May 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Stanislaw Lem died of heart failure on 27 March, 2006, in Kraków.
In the spirit of Lem’s work, particularly A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitudes, this blog contains abstracts for papers which have not been written, for a conference which does not exist.
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June 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie
An analysis of a range of techniques for the training of theatre performers reveals a high level of consistency and coherence in terminology. Although these techniques do not overtly claim to describe a world which differs from that of common sense or rational science, the paradigm and ’science’ of the physical world which is implied through this analysis is distinct in a number of ways. The axioms of an imaginary science of Performance might look something like this:
Space
Energy
Essence
Posted in Essence, Imagination, Metaphor, Performance, Poetics, Science, Theatre, Training | No Comments »
October 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Posted in Imagination, Metaphor, Performance | No Comments »
November 2nd, 2006 Fred McVittie
In some non-Western traditions, thought is sometimes considered a ’sixth sense’; a mode of experiencing the world distinct from the sensory modes of touch, taste, hearing etc. However, thought might be more accurately considered not as an additional sense but as the metaphorical application of the usual sensory modes to the contents of cognition. Thought does not exist distinct from the set of senses we use to gather experience. Rather we utilise the embodied experience of gathering data via the senses, and organising that data, to the gathering and organisation of data which, because of its abstract nature, is unavailable to the senses. The action of ‘thinking about’ an abstract concept such as justice does not employ a special thinking sense, instead there is a process in which, through the application of metaphor, the concept of justice is given an imaginary form which is (theoretically) available to the senses. We are then able to imaginatively (and non-consciously) ‘visualise’ the concept of justice, or we are able to ‘feel’ it in some way, (as when we ‘feel’ that an injustice has been done), or we may even ’smell’ some aspect of the concept (so for example, we may say that evidence smelly ‘fishy’). We seem to be equipped not only with a set of functional senses for the gathering of data in the external, physically constructed world, but also with a parallel set of ‘imaginary senses’ which we use to gather data from the internal, metaphorically constructed world.
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November 3rd, 2006 Fred McVittie
The contents of thought are not abstract, impressionless concepts, but are perceptions of various kinds. To test this one might simply try to imagine something; an idea, an object, etc and observe the impression it forms in the mind. One cannot imagine the concept chair without imagining a chair, or a sequence of chairs. These impressions are not always, or necessarily, visual; thinking on the concept of music will undoubtedly produce an auditory impression, sugar will entail the impression of a taste, and heat will most likely involve a tactile perception (quite possibly in addition to visual and other components; the sun, a fire, a hotplate; perception is, after all, usually a multimedia presentation). This perceptual nature of thought is also in evidence when we imagine concepts which have no literal or concrete analogue in physical embodied experience. Concepts such as justice, love, and truth, as well as speech components such as in (when used in phrases such as in trouble), or high (as in high performance or high anxiety) are abstract and do not apparently make direct appeal to the senses of perception. In such cases, even though we may not be consciously aware of it, our minds are conceiving of these abstractions through the imaginary perception of metaphors which stand in for these abstract concepts. So our ability to think about justice is due to our ability to form imaginary perception of the various metaphors which represent justice; visual images of scales and balances perhaps, or harmonic sounds, or perhaps other, more ideosyncratic sensory-based perceptions.
Posted in Cognition, Hearing, Imagination, Metaphor, Perception | No Comments »
November 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Imagine yourself as you were yesterday. What do you have in common with that person?
Imagine yourself as you were five years ago. What do you have in common?
What do you have in common with another member of your family?
Another member of your culture?
Someone from another culture? What do you have in common?
Someone from another time?
How about another species? What do you have in common with a non-human animal?
What do you have in common with something that is not alive at all? A rock. A wave on the ocean.
What do you have in common with everything?
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December 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie
The visual sense (and the visual imagination) has an inbuilt tendency to objectify experience by locating concepts at a remove from the body, thus transforming them into objects, and simultaneously creating a viewing position separate from those objects; the subject which is ourself. Inevitably, our eyesight gives us the impression that our ’self’ is located here, behind the eyes, while the world is ‘out there’, beyond the surface of the skin. The faculty of sight is not therefore conducive to the development of non-duality. Wherever we look we cannot see ourselves and, from this perspective (sic), whilst we may visualise the rest of the world as a unity; a single big picture, we ourselves are not in that picture. Visually, we are not in the world. Mirrors do, of course, provide a visual image of our selves, evidence for our worldly existence, but this evidence is circumstantial, not experiential. We usually do not identify ourselves literally with the reflection, or feel our consciousness to be located behind the mirror.
