Liquid States of Mind

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

William James (1892) famously uses the term ‘Stream of Consciousness’ to describe the unbroken succession of images which seems to characterize the flowing, river-like experience of wakeful awareness. He also writes of the ‘oceanic’ feelings associated with religious experience (1902), an entailment picked up by Freud (1973) and Clement (1994) and which also figures in first-person accounts of certain varieties of peak experience; a feeling of unbounded unity with the wider cosmos and an apparent dissolution of the boundary between self and world .

Clement, C. (1994). Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Freud, S. (1989). Formulations Regarding The Two Principles in Mental Functioning. The Freud Reader. P. Gay. New York, Norton: 301-306.

Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: from illusion to immersion. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Greenfield, S. A. and T. F. T. Collins (2005). A Neuroscientific Approach to Consciousness. Amsterdam, Elsevier B.V.

Gurwitsch, A. (1979). Human Encounters in the Social World. Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press.

James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Posted in Clement, Catherine, Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow, Freud, Sigmund, Greenfield, Susan, Gurswitch, Aron, James, William, Liquid, Metaphor, Phenomenology, Psychology, Religion | No Comments »

The Changing Status of ‘Psychology’

July 14th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The history of psychology as a science is very brief. It is usually thought to have begun being considered as a body of material knowledge, apprehensible by scientific means, with the work of William James. The status of psychology as a science, whilst subject to great debate and much fluctuations in esteem, continued throughout the 20th century. Prior to its embrace by science, any consideration of those entities and processes we now think of as the subject of psychology; identity, consciousness, dreams, rapture, mental illness etc.; were part of the discourse of philosophy and/or religion. Even throughout psychology’s time in the light of science there have been elements of psychological theory and practice, the work of Wilhelm Reich for example, and some would say all of psychoanalysis, which have been distinctly non-scientific. Because of the ill-defined, and largely non-experimental nature of psychology however, these practices have never been completely excluded from discourse in the way that heretical physics or heretical chemistry would be. Instead, psychology has been a bastard science, drawing information and knowledge from where it can, even if some of these places would be off-limits to scientists following more stringent maps to knowledge. As these practices continue into the 21st century there seems to be some evidence that psychology as a term is losing some of the scientific patina of respectability that it acquired post-William James, and is rediscovering its roots in philosophy and mysticism. University college courses and institutions are finding that ‘psychology’ is not a good recruiter of those students who want to study serious science, so we see college departments sprouting schools of ‘brain science’ and quietly losing the ‘p’ word. Also, there is an increasing use of the word ‘psychology’ to be used in contexts or to refer to concepts where it would not have been used previously. The writer Ken Wilbur for example, refers to his theories as ‘integral psychology’. This work, exemplifying as it does an ambition to pull together knowledge from across the disciplines of science, religion, and philosophy (east and west), and give this bastard knowledge a good name, would in all likelihood not have been able to qualify as ‘psychology’ without the reversion in meaning that the term has had. In fact, in earlier works outlining broadly the same ideas, Wilbur tended to call these ideas ‘philosophy’ and avoided the use of the other ‘p’ word.

Posted in History, James, William, Philosophy, Psychology, Reich, Wilhelm, Wilbur, Ken | No Comments »

Metaphorical Operator

May 30th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In ‘Why God won’t go Away’, Newberg and D’Aquili list a number of ‘cognitive operators’, or routine mental processes, which they claim give structure to experience. These are:

• Reductionist - which breaks apparently single data objects into multiple elements
• Holistic - which forms connections between inputs, making single concepts out of disparate elements
• Abstractive - which isolates essential components from complex experience, or commonalities between different experiences
• Binary - which divides information into two based on a perceived point of difference
• Causal - which identifies or constructs linear connections between data based on causality
• Quantitative - which recognises quantity and variable amount
• Existential - which recognises or awards agency and intentionality to experienced phenomena

In the spirit of Newberg and D’Aquili’s research, it seems likely that the functioning of metaphor also plays a part within the routine cognitive operations producing and supporting cognition and consciousness. We use metaphor extensively in language and thought, to the extent that without its use we would not have anything like the mental capacity we do. It might even be said that we would barely have ‘minds’ at all. It may be that in addition to the seven cognitive operators noted above (which is extended to eight is some writings) there is an additional ‘metaphorical operator’ which translates abstract concepts into embodied concepts. Alternatively it may be that metaphor is a natural result of the operations of the cognitive operators already proposed, particularly the Abstractive Operator.

