Picture of a tree
April 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Went for a walk during the lunch break and saw this tree. No real relevance, just liked it.
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Another Day, Same Tree
April 14th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Another Day, Same Tree
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Tree of the Day
April 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie
It’s actually much nicer weather than it looks on this picture.
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The sky is full of rain
May 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie
and this tree is a hole in the rain.
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Enlightenment for Atheists
May 28th, 2006 Fred McVittie
I say a poster at lunchtime today advertising a workshop entitled Enlightenment for Atheists. I can’t imagine what that could possibly mean, but since I was saying I was after this kind of thing I should make the effort to find out about it. There was no date, time, or venue information on the poster (which it completely typical of this Conference), so I am going to use the ‘clover’ method and basically wander about hopefully for the next few days and see if it ‘jumps out at me’.
Oh, and here’s another picture of that tree.
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That Tree
July 5th, 2006 Fred McVittie
I haven’t posted any pictures of that tree recently, so here it is.
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The Snake in the Triangle
May 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie
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Tree from above
August 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Tree from above.
I may be wrong, but I think the small pale smudge toward the bottom right is myself taking the picture.
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The Lure of Common Sense
August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The lure of common sense is incredibly strong and we have an inbuilt tendency to view the world in a way which we might think is ‘realistic’. This means that what we see of the world is how it really is and our sense give us an unproblematic access to that world. Even when we become aware that there are many aspects of the world which are beyond the reach of the sense, from ultraviolet light to the ultrasound squeaking of bats, and acknowledge that our awareness of these phenomena is through some act of interpretation (so the sound of bats becomes the movement of a needle in an acoustic meter, ultraviolet light becomes a waveform on the screen of an oscilloscope) we still regard the impressions of our sense as transparent and direct. We feel that when we look at a tree, or hold a rock in our hands, we are not carrying out any kind of interpretive act but that our activities are unmediated, untheorised, and uninterpreted. We might claim a kind of naturalistic support for this impression by referring to the experience as essentially the same as the unalloyed experience of children and babies. That in the golden age before education and conceptualisation there was a unique way of being in the world which was entirely of this realistic type. As over-educated and over-intellectual adults, this view continues, these natural perceptual abilities are shrouded in a conceptual fog that prevents us from seeing clearly what is really there. As grown-ups, it is felt, we compulsively dismantle the world-as-it-is in favour of some interpretation that might or might not serve some ends.
But what are the grounds for this assertion? We might say ‘there is a tree’ and point to the tree at the bottom of our garden, go on to suggest that all the proof of realist/naturalist perception is contained in that statement. However, we know that there is more to it than that. If we close our eyes the statement becomes, at best, open to error. Making no impact on the senses, we have no evidence for its existence at all. The tree and our seeing of it are inseparable, and removing our sight also removes the guarantee of any visible tree existing. The visibility of the tree simply vanishes. Furthermore, we could go on removing one by one those aspects of the tree as it appears to the sense. Just as we can remove its visible qualities by closing our eyes we can remove its smell, taste, touch, and any sound it might make as the wind sways its branches simply by banishing the sensory impression of it. So we can only say ‘there is a tree’ if we first acknowledge that are gesturing in the direction of our sensory impressions, even if our hand is pointing toward the bottom of the garden.
Also, we should consider what these sensory impressions are, if they are not the tree itself. We know from the testimony of science that these sensory impressions are the result of complex physical and neurological events which are alchemically transformed into the various sensory mods’ some events become sounds, some others, superficially similar, become sights, or smells, or tastes. Since the basic biochemical processes are identical, these transformations are also interpretations, with some signals being translated into the language of vision, others into the lingo of sound. The experience of synaesthesia demonstrates this interpretive act which precedes the most basic act of perception in that, with those who experience this condition, these is a constant slippage between one interpretive strategy and another, in which shapes are perceived as sound, colours as tastes, etc. And while it is tempting to conclude that these unusual experiences are simply misfirings, deviation from the normal perception which offer realist views of the world, this would miss the fact that all perception is also construal, not only that of synaesthetes. It would betray a perceptual chauvanism equivalent to claiming that the language one spoke was real because, while to a French person a chair is une chaise, to an English person a chair really is a chair. Seeing is never transparent but is always an act of interpretation.
