Conceptual Entities

September 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The realm of thought and ideas does not (cannot) meaningfully discriminate between the real the fictional. Terms such as ‘fiction’, ‘metaphor’, ’symbol’, etc are about the status of certain ideas held in the mind when compared to their ‘real’ counterparts the in outside world, these terms have no significance with regard to the ideas themselves. We do not have ‘fictional’ thoughts. In the realm of thought a soul is as real as a hand.

Posted in Fiction, Soul, Touch | No Comments »

The Emotional Reality of Phantom Limbs

October 5th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Non-conscious process utilise models of ‘being in the world’ that are different to the consciously arrived at models articulated by consciousness. An obvious example of this disparity is the case of phantom limbs, in which individuals who have lost an arm or leg (or in some cases who have been born without a limb) still experience the presence of the missing body part. The sense of the existence of the limb is so compelling that such people will, for example, avoid bumping the limb when passing through a doorway, even though they are fully aware that the limb is not there and there is no possibility of bumping it. The existence of the limb is ‘felt’ and emotionally responded to, even though the rational conscious mind is providing irrefutable evidence that the limb is not there. The compelling nature of this illusion, and the fact that this compulsion is so strong that it can significantly influence action, comes from its origins in non-conscious processes. The body image, the shape of the amputee’s ‘being in the world’ contains this limb and informs the behaviour of the person emotionally. For the person passing through the doorway, although it may be obvious that there is no real danger of bumping the phantom limb, to not take evasive action would not ‘feel’ right.

Posted in Emotion, Feeling, Proprioception, Touch | No Comments »

The Prehensile Mind

October 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Alfred North Whitehead makes extensive use of the construction of knowledge using tactile metaphors in his notion of ‘prehension’;

“Whitehead said that the actualities of which the world is composed are related to each other by means of prehensions—indeed, the actualities are their prehensions. To “prehend” is to “grasp” or to take account of other actualities. Prehending is not limited to human beings: as nonhuman forms of experience exist, so do nonhuman forms of prehension. Every actual entity, including nonhuman ones, is related to the world by means of prehensions. The particular way in which each actual entity prehends the world, the how of its “grasping,” Whitehead called the “subjective form” of the prehension, by which he meant its affective tone. Thus, a prehension is a “feeling of feeling.””
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/Hartshorne/Viney/3.html

As a monkey has a prehensile tail which it uses to grasp distant objects and bring them into contact with its self, so we have a prehensile mind that performs a similar trick with the conceptual experiences of our world.

Posted in Grasp, Knowledge, Touch, Whitehead, Alfred N. | No Comments »

Feelings aren’t Facts

October 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie

We come to know and understand abstract concepts through the metaphorical application of non-abstract embodied concepts. These concepts, which are entirely familiar and concrete, and include such things as physical objects, journeys, containers, etc., are organised ‘naturally’ into different sensory modes; those which are apprehended visually, aurally, kinaesthetically, gustatory, olfactorily, and as tactile experience. Therefore our understanding of abstract concepts is likely to be similarly organised into different metaphorical sensory modes. There is certainly an apparent order to the way we use language to articulate different types of abstract concepts; those which we regard as objective (e.g. justice, truth, etc) tend to be described using visual metaphors, whereas those which are thought of as subjective (love, hate, etc) are often spoken of using metaphors of touch. Abstract concepts which are objectified through the use of visual metaphor are awarded the status usually attributed to objects; permanence, boundedness, etc, whereas those which are not objectified in this way but are understood using tactile metaphors are regarded as ‘feelings’, and as everyone knows, feelings aren’t facts.

Posted in Abstract, Metaphor, Objectivity, Seeing, Sense, Smell, Taste, Touch | No Comments »

Knowing and Sensing

October 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Our experience of the world is mediated and organised through the senses, and the various sensory modes give us different information about the world, as well as implying different relationships between ourselves and the source of the sensory information. Events which stimulate the visual sense, i.e. things that we see, are obviously outside of our body, possibly even a considerable distance from our body, and therefore may or may not have a direct ‘impact’ on our wellbeing. Visualised objects are also (usually) also visible to other people, existing in interpersonal shared space, which means that objects apprehended visually are likely to have similar significance for all viewers (seeing a tiger is likely to cause anyone in visible range to run away). Objects and events which are apprehended through the sense of touch, on the other hand (sic) do, by definition, have a direct impact on the body doing the touching, they are in extreme proximity to that body, and are likely to have a greater significance for the person touched than for someone else who is not in contact with the object, (touching a flame causes a significantly different response than seeing one). This suggests that there is a structured and organised variation in experience depending upon which sense is primarily used to access that experience.

Given that we draw substantially on embodied experience to organise and structure our knowledge of the world which is abstract (i.e. non-concrete) through the use of conceptual metaphor it is likely that abstract concepts will also be organised according to the various sensory modes. Indeed we do find this distinction, with entities which we regard as ‘objective’ being referred to using visual metaphor, thus placing them in a shared conceptual space where they appear similar to all (metaphorical) viewers, whilst those entities we regard as ’subjective’ are often referred to using tactile metaphors. Such subjective entities are held metaphorically against the body where they are ‘felt’, an individual experience with an acknowledged difference in impact for the ‘feeler’ than for the objective ‘viewer’.

The metaphorical application of the senses of smell and taste appear to be less widespread than that of sight and touch, although there does seem to be a relatively consistent mapping from the sense of taste to an aesthetic response to experience, as when we might say that some idea is ‘distasteful’. There may also be some consistency in the mapping of the sense of smell onto concepts which have moral implications, as for example when we say that an abstract idea ’stinks’. Since there is considerable crossover in the concrete experiences of smell and taste it is likely that this crossover will also appear in their metaphorical use of these senses to describe abstract concepts.