Posted in Cognition, Psychology | No Comments »

Three Types of Knowledge

October 10th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In ‘Beyond Understanding’, a keynote speech at the symposium on Threshold Concepts at Strathclyde University in 2006, David Perkins lays out a taxonomy of knowledge and its application to teaching and learning. He describes knowledge as located as in three ontologically distinct forms. Video here. Symposium programme here.

The first he describes as ‘possessive’ knowledge, in which the object of knowledge is felt to be owned by the individual and can be produced on request. So, for example, we might be asked in what year Columbus landed in the New World and we might retrieve the date 1492 and display this known fact, rather as one might take a rock out of one’s pocket and hold it up for inspection. Similarly, the question ‘Who who wrote the novel on which the film “Solaris” is based?’ might solicit the response ‘Stanislaw Lem”. In each of these instances the item of knowledge is considered as possessed by the individual and this possession is, in turn, conceived of as a kind of object, a rock, a book, that can be produced on demand. This metaphorical mapping of the concept of knowledge as object has the effect of awarding other object-like properties to the knowledge item. Objects tend to be relatively solid, clearly bounded, and consistent over time. Similarly, knowledge which has this character of a possessed object is also intuitively experienced as solid, bounded, stationary, and permanent. So, for example, the date of Columbus’ arrival on the shores of New Found Land is felt to be a ‘hard fact’; there is no sense in which we feel that fact to be ’slippery’ or ‘fluid’. Also, that experienced fact is clearly delineated; we do not feel that the edges of it blur into other facts, in fact it is difficult to imagine what this ‘blurring’ might mean. It is also experienced as still and intransient, that this article of knowledge is not wavering or changing its place in the index of human information, and it will continue to occupy this place, in history, in geography, in cartography, forever. This fact, as object-like, and as objective, as a rock, is something we feel we can hold, unchanging and fully graspable. We can take ownership of it and consider ourselves in possession of this fact. We can put this fact in our pocket and produce it on demand. Similar object status might be awarded to the authorship of the book on which the film ‘Solaris’ is based and the response to any question on any TV game show.

The second form of knowledge that Perkins introduces is that which he considers ‘performative’. This type of knowing goes beyond the rote recitation of solid items of data and begins to use this data, these facts, not as objects of thought but as tools to think with. Knowledge, in this formulation, becomes less like a set of solid, separate, inert entities and more like living dynamic structures, capable of breeding, hybridising, fissioning, fusing, and blending. Performative knowledge responds to situations in a way which is not hard and resistant, but which is flexible and yielding, and the clearest examples of this knowledge is its ability to respond to creative or problem-solving situations. Possessed object-like knowledge is speechless when faced with a question such as ‘In what way is the film “Solaris” a commentary on the exploration and conquest of the New World? The individual isolated facts which characterise a possessed knowledge approach do not allow the kind of analysis and creative thinking which the question demands. Performative knowing, on the other hand, is well equipped to make a response to this situation. This may be through, for example, allowing the live information structures which make up the knowledge of Stanislaw Lem’s book, and the film of that book, to mingle with those of Columbus and his first footfall in the Americas. One can imagine a text that brings out the mutability of culture and the act of projective imagination that allows us to conceive of such things as ‘nations’ and ’states’ being born from this miscegenation. This ability of what Perkins calls performative knowledge to dynamically construct novel solutions to problems and creative responses to situations is referred to frequently in literature on creativity and innovation. Koestler calls it ‘bisociation’, elsewhere it is formalised into knowledge generation systems and training routines such as Triz, Synectics, Scamper, etc. Performative knowledge is very good at responding to set briefs, solving problems, fulfulling creative criteria, and producing novel answers to well-framed questions.