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December 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie
When we think consciously about space we often imagine it as Newton may have imagined it; as an effective emptiness; an absolute nothingness that existed distinct from matter and the body and spread uniformly without regard to the events of the world. Space, in this understanding, is the neutral backdrop against which experience and action takes place, it is not implicated in that experience and action. This imagination of space affects our felt relationship to space; we do not, typically, consider ourselves to be part of space, or to have an affect upon space, but simply that space is the void between one body and another. When we move, we imagine ourselves passing through this emptiness like a ghost passing through the walls of an empty house. We are dead to this space.
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March 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie
The functioning of the mind as described by the theories of Embodied Cognition are radically different from that associated with more blandly ‘computational’ models. The idea that cognition is merely, or even only, the wielding of symbols and the arithmetic calculation of weightings across connectionist networks is replaced by a view that looks out across the mind as a landscape of poetic imagination, not dissimilar to that explored by Bachelard in ‘The Poetics of Space’ and other works. The structure of thought, even the most banal or apparently rational, is underpinned by the methods of poetry and art; metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche are essential elements in the grammar of cognition.
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May 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Our ability to exercise our imagination to ‘body forth the form of things unknown’ is probably rooted in the adaptive capacity to predict the consequence of actions. For our ancestors, the creature who was able to imagine that the herd of stampeding wildebeest in the distance would soon be stampeding over the ground on which it stood, had a greater likelihood of survival that the one who lacked this imagination. The routine processes of evolution would thereafter ensure that creatures developed who had this imaginative capacity. Our own abilities to countenance subjunctive worlds and fictional events seems likely to be an extension of these powers, although the imagination of humans has taken particular and peculiar flight with the development of other human traits including language, mathematics, science, and art.
The human imagination now seems to be a place where we live most of our lives; when our eyes are not fixed on the blinding mirage of the future, they are looking around at the parallel universes of the past. We extend ourselves forward along the timeline to plan our retirement and death, and backward to relive, or reinvent, the past. In our imagination we are surrounded by stampeding wildebeest all of the time.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Act V Scene I
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May 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Given that our imagination was formed as part of an evolutionary process ‘designed’ to assist the survival of medium sized objects moving at medium speed, it is likely that our imagination is limited to the sensory range appropriate to that scale of object. For our remote ancestors, whilst there would be an adaptive advantage to imagining the approach of a tiger or imagining that the outside world continues to exist when you close your eyes, there would be no advantage to imagining sub-atomic particles, a spherical Earth, or Black Holes. Given also that human history is too short to have allowed major evolutionary changes to have taken place in either the body or the mind, our imaginations are still operating within that range. We have the imagination of medium sized objects, and the paradigms and cosmologies of that imagination correspond to that scale of being, a scale of being which is largely Newtonian and Cartesian.
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May 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie
‘Space’ is a concept which one can construct through the operation of a number of senses, primarily kinesthetic, but also visually and acoustically. The multiplicity of sensory modes through which space is evidenced has the effect of multiplying the number of spaces that we can imagine; when I close my eyes,’space’ does not disappear, but is transformed from a multimedia display to a purely sonic space, populated by the sound of birds and traffic, each sound located in and travelling through the space that it simultaneously occupies and realises. The multi-modal potential of space allows it to act as an organisational aid for the imagination. The dark space of sound allows for the perceptual projection of the visual imagination. The silent space of sight is an imaginary auditorium for the projection of subjunctive voices.
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May 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Metaphor is the imagination of the imagination
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May 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie
It has been estimated that between 75 and 90% of spoken and written language in not literal and concrete, referring to primary experiences with the material substances of the world, but is ‘metaphorical’. It is further believed that this use of metaphor in language reflects a similar widespread use of metaphor in thought, and that most of the cognition we engage in, both conscious and non-conscious, is non-literal. Metaphor allows us to think about aspects of lived experience which would otherwise be unavailable to the senses and therefore unthinkable. These include entities and forces which are simply beyond the reach of the senses because they are too small, too fast, too large, too distant etc. but also includes the many abstract concepts that have been created by human culture and cognition including ‘justice’, ‘truth’, ‘romantic love’ etc. Even such apparently literal and concrete phenomena such as our understanding of numbers has been shown not to be direct (at least above very small numbers), but grounded in metaphor. This dominance of both conscious and non-conscious cognition by metaphor is so great that an entity, person, animal, or artificial intelligence which was only able to process information directly and had no means of embodying abstractions through metaphor would barely qualify as the possessor of a mind at all. It is almost true to say that our modern concept of mind itself is as a kind of metaphor machine.