Posted in Knowledge, Metaphor, Objectivity, Seeing, Sense, Smell, Taste, Touch | No Comments »

Felt Knowledge

October 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Different forms of knowing correspond to different sensory modes: Objective ‘3rd person’ knowledge is associated with sight, whereas subjective ‘1st person’ knowledge is associated with touch and ‘feelings’. Knowledge that we regard as distinct from our selves and not part of our consciousness or being is metaphorically placed external to our bodies where it can be viewed dispassionately. Other knowledge, which we might regard as more ‘intimate’, is held close to the body where it is felt and embraced. This latter kind of ‘felt knowledge’ is not dissociated from one’s self and is experienced as a part of our being, a part of our ’subjectivity’. This difference in how knowledge is imagined, as distant and distinct or as upclose and personal, has implications for the use of imagery and the imagination in performance optimisation. Exercises which use the imagination to affect change in mental states often work better if the imagery used in not visual, but draws on one of the other senses, particularly the tactile and kinaesthetic. These latter forms of imagery do not objectify one’s experience and suggest a distinction between experience and experiencer, which visual imagery inevitable does.

Posted in Exercises, Feeling, Knowledge, Performance, Proprioception, Sense, Touch | No Comments »

Proprioceptive Knowing

December 3rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The various sensory modes which make up the human sensorium; sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell; map onto a set of knowledge types which range from the most ‘objective’ knowledge to the most ’subjective’. So, for example, we use the faculty of sight to refer to knowledge which we regard as objective, placing the knowledge at a remove from our bodies in the (metaphorical ) interpersonal space of shared experience. At the other extreme we use the faculty of touch to refer to knowledge which we do not regard as objective. We talk of the objects of such knowledge in terms of how we ‘feel’ about them, collapsing the metaphorical space and assuming a personal contact in which we might even say we are ‘touched’. In addition to the senses already referred to however, there is also the additional sensory mode of proprioception; the schematic sense of our own bodies in space and the relations between the parts. The type of abstract knowledge which maps from this sense is likely to be different from the objective and subjective types noted above, and is likely to be concerned with such embodied kineaesthetic operations as balance, relation, centre, location, weight, etc.

Posted in Knowledge, Objectivity, Proprioception, Sense, Touch | No Comments »

Elephant Knowledge

December 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The parable of the blind men and the elephant tells us something about the partiality of knowledge; that only having access to local information does not give us the ‘big picture’. It also suggests that our sense of touch (feeling) is individual and separate, whilst our visual sense is communal. So it is that our feelings, metaphorically mapped from our sense of touch, and the emotional knowledge that these feelings represent, separates us. Our visual sense, and the objectified knowledge it gives character to, brings us together. It is also noteworthy that the men in the story are blind, and therefore would have to take the reality of the big picture on faith.

Posted in Elephant, Feeling, Metaphor, Seeing, Sense, Touch | No Comments »

A Tongue Returning to a Broken Tooth

April 2nd, 2008 Fred McVittie

(Transcribed from HERE)

In some of these videos and in some of the bits of writing in the blog which kind of parallels these videos I keep finding myself coming back to the same ideas over and over again. Sometimes within the space of a few days but sometimes over a period of weeks or even months I find myself coming back to something. and looking back over the writing of the blog particularly it’s very evident that some of the ideas that I’ve been struggling with in the early pieces of writing, or that I’ve had a very, sort of, fleeting relationship with have come back in much more solid form, or much more fully expressed form. When I think about that part of me thinks that it is like a tongue going back to a broken tooth, that’s one of the images that I have of what’s happening there. A kind of fascination with ……….. a necessity to lick it into shape or explore it internally to have a really close examination of it, but not an examination, it’s paradoxical that the blog is public and the examination seems to be taking place much more privately where the tongue explores rather than where a more distanced type of exploration might take place. I’m just wondering what happens when I do change those (entries), when those postings or these videos change over time there is, I do return to something in a different form, they change, what is happening there? I think part of what’s happening is there’s a kind of physical shaping, the hands of my thinking are going out there and ‘tweaking’ stuff, nailing bits together and cutting off the bits that are unnecessary, twisting it back, shaping it, and in some cases eventually launching it almost like a shipbuilding exercise. Certainly some of the early ideas to do with, for example, liquidity metaphors, which fascinate me,eventually are processesed and nailed together, shaped and ultimately launched as a kind of object, a kind of ship, and that’s now available as a published paper, academic paper, so it’s a kind of objective (not flotsam or jetsam) a kind of objective …. stuff, piece of objective… vessel or vehicle of some sort which is off there floating toward the horizon all by itself now, out of my control. So it’s shaped with my hands, the hands of my conceptualisation, and ultimatetely launched. So part of this process seems to be about that, seems to be about revisiting, for the purposes of shaping and finishing and ultimately launching, but part of it also seems to be about this broken tooth idea which is more to do with an internal caressing of the broken, almost a tasting of the broken (and here I’m reminded of the tongue’s other use in shaping the sounds of words)a kind of semiotic engagement with the broken, a linguistic, pre-linguistic engagement with broken ideas. keep returning to that broken idea to try to wrap a word around it. That seems to be what’s going on, at least partially what’s going on when I’m finding myself returning to these same ideas; recycling, repurposing, and rebuilding. Licking and tasting and launching.

Posted in Language, Taste, Touch | No Comments »