The third type of knowledge which Perkins introduces, and the one which adds the most to current understanding of knowledge, is what he terms ‘proactive’. This form of knowing, as the name implies, is neither inert nor reactive or responsive, but rather is actively engaged in the processes of its own implementation. Individuals who are able to mobilise proactive knowledge resources are not ‘problem solvers’ they are ‘problem finders’, that is, the knowledge that they embody (possess is too passive a term) seems to constantly engage with the world around them looking for opportunities to perform. Proactive knowledge does not simply appear on demand when a question is posed or a problem is set, but is out there in the world looking for opportunities. This type of knowledge seems largely to be dispositional; certain attitudes or habits of behaviour need to be in place in order for proactivity to emerge, and whilst such disposition can be learned or cultivated it is likely that some individuals would find this easier than others. Proactive knowledge users, whether by accident of nature or design of education, are constantly asking questions of the world, noticing small irregularities in the fabric of society, finding new uses for old objects, coining new words and phrases because they like the taste of language. They make extensive and joyful use of metaphor and analogy, and are incontinent inventors. Give a proactive knower a new word or a new idea, and watch them scurry around looking for some way to use it.

This continuum of knowledge, from the possessive at one extreme to the most proactive at the other, is complementary to the continuum of objectivity and subjectivity. Possessive knowledge, constitutive of object-like facts, appears, unsurprisingly, at the objective end of the spectrum. It is experienced as distant, removed, existing in interpersonal space. Proactive knowledge, conversely, is felt against the surface of the body, or even inside the body, and is inseparable from the experience of being. It is part of the subjective phenomenological experience of one’s self concept.

Posted in Creativity, Knowledge, Lem, Stanislaw, Psychology, Self, Sense, Training | No Comments »

Evolutionary Psychology

December 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

It is a tenet of evolutionary psychology, and indeed of evolutionary processes more generally, that organisms acquire what characteristics they have through the slow machinations of natural selection. The form of an animal, mind and body, today is the result of the challenges its ancestors faced yesterday. Inevitably there will always be something of a lag in this process, evolution is slow and the relatively rapid changes which can take place in the environment can easily outstrip the rate of modification in the genome which equips organisms for success in that environment. Also, even if the rate of change within the environment was relatively slow it would always be the case that organisms were, in general, somewhat behind that rate of change. Evolutionary adaptation is inherently a conservative, parsimonious process, and adaptive pressure will not be exerted unless there is a compelling need since a perfect degree of fit between organism and environment is not necessary. Provided an organism is well-enough adapted such that it will outperform its competitors then it will survive. This is reminiscent of the old joke;

Two trappers are camping in the forest of the Canadian wilderness when suddenly they see a huge grizzly bear charging across the clearing toward them. One immediately gets up and starts to run; the other stoops down and puts on his trainers. “Don’t waste time putting your trainers on”, the first one shouts, “we’ll probably not outrun it anyway”. “I don’t have to outrun the bear”, the second one replies, “I just have to outrun you.”

This ‘good enough’ criteria which marks adaptive evolution is also demonstrated by the existence of physical and cognitive features which, whilst they may have served some useful function in the past, no longer do so. The human appendix, for example, or human toes, or the dewclaw of a dog, or the vestigial eyes of some cave-dwelling fish which live in the total absence of light. The parsimony of evolution means that such relics tend to persist despite their apparent uselessness simply because, since their continued existence does not decrease the organisms chances of survival, there is no adaptive pressure forcing their removal from the genome.

Posted in Evolution, Psychology | No Comments »

Adaptive Consciousness and Evolutionary Lag

December 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

It is a tenet of evolutionary psychology, and indeed of evolutionary processes more generally, that organisms acquire what characteristics they have through the slow machinations of natural selection. The form of an animal, mind and body, today is the result of the challenges its ancestors faced yesterday. Inevitably there will always be something of a lag in this process, evolution is slow and the relatively rapid changes which can take place in the environment can easily outstrip the rate of modification in the genome which equips organisms for success in that environment. Also, even if the rate of change within the environment was relatively slow it would always be the case that organisms were, in general, somewhat behind that rate of change. Evolutionary adaptation is inherently a conservative, parsimonious process, and adaptive pressure will not be exerted unless there is a compelling need since a perfect degree of fit between organism and environment is not necessary. Provided an organism is well-enough adapted such that it will outperform its competitors then it will survive. This is reminiscent of the old joke;

Two trappers are camping in the forest of the Canadian wilderness when suddenly they see a huge grizzly bear charging across the clearing toward them. One immediately gets up and starts to run; the other stoops down and puts on his trainers. “Don’t waste time putting your trainers on”, the first one shouts, “we’ll probably not outrun it anyway”. “I don’t have to outrun the bear”, the second one replies, “I just have to outrun you.”