Our relation to the metaphorising processes which constitute cognition and the formation of mind range from unquestioning acceptance to more self-conscious awareness that we are not thinking or speaking literally. When we speak about atoms we feel that the language is concrete (except to a physicist who knows the truth about atoms), whereas when we speak about God we are not quite so sure if we are talking literally or metaphorically. An uncertainty that will also vary depending on our religious preferences.
Given the ubiquitous concerns with abstractions that seems to characterise the being of human, it is fair to say that most of our phenomenology, and most personal thought and interpersonal discourse is metaphorical. For the most part we live cognitively in a world which is not directly available to the senses, which is beyond human bodily experience. Instead we live in a world of shifting metaphors in which abstract ideas mould themselves into shapes of objects, spaces, and forces that we can see with our minds eye, touch with the mental feelings, move through with the body in our minds. These transient thought forms dissolve and combine, blending and elaborating into complex architectures of thought as our attempts to grasp the ungraspable lead us to constantly build and rebuild these mental structures using the blueprints of embodied experience.
This shifting internal landscape of embodied metaphor, call it ‘imagination’, is the ground for what we experience daily as normal waking consciousness. Behind the clear and constant solidity of waking awareness there is this ongoing dream populated by shape-shifters and transformers. Our consciousness lives on Earth, our imagination lives on Solaris.
Posted in Cognition, Consciousness, Embodiment, Grasp, Imagination, Lem, Stanislaw, Metaphor | No Comments »
July 2nd, 2007 Fred McVittie
Imagine a point on the wall in front of you.
Imagine that point extending laterally to a length of about 2 metres. You are imagining a line of 2 metres.
Imagine this line extended upward into a second spatial dimension. Imagine it extending to a height of about 2 metres. You are visualising a square of 4 square metres.
Imagine this figure extended outward into a third spatial dimension. Imagine it protruding from the board about 2 metres. You are visualising a cube of 8 cubic metres.
Imagine this figure extended into a fourth spatial dimension. Imagine it protruding into that dimension about 2 metres. Are you imagining that? Can you imagine that? I can’t.
Although some may claim to be able to visualise such a four dimensional hypercube, I am sceptical about this claim. There is no adaptive reason why we would possess this ability, and the parsimony of evolutionary necessity suggests that this ability would not persist if it did somehow emerge. We are adapted to function in a physical world appropriate to our size, and do not have the physical or mental affordances to manipulate extra-dimensional entities. Just as our fingers are not equipped to handle atoms and molecules directly, so our minds are not equipped to handle concepts beyond the ken of medium sized objects moving at medium speed.
Interestingly, although this shape may be beyond our sensorial imagination, we can ‘imagine’ this hypercube mathematically. Knowing its measurements we can calculate with some degree of certainty what the ‘quadratic volume’ of this unimaginable object might be. Following the logic of the progression from a one-dimensional line to a two-dimensional square and to a three-dimensional cube, in which at each stage we have calculated the length, area, or cubic volume by multiplying the extensions in each dimension together (2 x 2 x 2 etc), so we can calculate the hypervolume in quadratic metres by adding this extension to our multiplication. We can say that the volume of this inconceivable shape is 
Posted in Evolution, Imagination, Mathematics, Space | No Comments »
July 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Despite the fact that much of the discourse of scientific rationalism is inherently metaphorical, there is still a sense that a vast gulf exists between this discourse and that of myth, fantasy, dream, art, etc. As Ira Chernus (1985) points out in Imagining the Unimaginable this perceived difference is not simply due to an ontological distinction in the kind of knowledge represented in the discourse, but is a difference which is actively constructed and maintained to serve the interests of particular individuals and organisations. Chernus uses the the example of Nuclear war and how this possible event is described. He indicates that it is not the unimaginability of such an event that is the problem, but rather how the kind of imaginative engagement we might have with it is constrained to the apparent ‘objectivity’ of scientific and military strategic discourse. Other forms of engagement: fantasy, narrative, mythic etc. are effectively suppressed and claimed to be invalid, despite the fact that the apparently objective allowed discourses are equally grounded in imaginative metaphor.
Chernus, Ira. (1985). “Imagining the ‘Unimaginable’.” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, no 1, pp. 79-85.
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August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The metaphor of MIND IS SPACE may lie in our ability to construct imaginary ‘representations’, or three dimensional maps of the space we occupy. An ability which is probably assisted by the consilient simultaneous mapping produced by the different senses, particularly hearing and proprioception. Many animals seem to be able to carry some kind of map of their local environment in their minds and which gives them information about their location, and an ability to plan and predict actions within that space. It seems a short step from this memory of real space to the subjunctive spaces of prediction and planning, and then to those in which imagination may play a part. Once a space contains imagination there seems no reason to prevent the imaginary from overrunning the space and thereby transforming it from a map of the real to a realm of purely conceptual thought.