We know and cannot deny that the story of vision which begins with the eye and ends with the bald claim ‘there is a tree’ needs fleshing out. This narrative involves a cast of thousands including photons, cells of the lens, aqueous humor, sclera, choroid, retina, optic nerves, neurons, axons, dendrites, neurotransmitting chemincal, complex neuronal structures allowing for the individual processing of straight lines, diagonals, fields of colour, colours themselves, textures, edges, memories, language, the formation of whole gestalts from the accumulation of disparate elements, distinction of figures from background, our ability to name. It is only through the careful co-ordination of these millions of players that the play called ‘there is a tree’ is rehearsed at all, and the extent to which this choreography of ideation can go wrong is an indication of how ultimately interpretive the simple act of seeing is. Any break of misfiring in the great chain of seeing brings the perception of the tree crashing around our eyes. It is also significant how culturally and species-specific such a statement is, which is obvious if you consider the point of view of an any, a bear, or a bacterium. Every word in the sentence ‘there is a tree’ demands a huge amount of knowledge about being human to even begin to make sense
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How to know Deepak
October 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie
“The same brain responses that enable you to see a tree as a tree, instead of as a ghostly swarm of buzzing atoms, also enable you to experience God.” - Deepak Chopra. ‘How to know God’. p.17
In this Chopra is probably correct. There are undoubtedly mechanisms within the neural labyrinths of the mind which take the raw data of the world and transform it into our imagination of that world. This data, filtered through the senses, is cast together into the unified experience of conscious awareness. In neuroscience this is referred to as ‘binding’, but was known in medieval times as the ’sensus communis’; the common sense of singular being in which seeing this branch, this leaf, this twig, is transformed into the communion of ‘tree’.
Chopra is right to suggest that these binding and consilient sense-making processes are not limited to the construction of those parts of the imagined world which appears as physical reality. It is this ability to build coherent and singular patterns out of fragmentary data which also allows us to conceive of conceptual ‘objects’ which are experienced purely cognitively, and which appear to have the same imagined wholeness as trees and rocks. These are the mechanisms which lie behind our apprehension not only of God, but also of theories and archetypes, of quarks and leptons, black holes and big bangs, love, justice, time, and anger. Such phenomena are inherently abstract, leaving no direct impression on the senses in the way that buzzing clouds of atoms seem to. And yet the sensus communis which makes the sense of a tree out of the imagination of atoms also makes sense of these ephemeral, disembodied, and evansescent entities. All of these, trees, gods, and atoms, are experiential patterns in one’s imagination of the world.
This does not mean however, that because all these entities are similarly produced within the individual imagination that all are necessarily equal, that all are equally ‘real’. What Chopra does not go on to say is that one’s individual imagination of a tree exists also within the imagination of anyone with eyes standing near where you are standing and looking where you are looking. The ghostly swarm of buzzing atoms (which is neither ghost nor swarm, and most certainly does not buzz), appears in the interpersonal imagination of the objectively described world. This is similarly the case with at least some of the abstractions noted above; a good theory is one which appears robust not only in the imagination of a single individual but in the minds of many, and which maintains its robustness in the face of attack and competition, whether this be in the form of organised scientific attempts at falsification, or the more vernacular processes of scepticism and doubt. It is through these processes that such theories as natural selection, heliocentrism, and relativity come to exist not as follies, ideosyncratically located within the private garden of an individual mind, but as metaphorical objects in the common ground of the shared imagination.
