation of I-it, in which we preserve the object’s inanimate sovereignty, but at the cost of rendering ourselves similarly lifeless and regally removed from the situation. Or we might try to establish an I-Thou relationship in which both the object and ourselves are mutually potentiated by contact.

Alternatively, we may have come to the question after reading Polanyi, and recognise in our apprehension of the object a certain direction, a kind of vectorial aspect to our relationship. We may feel that the object over these in shared conceptual space lies at the end of a line of intentionality that begins at the source of our own self. We may sense the ‘from-to’ nature of this intentionality; here I am and there is the object, and what I know of it is the result of the pouring of perception from here to there, an outpouring which oddly leaves my own body in its wake so that I feel myself not located entirely at the source but eccentrically and ecstatically projected forward toward the object. In the from-to relationship this projection is welcomed and a sense of rapport, compassion, empathy, and fellow-feeling may be invoked. The from-to light does not simply stop at the surface of the object but penetrates, connects, warms, and co-illuminates. It has a place to go to and it feels like home. Or, to stay with Polanyi, our relationship of projected intention may be less ‘from-to’ and more ‘from-at’, in which the object is given no power to receive our transmissions, and while the gaze may originate here, with the self, there is no end to the journey of our perception. The view into the shared space does not resolve onto an object of (comm)union but is interrupted by an object of the imperial empirical state.

Posted in Buber, Martin, Dualism, Object, Objectivity, Perception, Polanyi, Michael | No Comments »

Cartesian Dualism - A Good Thing

January 14th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The distinction of mind and body into these two separate entities and substances is usually associated with Descartes and his notion of ’substance dualism’. This proposes that it is unimaginable that the experience of conscious thought might emrge from mere meat. This discontinuity is widely assumed to be:

(a) Wrong
(b) A Bad Thing

The badness of this substantive apartheid will be addressed later, and indeed challenged, but we might first consider what is wrong about it and where this wrongness is assumed to come from. The wrongness of this Cartesian dualism is reckoned to lie in its misrecognition of the power of physical explanation and the relationship between knowledge and intuition. The apparent difficulty in understanding conscious experience in all its ephemerality and intangibility using mental tools which we associate with inert and inanimate matter. This difficulty is, most likely, only an apparent one however, not as actual as it appears, and is most likely a reflection of the limits of our ability to intuitively grasp ideas which are outside our usual range of operation. It is likely that, even if a complete and exhaustive physical description of mind was available we would still find it intuitively unsatisfactory for the same reason that we find many other ideas difficult. Eleven dimensional space, the non-locality of sub-atomic particles, the time-dilation effects of relativity, all ‘feel’ unsatisfactory, despite the robust nature of these concepts. This counter-intuitive and unsatisfying sense we experience is a result of the deep unfamiliarity of such idea; an ability to grasp such ideas easily would have served no useful purpose to our evolutionary ancestors so we have never developed an embodied emotional ‘felt’ relationship to them. They appear distant, abstract, and disembodied, even when their status as fact is well-established. So it is with mind and consciousness; the difficulty we may experience in imagining evanescent mind as a property of proface matter is an artefact of our developmental history, and does not reflect an actual ontological distinction.

The logic of evolutionary adaptation, driven by the quest for survival of genetic information, provides a good explanation of why we experience difficulty in resolving mind/body dualisms in a way which feels intuitively satisfying, but it does not explain how this apparent distinction arose in the first place. Nor does it explain how this distinction continues to arise every time we perform any act of introspection. Within the routine processes of lived experience it seems to be almost inevitable that this divide continues to reassert itself, often despite our best efforts to bring body and mind together. The existence of this divide within the traditions of most, if not all, cultures (where the mind might be variously represented as the ’soul’, the ’spirit’, the ‘ti bon ange’, the ‘ka’ etc) suggests that it has something of the quality of a Human Universal and the fact that it has been identified in infants and young children argues for this distinction being, if not innate, then as contributing to a way of being which is acquired at a very young age and without any obvious prompting. It is likely that this persistant illusion of substance dualism is a product of our particular embodiment; the contingent and ramshackle architecture of body, sensory organs, brain, and mental modules which comprise our thinking selves.

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Non-duality in Science and Metaphysics

January 15th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The separation of mind and body articulated in the various dualistic models of Descartes and others is usually considered an unwanted and irrational consequence of our embodiment and our evolutionary history. An exception to this negative relationship to dualism is the religious distinctions which posit the ephemeral mind (or soul) as somehow elevated from the the mortal and physical body. Some traditional forms of Christianity, for example, cast the body as the site of sordid temptation and original sin. As such this body is something to be disowned, cast off, and escaped from. In this formulation the intuitively separate mind can provide the vehicle for such an escape; as a separate entity connected only by virtue of temporary circumstance to the fallen flesh, it can be considered radiantly virtuous and possibly even immortal. In this tradition the natural dualism created by our phenomenology is given a moral (and some would say morally reprehensible) spin. Cartesian dualism is thus put to the service of a moralistic theology. Other traditions seem to resonate more closely with contemporary sensibility in its rejection of this moralistic divide and its repressive consequences. The various contemplative traditions including Buddhism stress a practice which seems to have the aim of dissolving this dualism, (along with other dualism, hence the title ‘non-duality’ which is often given to the aims of such practices). Vipassana mindfullness meditation for example includes within its techniques a close alignment of body and mind, requiring the proponent of such practice to give full conscious awareness to the behaviour of the body. One adept and teacher has even commented that mindfullness might more accurately be referred to as ‘bodyfullness’, stressing the unified embodied nature of the enlightened mind. The apparent accord between scientific understandings of the relationship of mind and body, which attest to the illusory aspect of such distinctions, and the practices of some contemplatives such as Buddhists, may be one reason why the study and practice of Buddhist and related techniques is increasingly popular in Western neuroscience and psychology.