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August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The contents of the visual field constantly change, with new perceptions entering this arena every second and the existing content departing at the same time. This sense of content entering and leaving, together with the movement that perceptions make across the visual field is integrated with the other senses, particularly the proprioceptive sense, and contribute significantly toward the construction of the world we occupy.
Taking the visual field on its own, and recognising the flux of the majority of its contents, there is nevertheless one constant item of content which changes hardly at all. This is the faint dark border which marks the edge of the field and which we may not even be routinely aware of. This border is the edge of the eye sockets and the smudge of the nose, possibly also the top of the cheeks. Whatever else changes inside this frame, the frame itself stays in place and is with us wherever we go.
If I pay attention to the frame I notice some details about it. Firstly, even though I have two eyes, I only experience a single frame (although since I wear glasses I also experience a frame within a frame, but this frame is also singular). Secondly, the frame is darker than the images of the world which it contains, it is a grey or possibly black boundary on the visual world. Thirdly, I can only see the frame and its internal contents, I can see nothing of what might lie ‘outside’ of the frame, or make any inference about the width of the frame. In fact, if I continue to attend to the frame and try to intuit what its width might be, or try to guess if there is a ‘beyond’ at all, I find that my understanding of this frame changes. To guess the extent of the frame, and to arrive at a guess which feels intuitively satisfying, I can only work on present evidence and the logical extrapolation of that evidence. Present evidence presents a dark border to the world which extends for some distance in all directions. No amount of careful scrutiny reveals an outer edge to that border; rather it seems to continue outwards to the edge of my ability to perceive at all.
Furthermore, I can detect no internal structure to that border, it seems homogeneous throughout. Nothing about this perceived border suggests that it will change in character, I see no evidence that it might suddenly change colour somewhere beyond my ability to see it for example, or somehow become a square border rather than a fuzzy oval, or break into multiple nested frames. Similarly I see no evidence that it will suddenly stop at an outer edge and have some other, possibly similar or possibly different ‘content’ (context?, extent?) beyond its outer edge. This is not to say that I cannot imagine such a possibility, but nothing from current evidence supports this kind of an imaginative act. Extrapolating from current perception, this frame continues uninterrupted as far as I wish to consider. It is also continuous on all sides, the extension seems to be in all directions, above, below, left and right.
As well as extending outwards in all directions, the frame seems to also extend in the front/back dimension. The front of the frame, which I feel as coterminous with the front of my face seems to extend backwards, with no sense that there is any gradation or dissolution. Again, I can easily imagine all kinds of ways in which the depth of this frame might terminate and of things that might exist behind this frame on ’this side’ of it, effectively what is happening behind me, however, on current evidence and by extrapolation from that evidence alone, I can detect no signs that such a thing exists or that the depth of the frame is limited in this way. By extrapolated intuition, the frame which extends outward without apparent end, also seems to extend backward without end.
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August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The contents of the visual field constantly change, with new perceptions entering this arena every second and the existing content departing at the same time. This sense of content entering and leaving, together with the movement that perceptions make across the visual field is integrated with the other senses, particularly the proprioceptive sense, and contribute significantly toward the construction of the world we occupy.
Taking the visual field on its own, and recognising the flux of the majority of its contents, there is nevertheless one constant item of content which changes hardly at all. This is the faint dark border which marks the edge of the field and which we may not even be routinely aware of. This border is the edge of the eye sockets and the smudge of the nose, possibly also the top of the cheeks. Whatever else changes inside this frame, the frame itself stays in place and is with us wherever we go.
If I pay attention to the frame I notice some details about it. Firstly, even though I have two eyes, I only experience a single frame (although since I wear glasses I also experience a frame within a frame, but this frame is also singular). Secondly, the frame is darker than the images of the world which it contains, it is a grey or possibly black boundary on the visual world. Thirdly, I can only see the frame and its internal contents, I can see nothing of what might lie ‘outside’ of the frame, or make any inference about the width of the frame. In fact, if I continue to attend to the frame and try to intuit what its width might be, or try to guess if there is a ‘beyond’ at all, I find that my understanding of this frame changes. To guess the extent of the frame, and to arrive at a guess which feels intuitively satisfying, I can only work on present evidence and the logical extrapolation of that evidence. Present evidence presents a dark border to the world which extends for some distance in all directions. No amount of careful scrutiny reveals an outer edge to that border; rather it seems to continue outwards to the edge of my ability to perceive at all.