The U.S. constitution forbids the construction of religious icons on government land, and similarly there is no statue of God in the public park of interpersonal reality. Whilst it is likely that the God concept is a result of the same processes of binding and imagination that produce the image of the tree, there is little agreement regarding the nature, appearance, provenance, role, or substantive nature of this God. To the extent that he, she, or it appears within the interpersonal imagination at all it is as the ill-defined subject of sectarian discord and is only maintained through institutional dogmatism, wishful thinking, and pseudo-academic theological hand-waving.
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Seeing Is Seeing As
October 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie
All perception relies upon the mechanisms of the mind/brain to interpret stimuli and construct a meaningful image appropriate to that stimuli. The words ‘meaningful’ and ‘appropriate’ here signify the ancient archeology of thought in which meaning and appropriateness refer specifically to survival; the buzzing cloud of atoms is perceived as a tree, that is, as a hard, climbable, object, because that is the most useful way for medium sized predators like ourselves to regard it. In other words, ’seeing’ is never neutral but is always the result of an interpretive process in which the historically salient features of the scene are presented in ways which dramatises that salience. We do not simply see the tree, we see … as the tree.
The three dots here indicate that I cannot find a suitable object for the sentence. I do not want to write ‘we see the tree as the tree’, as that would simply avoid the issue, nor do I want to say ‘we see the cloud of atoms as the tree’, since we obviously have no access at all to the atomic behaviour of the world. Besides which I would have to accept that I myself, the ’seer’ in the story, am a similar cloud of atoms, which would make any description even more removed. The closest I can come to imagining this perception is to consider that, since the tree and myself are equally engaged in the act of seeing, (even though only I am able to narrate that act), then the seeing emerges jointly from that engagement. (And here I am endebted to Max Velmans and his notion of ‘reflexive monism’). This joint act of seeing creates the circumstances of the as.
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Copenhagen Interpretation of Sensory Experience
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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Barthes on Trees
October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie
If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree I am felling, whatever the form of my sentence, I ’speak the tree’, I do not speak about it. This means that my language is operational, transitively linked to its object; between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labour, that is to say an action. This is political language: it represents nature for me only inasmuch as I am going to transform it, it is a language thanks to which I ‘act the object’; the tree is not an image for me, it is simply the meaning of my action. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer ’speak the tree’, I can only speak about it, on it…. I no longer have anything but an intransitive relationship with the tree; this tree is no longer the meaning of reality as a human action, it is an image-at-one’s-disposal.. (Barthes 1973, p.145-46).
(This) acceptance of the risk inherent in positive interpretation is all the more remarkable because Barthes, whose sense of historicity and negativity is equal to Sartre’s or Brecht’s, usually cannot help giving expression to a fundamental hope, whose strength can be deduced negatively from the constant emphasis on language in his work, be it the ‘language’ of poetics, the language in which the critic writes his interpretation, or the final act of writing which for him is the natural conclusion of the reading intimacy (p.94). This is the hope of doing without language altogether, without representation or mediation of any kind. In Mythologies, the intellectual who can only ‘speak about a tree’ is seen to envy the woodcutter who, according to Barthes, ‘speaks the tree’ – uses the immediate language of action (pp. 145, 156, 158).
(Nisbet: 1989. p. 139)
Nisbet, Hugh Barr. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Cambridge University Press. 1989.
Barthes, R. (1973). Myth today In: Barthes, R. Mythologies. London: Collins/ Paladin. Original publication, in French, 1957.
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Everything contains the idea of itself
November 2nd, 2007 Fred McVittie
Everything contains the idea of itself. One of the properties of a tree or a rock is the idea of ‘treeness’ or ‘rockness’ which it embodies. There can be no tree, or at least no tree that appears in consciousness, which does not have implicit within itself this idea of its own self. In fact it might be more accurate to say that such ideas do not so much ‘appear in consciousness’ (which suggests that they might possibly exist unseen in some other location), but rather than they constitute consciousness in much the same way that the pressure of the bark on the palm of the hand constitutes the ‘hardness’ of the tree.
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