Recursive Loop Joke

April 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

A woman walks into a bar and says to the barman
“I’d like a double entendre please.”
So the barman gave her one.

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Velmans’ Reflexive Monism

May 31st, 2007 Fred McVittie

Max Velmans (2000) gives an account of perception and consciousness which he refers to as Reflexive Monism. In this account, an act of perception involves the subject ‘projecting’ an image of a perceived cat out into the world such that this perception exists not in their brain alone, but also in perceived space. This theory avoids the pitfalls found in representationalist views of conscious perception. In such views, a perception of a cat would consist of the duplication of the cat inside the mind of the perceiver and this mental representation of the cat would be the object of perception. Representationalist theories create problems in that, firstly they propose a kind of ‘theatre of the mind’ in which the objects of perception are cast, and no such facility has been located. Indeed, the concept of a theatrical mental space where perceptions come together has been robustly critiqued (Dennett). Secondly, if such internal representations were constructed and were posited as the real objects of perception (the cat I see is really inside my head) this would merely defer the problem, one would have to ask what mechanism was perceiving these internal objects. This leads to an infinite regress or to the creation of a humunculus that somehow does my seeing for me. Thirdly, representationalist accounts involving a duplication of the world outside and the formation of a world inside lack parsimony. Since there is already a perfectly well-formed set of objects and entities ‘out there’ why would the mind need to duplicate these in order to carry out its perceptual activities? Finally, representationist accounts ultimately lead to a solipsistic idealism in which the external world is merely the prompt for our own creation of the world inside the skull. If we are ultimately only perceiving some internal representation of reality, then there would be no real need for an external reality to exist at all. For all of these reasons many people find this representationalist approach unhelpful and indeed flawed as a model of perception and consciousness.

The theory proposed by Velmans replaces this internal representation with what he terms ‘Reflexive Monism’ in which the perceived object of vision (for example) is not represented inside the mind but constitutes its own representation out in the shared space of embodied experience. When I see a cat, my seeing of that cat takes place not only in my head but also out there in the room. Through the usual processes of vision, light bounces off the object and enters my eye, triggering signals which are processed by the fifty or so centres of perception in the brain. Rather than cohering into an internal representation which I can then ‘look at’ with som inner eye, this information instead allows me to ‘project’ my imagination of the cat onto the cluster of atoms hovering close to the mat in front of the fireplace. In effect, I am imagining the cat as it is, where it is. An interesting aspect of this model is that there is no radical separation between mental activity and the material world outside of the body. We are used to assuming that the mind is produced by the brain and somehow exists within that brain, but Velman’s model supports a concept of mind which, whilst it may originate in the brain, is better conceived of as existing as a kind of ‘field’ looping outside of the body to encompass the objects of perception and experience.

Velmans, M. (2000) Understanding Consciousness, London: Routledge/Psychology Press.

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The Great Chain of Being

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The snake of the Cosmic Ouroborus offered by history and legend represents the scales at which the universe operates, from the smallest meaningful measurement, the Planck length, at one end (the tail) and the largest meaningful measure, the entire visible universe, at the other, the all consuming head. In the model developed by Premack and Abrams these scales are wrapped around into a serpentine loop with the suggestion that these is some physical force or property which unites the smallest and the largest. No such force has been discovered yet in physics, although superstring theory is suggested as a possibility. Without this connection between the smallest and the largest, this understanding of the Ouroborus is little different from the traditional way of understanding the Cosmos generally referred to as the ‘Great Chain of Being’.

The Chain of Being idea is found in many theological and philosophical traditions and is part of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ of Huxley, Aurobindo etc. It is a way of understanding the universe by configuring it conceptually as a hierarchy with all entities: living, non-living, ‘divine’, and ‘profane’ having a particular place on this hierarchy. Medieval Christian illustrations of the Great Chain inevitably place God at the top of the hierarchy, with angels, archangels, cherabim and seraphim stacked below Him. Somewhere beneath the angels we find humanity, and below the humans are animals, primates only slightly lower, insects well down the chain. In some illustrations the chain is continued downward to include inanimate material below the level of living creatures.

D.E. Harding’s reworking of this hierarchy replaces the personification of the spiritual that denotes the upper levels with the equally unfathomable and awe-inspiring image of the large-scale universe. Beyond the human scale of medium sized objects Harding indicates levels at the scale of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and the ultimate scale, unmatched in grandeur, the totality of the universe. Harding also extends the scale downwards in scale (although the sense of ‘down’ is replaced by ‘in’) beyond the level of inanimate material occupying the lowest levels in Medieval illustrations, and includes in the hierarchy the levels of atoms, subatomic particles, and ultimately, the incomprehensibly infinitesimal space which lies at the heart of all matter. A space which is reduced to a dimensionless point. Exactly here.