Furthermore, I can detect no internal structure to that border, it seems homogeneous throughout. Nothing about this perceived border suggests that it will change in character, I see no evidence that it might suddenly change colour somewhere beyond my ability to see it for example, or somehow become a square border rather than a fuzzy oval, or break into multiple nested frames. Similarly I see no evidence that it will suddenly stop at an outer edge and have some other, possibly similar or possibly different ‘content’ (context?, extent?) beyond its outer edge. This is not to say that I cannot imagine such a possibility, but nothing from current evidence supports this kind of an imaginative act. Extrapolating from current perception, this frame continues uninterrupted as far as I wish to consider. It is also continuous on all sides, the extension seems to be in all directions, above, below, left and right.
As well as extending outwards in all directions, the frame seems to also extend in the front/back dimension. The front of the frame, which I feel as coterminous with the front of my face seems to extend backwards, with no sense that there is any gradation or dissolution. Again, I can easily imagine all kinds of ways in which the depth of this frame might terminate and of things that might exist behind this frame on ’this side’ of it, effectively what is happening behind me, however, on current evidence and by extrapolation from that evidence alone, I can detect no signs that such a thing exists or that the depth of the frame is limited in this way. By extrapolated intuition, the frame which extends outward without apparent end, also seems to extend backward without end.
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September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Mental imagery, regardless of the varying forms which it may take, always involves the presence of three necessary elements. These are:
? The imaginary mental space in which the image appears
? The location within that space from which the image or scene is observed: the mental viewpoint.
? The direction of the imaginary gaze from the mental viewpoint, probably toward a particular point on the image or scene.
The second and third elements are variable and likely to fluctuate widely during the observation of a mental image. The viewpoint may move in or out, embracing more or less of the scene, or it may move around the space allowing for different viewpoint on the image. Also, the direction of the imaginary gaze may flicker from one point on the image to another, much as the eye flickers over an object in actual vision.
Posted in Imagination, Seeing, Space | No Comments »
September 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Stanislaw Lem died of heart failure on 27 March, 2006, in Kraków.
In the spirit of Lem’s work, particularly A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitudes, this blog contains abstracts for papers which have not been written, for a conference which does not exist.
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October 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie
You are standing on the shore of an ocean, possibly a beach in some Northern English seaside town: Whitley Bay maybe, or Tynemouth, and since we are in the North of England and it is Midsummer, there is a persistent drizzle and a pale grey mist hangs heavily over a slightly darker grey sea. The horizon is indistinct, and there is no clear division between water and air, and because of the thickness of the fog there is scarcely any line between sea and sand.
Beneath your feet you feel the firmness of the Earth. Solid as Earth can be, which is only less presently certain in its permanence that the feet which stand upon it. These feet are, in turn, assured of their place in the temporal order of objects by the feltness of the body for which they act as pedestal. Here is solidity, this body, this rock, this anchor for the world. A heart of living eternal stone and guarantor of all the verities. If we can simply say ‘here is my heart’ then all else follows.
From heart to body to feet firmly planted on the sands of Whitley Bay is a small journey, but we may feel in the making of it a small softening, a catching of the time of the world in which the body at its Southernmost extremity slips slightly away. The feet are less certain than the heart, and may stumble or slip where the heart remains still.
And under the toes, the sand, shifting with the wind and taking imprint from every foot that passes. The sea, oceanic beyond the sand, and above it, and below it, and washing over and through it, has little resistance, even the stupidest fish can pass between. A rock thrown against the water encounters no resolve. It is there and it is not there, moving and waving like disappearing dancers boarding a train.
Sky above, grey as remembered sleep. There is nothing to say about the sky. There is just nothing to say.
Posted in Boundary, Centre, Imagination, Liquid, Substance | No Comments »
October 9th, 2007 Fred McVittie
One of the most enduring and intuitively satisfying images for perception (and by metaphorical inference for ‘knowing’) is that of the window. However much we may construct alternatives, or work to disabuse ourselves of this image, it is nevertheless extremely persistent. The window metaphor conceives of perceptual consciousness as formed around this image, and with one’s understanding of ’self’ depending on where one is located, and with which parts of the image one identifies. This image has six (or possibly seven) components, three of which are standard components of all images, both mental and actual. These are:
? The space in which the image appears, usually a three dimensional space replicating the Cartesian space of lived experience.
? A viewing position within that space from which one observes the image, usually from outside of the image itself but sometimes contained within it.
