The Flow of Space

May 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie

I went to a workshop last week which I said I would report back on, but I’ve just realised that I never did so here is a description of one of the exercises.

Hold a rock in your hand.

Hold you hand out to the side and feel the rock in the following ways.

1. Imagine the rock has a force inside it (call it weight). Feel the force striving to get to the ground. The rock is almost alive and is pushing against your palm its its desire to return to its natural resting place on the earth.
2. Imagine the rock is being pulled toward the earth by a force (call it gravity). The pull of the Earth is like a magnet acting on the rock, and you can feel this attractive force through your hand.
3. Imagine you are standing in a shower; a shower not of rain, call it space. You can feel the space flowing down on you from above, an etheric downpour acting on every part of your body. The rain of space cascades onto the rock and pushes it toward the earth, and only the upward pressure of your hand holds the rock steady against the flood.

Each of these different interpretations of the feeling of holding a rock in your hand is subtly different. Hold onto the last interpretation.

Posted in Energy, Exercises, Rock, Story | No Comments »

Polycentric Prototypical Performance

May 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

This paper will report on a study recently carried out in which subjects were assessed on their strategies for identifing prototypical members of the category performance (see Rosch, 1983). Subjects were presented with a range of descriptions of both actions and inanimate objects and were asked to give each example a mark out of 10 according to how well they felt it fitted the description of performance. It was found that, from a wide range of possible candidate activities and entities, those which rated highest as performance were either highly stereotypical, matrixed activities (conventional plays etc), and natural inanimate objects (a rock being the most highly rated of this set of examples).

Eleanor Rosch, “Prototype Classification and Logical Classification: The Two Systems,” New Trends in Conceptual Representation: Challenges to Piaget’s Theory?, ed. Ellin Kofsky Scholnick (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1983) 79.

Posted in Category, Conference Abstract, Rock, Rosch, Eleanor | No Comments »

Unweaving Harding’s Rainbow

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The accumulation of knowledge concerning objective facts cannot have an ultimate effect upon the experiencing of those facts, (knowledge about the physics of the rainbow does not unweave its beauty). It is possible to banish, or significantly alter, the experience of facts which are subsequently shown to be incorrect however. The ‘fact’ that rocks fall to the ground because of their desire to return to their natural place produces the convincing experience of a rock ’straining’ downward when held in the hand, almost like a small animal pulling on a lead. The replacement of this incorrect theory of why rocks fall with other explanations, the gravitational attraction of the Earth for example, causes this illusion of downward agency to completely vanish, replacing it with an equally convincing impression of a force pulling the rock toward the greater mass of the planet.

The experimental exercises of Douglas Harding show a similar effect, and are prey to the same hazards presented by contrafactual knowledge. Many of the exercises depend upon an explanation of vision (’seeing’ is the key metaphor in Harding’s system) which is scientifically incorrect but which allows the ’seer’ to have experiences that support the metaphysical aims of the practice. Since vision does not operate in ways that is routinely referred to in Harding’s writing, and which is embodied in the experiments, to continue to have these experiences the seer must maintain ‘belief’ in these incorrect explanations. Knowledge of more accurate explanations of how seeing functions can have the effect of dismissing the desired experience as effectively as knowledge of gravity dismisses the illusion of agency in the stone. There is a distinct possibility that, unless alternative appropriate theories are available which also support the desired experience, the acquisition of knowledge may well unweave Harding’s rainbow.

Posted in Harding, Douglas, Perception, Rock | No Comments »

Belief and Embodiment

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 »

Before and After Physics

November 21st, 2007 Fred McVittie

Some of the ideas behind (and in front of, and to the side of, and pervading the space between and inside) this work concern consciousness, evolution, and the interplay of feeling and knowing and being. These are big ideas, and are worthy of the attention of brains bigger than the ones possessed by we humans; we ‘medium sized mammals moving at medium speed’, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins. Since these stone-age hunter-gatherer brains are all we have, and since we are bound by the Cognitive Imperative hard-coded into our DNA to restlessly pursue the thought fox, however elusive and imaginary it might be, so the lure of the big idea draws us impossibly beyond the physics of our embodiment. There before us is the light of the moon, and our studies points like a finger in its direction, and if we must mix metaphors to approach that light, then so be it. Here are some shadows; a tree, a rock, words fading on a wall. Some are almost realisable as objects and can be easily seen and touched, some seem objective but are really only collections of words. Other collections of words make no pretense of objectivity but flow between the fingers uncontained, and all around is the white space, glowing and vibrant and eyeless.

Posted in Art, Consciousness, Evolution, Knowledge, Rock, Sense | No Comments »

Knowing is Sensing: Aural and Olfactory Modes of Knowing

February 24th, 2008 Fred McVittie

Sight and touch make an appearance on the sense which is coterminous with the origins of those sights and touchings. The object and the sight of that object are simultaneous. See a tree on the horizon, hold a rock in your hand, the rock and the feel of that rock are inseparable. The sight of a tree on the horizon does not signal the impending presence of a tree at some point in the future. The tree that we see is present at the moment of our seeing it. Similarly, the feel of a rock in one’s hand is not an indication that we may be in the presence of a rock at some undisclosed time, or have been in its presence in the past. The rock is here, now. The tree is there, now.

This immanence afforded by sight and touch is not shared by other sensory modes, particularly hearing and olfaction. Typically we hear the impending emergence of an entity prior to its physical manifestation. The crashing in the trees precedes the arrival of the bear into the clearing where we have pitched out tent. The sound may also persist after its departure as we hear its retreat. The ‘beingness’ of the bear which is indicated by the sounds we hear is smudged across a patch of time which extends some way in the future and the past. The scent of a bear, if we had the olfactory abilities of a dog, would show an even greater smearing of being. The lingering scent would not only spread the bear across space but across days of time. The bear would, in this sense, extend into the past, parts of itself clinging to trees and tentpoles and torn canvas and broken crockery, and the long trail of paw-shaped patches of ground that lead through the forest to the here and now of the visible touchable bear.

Applying this logic to the use of sensory modes as metaphors for knowledge there is a logical difference between phenomena which are sensed aurally or through smell than that which is accessed through sight and touch. Whereas seeing and touching refer to the now, hearing and smell also refer to the then of past and future. This difference in the way sensory modes operate should show up in the specifics of their application to the metaphor. It is well established that we use the concepts of felt and seen knowledge to specify that which is evidentially immanent; we say ‘I see what you mean’ and the time of that seeing is assumed to be immediate. We say ‘I feel bad about this’ and again the bad feeling is assumed to be taking place in the moment. When we use words which connect to olfactory or sound metaphors there is not the same self-evident immediacy. If we say ’something smells funny about this plan’ we are not making a claim that something is clearly (sic) amiss that anybody should be able to ’see’. Rather we are claiming some kind of intuitive knowledge about the status of the plan; we are indicating that we have sensed something about it which, although not presently obvious, will make itself obvious later, as the bear crashing through the woods eventually appears in the clearing. We cannot point to the source of our knowing such that it might appear in the senses of others because it is not visualisable in this way. We might say that we ‘just got wind of it’, or it is just ’something in the air’. Olfactory and auditory metaphors tend therefore, to be applied to knowledge which is outside of the subjective/objective dimension and is displaced in time. This is the sort of knowledge which is prescient, which speaks of premonitions, intuition, and ghosts from the past.

Posted in Embodiment, Hearing, Metaphor, Presence, Rock, Sense, Smell | No Comments »