A striking aspect of both these images of the hierarchy or Great Chain is that there is an implied direction to the flow of ‘energy’ (for want of a better word, causality? Responsibility?) within the chain. In the Medieval image of the Chain, the direction of power and creative energy is downward, and God, at the top of the hierarchy, is responsible for the origin and maintenance of that which is below Him. “And without him was not anything made” as the Gospel of John would have it. All is seen as an emanation descending from on high. At the point of the hierarchy at which human beings are found there is an assumed responsibility for all lower levels; we have ‘dominion’ over the creatures of the Earth, and even those of us who are not Christian, or profess no faith at all, may still feel that we are responsible for the Earth and its safe-keeping in a way which transcends simple self-interest.

A more detailed look at the Great Chain at the point where humans are shows us that humanity itself is divided hierarchically, with kings and aristocrats placed on a slightly higher level than the mass of common humanity, and whilst we may reject this caste system today it is still embedded in our cultural, legal, and political systems. The Sovereign of England rules by divine right and that right is hereditory. When I was a child, when we sang hymns in school assembly, our rendition of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ still included the second verse.

The rich man at his castle
The poor man at his gate
He made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate

The re-imagined Great Chain of Being which Harding indicates, and which is also found in Ken Wilbur’s writings for example, is superficially similar but significantly different. As noted above, the levels in the hierarchy above the human, which in the Medieval Great Chain were populated by spiritual beings, in the physical Great Chain are larger orders of scale, with an acknowledgment that different laws operate at these different scales. God is replaced by the totality of the universe (or the visible universe at any rate), the Angels become galaxies and the Cherabim and Seraphim are the Solar system and the planets. The levels below human, or rather below (or inside) human scale, are the levels of molecules, atoms, quarks, bosons, and the rest of the subatomic menagerie.
Absent from this model is the implication of greater value associated with higher levels of the chain, so the model cannot be used to prop up an aristocracy or justify the existence of a caste system (although there is a scent of just that kind of value difference is some of Wilbur’s writing.) A distinct difference between this model and the Medieval one is that the direction of creative power is reversed. There is no assumption that divine creative force operates from the far reaches of the universe, working through smaller and smaller circles of influence until, ultimately, it is conferred upon the human being. Instead the flow is imaged as originating from the ’source’, which is the void at the centre of the most infinitesimal

This distinction, which difference in which responsibility and ultimate understanding is not seen as lying at the top of the hierarchy, with the equivalent of God, but at the bottom, mirrors the modern understanding within the physical sciences. The quest for the most effective description of how the physical universe operates is a journey downwards, towards the most essential particle, the fundamental building block of the entire edifice. In place of emanation we have emergence, and the flow of creative energy is upward, with the higher levels, the higher orders of being, emerging from the behaviour and properties of the entities populating lower levels. So the behaviour of a material is understood as emerging from the properties of its constituent elements. A block of iron is hard because the atoms of iron which compose it have strong bonds between them, and these atoms have strong bonds because the electrons and protons which make them up have the particular configuration they have, etc etc. As responsibility and explanatory power is deferred downwards, so the creative energy is routed such that it flows upwards.

Both these images of a hierarchy of Being also therefore contain a heirarchy of power and creativity, and whether the movement of this power is seen as descending from on high or bubbling up from below it is still imagined as originating elsewhere. We, as humans located as we are somewhere in the middle of the Great Chain, medium sized objects half-way between angels and rocks, between the everything of the universe and the nothing at the heart of the atom, are not near either of these putative origins. In the hierarchy of the chain we are the middle link, a conduit for an energy or power that moves us and then moves on.

This image of a hierarchy is not without its uses, particularly if we imagine the potential for both upward and downward motion. The image serves more purpose however if it is wrapped into a circle such that the smallest is connected to the largest. In terms of the Medieval Chain this means equating Divinity with the essential quality possessed by all entities, something like a soul perhaps. In physical and non-theological terms that means finding a physics for the unification of the largest with the smallest. As noted above, some suggestions point to superstring theory for this connection.

When the bottom of the chain is connected to the top a Cosmic Ouroborus is formed, the tail of the snake entering the mouth and the universe is simultanously consumed and consuming, creating and destroying.

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Rivers and Dams

August 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The river of non-conscious (animal) cognition flows along the path of least resistance. The great trick of consciousness begins with an ability to temporarily arrest this flow and make a choice about whether we really want to follow the urging of the landscape and carry on in that direction, always downwards. We feel these moments of choice occasionally as build-ups of pressure or temptation, almost as if the waters of the river that is carrying us along have been dammed and that water is backing up behind us. This arrested flow causes the water behind the dam to form vortices and eddies, turning over itself and becoming chaotically complex loops of current before the ground offers a route that we agree to. Then we let ourselves go and follow the river downstream. A valley carved out not just by the yes of the river but also by the no of the dam.