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Anything with Anything

January 25th, 2008 Fred McVittie

As Paul Bloom has noted, we all appear to be ‘natural born dualists’, experiencing ourselves as consisting of two mutually-exclusive although possibly connected entities. These two entities are our body and our mind, and form the binary components of the classical Cartesian Dualism from which Bloom takes the term. Is has been widely demonstrated that this dualism, however intuitively inevitable, is not an accurate reflection of our real nature as revealed through scientific enquiry. It is, rather, an artefact of the particularities of our embodiment and its presence within all cultures and as an innate principle in very young children is accounted for by the shared nature of this embodiment. The idea that such separate elements of being exist of course informs the religious and metaphysical traditions of many, if not most cultures. Concepts such as the ’soul’, ‘reincarnation’, ‘astral travelling’, ‘out of body experiences’, ‘remote viewing’ etc all rely upon the possibility of body and mind (or soul) taking different pathways and existing apart from one another, and the likelihood that these concepts are entirely fictitious or illusory does not reduce their status as evidence for a thoroughgoing dualism within normal folk-psychology.

Regardless of the contrafactual nature of this dualism, the undeniable fact of its presence within all of us does present opportunities for imagination and practice which would not be possible if we were not born with this divide at the heart of our being. Our apparent existence as an insubstantial self inhabiting a substantial body allows for these two components to be considered separately and also capable of separation. In a sense we carry out such separation and strategic use of this dualism every day. We routinely change the location and size of our ’self’ many times a day; sometimes associating it with our entire body, at other times with only part of our body, as for example when we have a pain, when we may begin to regard our arm or our leg not as part of our self but as a kind of possession; “I have a pain in my leg” we might say. This withdrawal of one’s self from a painful limb would be impossible if we were not intuitive dualists. As unified, monist beings we would be forced to say “I am hurting” with the sense of “I” as present in the aching limb as it is in every other cell in the body. Similarly, when we are in conversation and we want to stress that the ideas and opinions we are stating represent our true feelings we may gesture with the hand towards the centre of the chest or the heart region. This action seems to be indicating that we want to associate the most vital (and survival dependent) parts of our anatomy with our ephemeral self. “Ignore the possible inaccuracies of my extremities”, we seem to be claiming, “my true self is here and can be trusted”.

This movement and contraction of the self within the body represents an ability we seem to possess to make temporary and strategic alliances between our self-concept (or ego, or I), and parts of the material world, particularly those parts we feel most associated with which lie within the boundaries of our own skin. It is likely that this ability is also in operation when we occasionally find the ability to ally our self with material beyond the limits of our own embodiment. Again we do this quite routinely when we take on the responsibility and compassionate care of a lover or a family member. At times we can feel that our self no longer stops at our skin but merges with the flesh of the other person. Less romantically, the allegiance one might feel with a team, a group, or a country, seems also to be a mobilisation of this ability to transfer the association of ephemeral self away from its ‘natural’ place within the corpus of the body and into a larger and more disparate entity.

These perambulations of the soul, regardless of the fictional status of such a soul, nevertheless seem to confirm our intuitions as naturally dualistic beings. If we were truly monists, with body and mind firmly welded together then such mobility and extensibility would be incomprehensible. This is also the case if we lived in a permanent state of advaita, the sense of Absolute Unity of Being referred to in many mystical traditions in which one feels oneself to be ‘One with Everything’. However desirable such a state may be, it would not allow the variable and mercurial ability that we all possess to be anything with anything.

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Gendlin’s Vast Space

April 30th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The technique of ‘focusing’ developed by Eugene Gendlin aims to optimise performance and psychic health through the use of mental and physical imagery and schema. Emerging out of phenomenology and Rogerian counselling, focusing invokes an awareness of the body and its responses and maps these onto cognitive states. One interesting feature of this technique is its use of the metaphor of ’space’ in organising the understanding of certain states, and the relation of these to the person.

The first stage in the process, what Gendlin refers to as the first ‘movement’, involves the clearing of a ’space’ in one’s mentation by proposing the question, to the body, that ‘everything is fine’. This is immediately followed by a kind of active listening; the utilisation of the ‘felt sense’, to detect what responses the body makes to this proposal. Typically, to the experienced focusser, the body then presents a set of sensations and feelings, usually vague and unformed, which represent in corporeal form those aspects of being which are ‘not fine’. It is almost as if the body is replying to the original proposal made by the mind and saying “you think everything is fine? What about this?”

This prompting of a bodily response in which issues or problems normally considered to be entirely cognitive events are identified within the space of the body allows these events to be considered separately from the mental space of their arising. The technique subsequently involves the detailed identification of these issues out of the rather ill-formed initial felt response such that these issues begin to take on the ontology of objects external to the site from which they are viewed, almost as if they are outside of oneself. They can then be ‘put down’ or ‘put aside’ or ‘held up for view’, moves which only make sense as part of the overall schema in which entities which began as (possibly painful) phenomena lodged within the core of the self are redefined as objects outside of that (version of the) self and which one can take a more ‘objective’ viewpoint of. Simultaneous with this objectification of problematic concepts is the identification of self with the space in which such objects appear. There is a feeling that one is not coterminous with the thoughts and feelings one might normally be ’subject to’, that is, those located within what are normally thought of as the bounds of the subject. Instead the sense is of oneself as an emptiness, a calm immensity, or a kind of illuminated void.

Gendlin, E. T. Focusing. Second edition, Bantam Books, 1982.

Posted in Attention, Boundary, Dualism, Gendlin, Eugene, Non-duality, Psychology, Sense, Space, Void | No Comments »