? The direction of the imaginary gaze from the mental viewing position, probably toward a particular point on the image or scene.
All mental images have these elements as standard; the ‘window’ image also contains three (or maybe four) other elements or entailments, the conceptualisation of which determines the state of one’s perceptual consciousness within the limits of the metaphor. These additional components are:
? The space ‘outside’ the window, which in terms of perceptual consciousness is usually conceived of as the objective world.
? The space ‘inside’ the window, which is understood to be the mental space of thought, mind, memory, imagination, and subjective existence.
? The frame of the window, which in visual terms has the incorporated form of the dark border to our vision formed by the eye-sockets, the nose, and the top of the cheeks. Conceptually this frame is the edge of the visual field.
? (Possibly) the surface of the window itself corresponding to the pane of glass which separates outside from inside. I say ‘possibly’ because I personally find no evidence for the appearance of this part of the image in my mind when I look at my mental image of the window and apply it to my cognition.
The default setting for this image as a conceptual metaphor for consciousness places our ’self’ within the internal space, looking through the ‘frame’ of our eye-sockets into the other space of objective interpersonal reality. Support for the ubiquity of this experience presumably comes partly from the very real and tangible existence of the ‘frame’ component, but also from the intuitive, if not innate tendency that we have to locate our identity, and indeed that of others, within an interior space. Experiments with the naïve knowledge of children suggests that we acquire this sense at a very young age indeed, and that this essentialist idea of (self) identity as existing inside the body, and certainly behind the eyes, is not something that is learned through formal or informal cultural practices, but is implicit in the structure of a universal human engagement with the world. The window metaphor then, whilst having no real basis in psychology or neuroscience, corresponds sufficiently well with some elements of naïve knowing and with some facts of embodiment for it to feel ‘right’ as an image of perceptual consciousness.
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October 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie
You are standing still and looking out through your own eyes at whatever the world is placing in front of you at this moment. Standing in a field is good, but anywhere will do. Without changing your position, try to change your interpretation of what you are looking at, or rather, where you are looking from. Try to imagine that you are standing at the edge of a space which is infinitely vast, and inexpressibly dark, and you are looking out of this space. The world in front of you is brightly lit, and everything in it is clear and visible and knowable. You can just make out the periphery of the dark space behind you at the edge of your vision, a blurred black border around your sight which extends outwards and backwards as far as your informed imagination can reach. Feel the darkness of the space behind you and alongside you.
Now turn around so that you are facing into the darkness that you felt a moment ago. See how bright the darkness is, and how much it contains. See how the stuff of the world extends into the dazzling dark, shrinking with distance, so that at the furthest extent of your vision everything is infinitesimally small, and how, beyond that point, all is a single blurred whole. Notice also, that in turning around you have created a new dark light space, bordered in black where your eyes meet the world. You may wish to turn back around to remind yourself how full of light and space and matter that place behind you really is. Turn again, and again. Wherever you turn you find yourself looking into the heart of the astounding darkness which surrounds you.
Now close you eyes and feel the darkness close over you and include you in its embrace. There is nothing to fear here. Hello darkness, my old friend.
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October 21st, 2007 Fred McVittie
The experiences of the senses do not describe the real world, but rather they describe what systems of cognition we need to create in order to understand (live in) the world.
The experience of ‘hardness’ that we sense when we push against a wall or a tree is not simply a result of the tree ‘being hard’, but is the way in which our cognitive systems represent the tree and the forces of which both it and ourselves are composed. A salient feature of the physics to which both the tree and ourselves are subject is that of non-penetrability. I cannot walk through the tree despite both it and I being largely constituted of space. This non-penetrability, should I not be able to experience it phenomenally, would most likely result in my repeated attempts to pass through the tree, an action which would be injurious if not fatal. The gift of evolution has served to avoid this by allowing me to interpret this abstract physical law in human, experiential terms. When I push against a tree I do not have to consciously consider the nature of the strong and weak nuclear forces which prevent one medium-sized object passing through another, I simply feel the tree as ‘hard’.
To a fictional creature which was substantially smaller than we are, the size of an atom, say, the tree would not be hard at all. In fact it would barely exist as a coherent entity at all. The space within each atom of the tree would dominate the experience and passage through this space would be largely unresisted.
The tree therefore, is a product of processes through which reality is imagined.