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The Motion of the Snake

September 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In the beginning was the snake, and the snake was in every moment of time and all space contained the snake. There was nothing before the snake, for all of time is in the body of the snake, and there will be no end, for the same reason. And the movement of the snake is a circular movement and the appearance of a wheel, but there is, as it were, a wheel within a wheel, and endless wheels within wheels, and all of the turning of the wheels is the motion of the snake.

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Going Round in Circles

September 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie

At the risk of mixing metaphors, or rather with the gleeful mixing of metaphors, I should say that the material in this blog, in addition to its being arranged in form around the poetics of the conference abstract, can also be thought of as arranged into a number of concentric circles.

The core of the thesis is that which is most directly related to the Research Question and comprises a set of postings which refer to that question. This core material is supported by the usual referencing and bibliographic protocols. This section is written almost entirely in the third person, and strives for (or possibly simulates) the objectivity which is conventional in documents of this kind. These core postings will form the basis for a reflective document I will be writing at some point in the future. In metaphorical terms, this material corresponds to downstream materiality.

Outside of this core material are a set of postings which relate to the relationship between knowledge paradigms and embodied cognition, specifically the extensive use of body-based metaphors within the individual and cultural management of knowledge. This set cannot be read as a single linear argument, but rather exists as a constellation of ideas which form a backdrop to the core thesis, like the night sky regarded by sailors of the 16th Century, as both an aid to navigation and the location of myths and dreams. Here the language is likely to be compressed, sometimes into the form of a conference abstract, sometimes into the other abstractions of poetic and literatary imagery.

Beyond the orbit of these postings there are the whispy and filimentary traces of half-formed concepts and shape-shifting metaphors. Pointing our mental telescopes in their direction shows them as isolated and evanescent phantoms, connected to the Earth only by the sightline of our own looking. There are dead men out there, and angels, my children wake up in the night and have to be lulled to sleep, dogs are barking at nothing and the land is littered with Old Gods and abandoned technologies. We would cast these vague monstrosities adrift but something about them stays our hand. It is as if the tides within us are somehow affected by these remote entities and some part of us, at the heart of our being, moves with them. Here is a picture of the ocean, and we are on that beach looking at a distant sail: there is a dream of a snake burning in the garden of the world.

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Creative Cycles and the Illuminated Moment

October 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie

A dominant image within most formulations of the creative process is that of the cycle. Typically, artistic production, for example, is seen as structured with a number of sequential phases, each representing a particular part of the overall process and each requiring a different set of behaviours and sensibilities on the part of the artist. These various phases, which are named differently according to the various schemata invoked, include such activities as; research, play, analysis, data collection, improvisation, experiment, hypothesis generation, measurement of efficacy, review, etc. Many (although not all) models for the creative process involve a phase, (sometimes conceptualised as an atemporal ‘moment’) at which a breakthrough occurs. This is the moment of illumination, enlightenment, and realisation. It is the stereotypical moment when the lightbulb appears above the inventor’s head and the solution dawns on the mind of the scientist. It is a moment which has entered the mythology of creativity via Archimedes bath and Kekule’s serpent. Widely criticised as a product of the romantic imagination, and often considered relatively irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, the illuminated moment of inspiration has been consigned by many to the 5% status of whimsy, drowning in the 95% flood of the Real Work of creative perspiration. This paper will attempt to recover this washed out loser from it ignominious fate and relight the lantern that has shone over most of the greatest events in human history.

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Flow of Creativity

October 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

It is widely understood that individual creative processes go through several stages. Activities which mark the early stages of a process are different to those which dominate later. It is further noted that the creative process is not linear, beginning with a particular problem or stimulus and working in an orderly fashion toward a final conclusion or response, but is chaotic and lacking clear boundaries. Inasmuch as there is an end to a creative process, perhaps in the revealing of a product of some kind, this end is likely also to be the beginning of others. Moreover, it is noted that the stages of a creative process tend not to be sequential and singular, but rather are multiple and cyclical. During any period of creative activity, the individual is typically working on different parts of the problem simultaneously, and the results of one activity tend to be recycled into other parts of the process. Also, these cycles within the creative process tend to occupy different scales, with some involving large formations of material undergoing massive transformations, whilst at the same time small problems are being creatively solved and tiny questions answered. We can visualise the creative process, then, as a tumble of circulating material and ideas, rather like the flowing of a river through rocks, with currents entering and re-entering the flow.

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