This ‘good enough’ criteria which marks adaptive evolution is also demonstrated by the existence of physical and cognitive features which, whilst they may have served some useful function in the past, no longer do so. The human appendix, for example, or human toes, or the dewclaw of a dog, or the vestigial eyes of some cave-dwelling fish which live in the total absence of light. The parsimony of evolution means that such relics tend to persist despite their apparent uselessness simply because, since their continued existence does not decrease the organisms chances of survival, there is no adaptive pressure forcing their removal from the genome. Cognitive features which may parallel these (and the behaviour which stems from these features) include: the ‘lethal raid’, promiscuity amongst males, fear of snakes and spiders, and hostility to out-group individuals. Like the appendix or the toes, these instincts and behaviours likely served our ancestors well in the past, and aided in their chances of survival in the environmental conditions occupied by those ancestors (including the social and inter-species environment). In the modern world however, these traits, whilst rarely self-destructive, usually serve no useful function, and it is only evolutionary inertia and parsimony which allows them to persist at all.

The evolutionary lag which marks the passage of the genome through its changing embodiment in a changing environment, means that the body/mind is always one step behind the world in which it is embedded, and in all likelihood always has been. As we have the brains and bodies of stone-age hunter-gatherers, so presumably did our hominid ancestors live with the handicaps of pre-hominid brains, bodies, and behaviours. Our Neanderthal cousins had the body hair and sloping brow of their tree-dwelling forefathers, who in turn may have had some of the cold-blooded instincts passed down unwanted but uneradicated from their own reptilian kin.

It may even be the case that these traces of adaptive history persist beyond the range of such convenient paleontological divisions. This history may be more like a script which exists not in neat, hermetic chapters, but as a holistic narrative which is simultaneously active in the present. Or alternatively, we might regard this history as the laying down of innumerable layers of physical and cognitive organisation, all of which comprise our current sense of being, not only the last 100,000 years or so. The occasional claims of evolutionary psychology that our present behaviour, our sociobiology, is explainable in terms of stone-age beings in an information-age world, ignores the fact that we have been many other things before we were hunter-gatherers in the Great Rift Valley of present day Africa. Isolating that moment of our evolutionary history is certainly revealing and has useful explanatory power, but it also misses the bigger picture.

Also missing from this picture is any suggestion of ‘what next?’ Of course it is unscientific to speculate beyond the data and we cannot guess what the future holds with any degree of certainty. The future is, as Steven Vizinczey put it in The Rules of Chaos, ‘a blinding mirage’. Nevertheless, if we can at least tentatively accept that whatever our mind is like now it is probably slightly out of step with how it would be if it were somehow ideally wedded to the social and physical environment of today, then we should be able to consider what kind of mind we should have. Furthermore, to the extent that we are able to control our minds, if only to the minimal extent of deciding what to consciously put in through reading and other experiences, then we should be able to modify our consciousness to correspond better to the world around us.

Posted in Consciousness, Evolution, History, Psychology | No Comments »

Sensory Experience and Practical Realism

December 12th, 2007 Fred McVittie

At the level of direct sensory experience we are all practical realists in David Sloane-Wilson’s use of the term (2002). A factual realist approach to what we call solid physical matter, for example, would have to acknowledge that such matter is mostly empty space, or in some formulations, entirely empty with the subatomic particles that occupy that space being more ‘geometrical’ than physical. Such a factual realist approach might then go on to consider the relationship between the forces within this space and the forces which make up, for example, the material substance of our own body, possibly arriving at a conclusion to do with the non-penetrability of such substance by such body. Alternatively, one might take a practical realist approach (in fact such an approach is unavoidable) in which we understand physical matter such as a wall as ’solid’ or ‘hard’, and we have a deeply-held belief, confirmed by experience, that any attempt to walk through such a solid wall would result in pain and damage. That both practical and factual realist approaches lead to the same conclusion, that a person cannot walk through walls, illustrates that, in this case at least, there is no advantage of one approach over the other at an explanatory level. In terms of lived experience however it is much more efficient and adaptive that the ‘fact’ of non-penetrability be understood firstly through a practical realist strategy, which is, of course, how the body and the senses do present that information. If we had to invoke a factual explanation for every interaction with the material world our ability to operate effectively in that world would be substantially diminished.

Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral : evolution, religion, and the nature of society. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Posted in Belief, Psychology, Reality, Sense | No Comments »

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 »