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October 22nd, 2007 Fred McVittie
The ‘God of the Gaps’ argument critiques certain approaches to theism on the grounds that, if we use God as an explanation for all those phenomena that we do not understand, then as our understanding increases, inevitably God decreases. Presumably then, the hypothetical end point to such inevitable progression of knowledge would be an epistemological universe in which no space was left in which God might hide. Even if knowledge is never total, as it surely will never be, this understanding of God is still problematic as it presents an image of a deity which is in a state of progressive decline. Every new article of information, from the most robust and powerful scientific theory to the simplest new fact acquired through routine acts of perception constitutes an amputation of the limb of God. For this reason the ‘God of the Gaps’ description of a deity has been roundly criticised as both a failure of the scientific imagination and an insult to the Almighty.
Having said that, a case could be made for a different kind of God of the Gaps, if we understand these gaps not to be in knowledge, but in our ability to conceptualise this knowledge in a way that was directly embodied.
The extensive work done in the field of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Embodied Cognition points to the importance of our embodiment in our ability to make sense of ideas and to structure concepts. The outcome of such research suggests that whilst we are easily able to conceptualise concepts which have direct sensory impact (medium sized objects, forces, substances, schema etc), when we wish to think about anything which is beyond the horizon of our bodily experience we have to use indirect methods. Chief among these methods is the systematic and consistent use of metaphor, such that we think of concepts which are abstract in terms of others which are concrete. We commonly think of love for example, as a journey, or of anger as heat in a sealed container. (These examples are from Lakoff and Johnson’s excellent introduction to these ideas ‘Metaphors We Live By’). Outside the relatively narrow domain of direct embodied experience is all the really interesting stuff of science, philosophy, politics, culture, and religion. Most of these practices, it can be demonstrated, are concerned with abstractions, and therefore the currency of their debates is metaphor and imagination.
In terms of science, As Stephen Jones points out in ‘Physics and Metaphor’, many of the most robust and elegant theories of science are understood only through acts of imagination. The concept of the origin of the universe in a Big Bang is one such example of this. Whatever event took place that triggered the subsequent creation of all that we see around us today clearly was not Big and did not go Bang. Yet this image of a kind of explosion is a useful image around which to structure our understanding of something that we simply are not adaptively equipped to understand literally. This does not mean that something that we call the Big Bang didn’t happen, it simply means that we are too stupid to understand it without drawing a picture of it, rather like the scene in Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, where a group of post-apocalyptic children try to recreate television using using only cargo-cult materials of sticks and leaves. The big difference that makes a difference between the children in Mad Max and Georges Lemaître (an early proponent of the Big Bang Theory) is that Lemaitre tested his imaginary explosion against the data of other ideas and theories. As Richard Dawkins might put it, the image of the Big Bang is the beginning of a knowledge-gathering process whereas the TV made of sticks is the end.
This example, of the organised application of imagination to fill a significant gap in embodied knowledge, is typical of the way that science works, and indeed is also typical of the way that non-scientific gaps are filled. When I talk to my children about what they will do in the future, the question of a career often comes up, but if I am honest I have absolutely no idea what a career is. It has no smell, taste, or visible substance, and I can’t hear it or touch it. In fact I have to admit that there is a huge gap in my ability to think literally about their career. This doesn’t seem to stop me thinking about it though, and the way I do it is through the (largely unconscious) use of metaphor. If I look closely at how I am thinking I would say that I imagine their careers as something like the flight of an arrow, launched upwards and curving gently to arrive at a desired target, and I try not to imagine them as careering out of control like a driverless vehicle, a danger to themselves and passers-by alike. Without some kind of image like this I don’t see how I could conceive of something like ‘a career’ at all.
Which brings me, finally, to the God of the Gaps. Given that much of what we say and think is outside embodiable range, and is therefore in this realm of the metaphorical and the imaginary (up to 90% by some estimates), this means that our thoughts are entirely dominated by the imagination and it is not some freaky little playground in the corner of our brains where only fairies and artists hang out. It also means, at noted earlier, that any idea which is even remotely interesting is probably suffused with imagination, if not constructed of it entirely. If I was a theist, which I am not thank Richard, I would definitely want my God to be at least as wild as the Big Bang, if not more so, which would definitely put it in imagination territory.
The bottom line with any conceptual metaphor and any imaginary entity yielded by that metaphor is how well it functions. The Big Bang metaphor works really well to cohere data and observations into a single big picture. The flight path of the arrow that (I hope) traces my kids’ career also helps them organise and plan their actions. I am quite happy to believe in an imaginary God; at least to the extent that I believe in the Big Bang or a Career Plan. I can see some potential value in this kind of God of the Gaps, a complex, coherent anthropomorphic metaphor which helps to give form to certain aspects of the universe that are beyond my embodiment. If someone can show me what the function of this particular imaginary entity is, ideally someone who does not misunderstand science and the imagination to such an extent that they insist that God is real, I’d be happy to consider believing in it, (although I would probably draw the line at worship).
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October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie
It has been conclusively demonstrated that much of the language that we speak is metaphorical, these metaphors not only being linguistic turns of phrase but echoing the widespread use of such metaphors as a cognitive strategy allowing us to think the otherwise unthinkable. A tenet within the various disciplines of conceptual metaphor theory, embodied cognition, cognitive linguistics and experiential philosophy is that the mind can only think in terms of the affordances of a (evolutionarily constructed) body and sensorimotor system. Cognition uses the totally familiar and concrete experiences of pulling, pushing, containment, direction, substances, entities, directions etc as the basic vocabulary from which all thoughts, however apparently abstract, are contructed. The use of conceptual metaphor within cognition allows us to conceive of entities and phenomena which would otherwise be inconceivable, these entities being outside the range of the senses.
Most of the work in this area has been concerned with the excavation of such metaphors and the mapping of key metaphor groups across specific areas of experience. What has not been systematically identified and analysed is the wide range of metaphors in common daily use which refer to entities which are not only abstract but which are, in all likelihood, non-existent. We may be familiar with (and perhaps condescending toward) the use of such fictions in the past, totally unaware that we are maintaining similar fictions in the present through the repeated positing of such ideas in language and thought.
Some entities which figure extensively in our language and cognition seem to exist purely in metaphorical form; they have well-articulated sources for the metaphorical mapping but no evidence exists at all for the target of such mapping. These are concepts without referents: free-floating figures of speech and thought that occupy our minds and feature extensively in social discourse. Their only life is in language and mentation and perhaps the most two prevalent of these are the concept of mind and the concept of God.
Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Embodiment, God, Imagination, Language, Metaphor | 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 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie
‘Imagination is our capacity to organise mental representations (especially percepts, images, and image schemata) into meaningful coherent unities.’ (Johnson. 1987: p.140)
In ‘The Body in the Mind’ Johnson reminds us of the Platonic categorisation of modes of cognition, in which the validity of knowledge is seen to vary according to how one approaches its collection. Most valued is knowledge acquired by intellection (noesis), in which the unchanging ‘essence’ of the knowledge is grasped. At the bottom of the scale of knowing is imagination (eikasia) in which only ‘images, shadows, reflections’ (p.142) are apprehended, not the essential knowledge itself.
This structure of distinction, it can be noted, also arranges knowledge across the spectra of proximity and the senses, locating the essence of knowing close to the body where it can be ‘grasped’, and the less secure knowing offered by the Platonic imagination placed at some remove where only its surface appearance, or even only traces of that appearance such as a shadow, can be apprehended. Interestingly, there is no suggestion within this scheme of the later association of closeness/’feltness’ with subjectivity, or of distance/visibility with objectivity. In our current understanding,as revealed through the metaphors we use, we give a great deal of credence to objective knowledge described in visual terms and located figuratively at a distance in interpersonal space. We correspondingly give less credence to subjective knowledge described in tactile terms and located up close and personal (even though we may intuitively ‘feel’ this subjective knowledge as more ‘real’ than the objective knowledge of intersubjectively validated visual knowing). This modern value distinction between the subjective and the objective does not appear in Plato’s categorisation.
Posted in Essence, History, Imagination, Knowledge, Metaphor, Plato, Proximity, Space, thesis | No Comments »
April 7th, 2008 Fred McVittie
Primack and Adams begin their book ‘The View from the Centre of the Universe’ with the following line.
“In their hearts, most people are still living in an imagined universe, where space is simply emptiness, stars are scattered randomly, and common sense is a reliable guide. In this imagined universe, we humans have no special place and often feel insignificant.” (Primack 2006, 3)
They then go on to construct a convincing argument that one of the possible causes of the ills which plague contemporary societies is the lack of an imagined universe which does have a special place for humans, and in which we might not feel this insignificance. However, I suspect that hiding in this quotation is a conflict between different ways in which we actually imagine the universe and our place in it, and a possibly ideosyncratic use of the term ‘common sense’.
The universe which they refer to, the one which causes such anomie and existential angst, is, I would argue, not the universe of common sense at all, nor is it the one that lives in our hearts. Rather it is one which has only been brought into existence through the finding of science within the last 400 years. The universe of endless de-centred, inhuman emptiness is not one in which we routinely live, and to the extent that we have ‘internalised’ it at all then it lives as an objective fact in our minds and our libraries, not as felt experience at the core or heart of our being.
Posted in Centre, Cosmology, Imagination, Science, Space, Universe | 3 Comments »