SubscribeAugust 7th, 2011
primordial experience and poetry
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post.
In Hirshfield’s chapter called “The Myriad Leaves of Words”:
Primordial experience is nameless and without form; still, we find our way into the life of expressive language by means of an inner attention tuned to the outer world’s voice. Images, metaphors, similes and stories are sliding doors, places of opening through which subjective and objective may penetrate and become each other.
She’s been talking about Tsurayuki and his idea that
A nightingale singing among the blossoms, the vice of a pond-dwelling frog—listening to these, what living being would not respond with his own poem? It is poetry that effortlessly moves the heavens and the earth, awakens the world of invisible spirits to deep feeling, softens the realtionship between men and women, and consoles the hearts of fierce warriors.
The idea is that by connecting the idea of what it means to be human and the idea of what it means to be the natural world a gateway in primordial feeling is opened for our words to enter and link.
Aaaaaaaaaargh!
It’s one thing for a 10th century poet to make the leap a between a shift in human attention and feeling to this shift being causally related to the awakening of “invisible spirits to deep feeling”. It’s quite another for a person today, with all we know about the mind and our propensity to anthropomorphize quite without any respect to the vast non-human world of action and being. Drives me crazy.
(I just went off on a rant, wrote a bunch of stuff then drank a coffee to chill, and hit delete.)
Try again.
I value Hirshfield, her experience and capacity with poetry but I find it oddly hilarious that reading her requires a constant act of translation. I mean she’s well educated and clearly in love with the power of language and for her to fall into that same mistake, that very human error — it’s the same thing as the soul argument I talked about in yesterday’s post.
So why write about this one too?
We have this idea that there is a world of primordial experience that is something more true than the world of mundane experience. We also have this idea that words can get us through the gateway between these distinct realities – and therefore, we have the idea that primordial and mundane experience are separate realms.
This is another manifestation of Descarte’s error, of the erroneous line between reason and feeling. There is no gateway because all primordial feeling amounts to is the body and its below-awareness working attached to a specific set of feelings.
Sure, the body is hard to hear, and that is largely because most of its workings/feelings need to stay below the level of awareness so that we can keep living. Imagine, for example, if you had to think every time you took a breath or exhaled.
Still, meditation works, as does poetry, to shift awareness and generate wonder, awe, and other feelings. If we don’t use the metaphor of gateways because it requires a bifurcated self, then what?
One alternative is to think of a microscope and its ability to focus on the universe of the minuscule and make of that tiny drop of world the universe. As a kid I’m sure you had the experience of seeing a drop of pond water and looking at it, realizing that this tiny life took up your entire field of vision, you got temporarily enthralled. And the lab, the lab and the outer world disappeared.
Attention riveted on the mundane does that and paramecium are about as mundane (and awe inspiring) as the world gets. Primordial experience is really the set of awe-feelings that mark an experience as something other than mundane, which is why paramecium (and mountains) are both mundane and awe-inspiring. That can be true of any experience, hence finding the mountain within the mountain of Tsurayuki. A microscope allows us to attend to a world normally invisible and in that attention, respectfully given, a world of feeling is generated that amounts to primordial experience.
Poetry is our microscope; words, grammar, rhetoric, rhythm etc are our focus knobs, our slide clips, our slide stage.
Isn’t this just another way of saying a gateway? No. For Hirshfield (and other similar thinkers) the primordial is “nameless and without form”. This kind of idea is an inheritance from the bifurcated reality that is foundational to such a way of thinking. Nameless perhaps, as such pre-aware feelings are also pre-linguistic, but certainly not without form. Primordial experience is about as formless as pond water is lifeless. You just need augmented “eyes” to see.
The reason this drives me crazy: the forms that do exist are critical in the successful translation of pre-linguistic experience and awe-feeling structured experiences into liguistic modalities. We give up our ability to understand those when we stick to a false but common understanding of reality as split down the middle. We can and do stumble on those forms by accident, but it would be so much better for us if we tried to understand our own mechanics behind the curtain of awareness rather than continually propping up the story of the grand wizard.
July 24th, 2011
movement, mind, self and rhythm in poetry
I am reading Damasio’s Self Come to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. There are many little aha! moments in the book, but here’s one I just had to share.
In a discussion of the difference between emotion and feeling Damasio relates emotion to movement, or movement potential, and feeling to a “composite perception of all that has gone on during emotion—the actions, the ideas, the style with which ideas flow”.
While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time.
He has already shown how the body uses as-if loops, in which the brain simulates its own states preparing the body for change, enabling speedy reactions to possible environmental changes. In other words, the body maps movement, these movements are mapped neurologically connecting the body to the parts of the brain that generate emotion, making movement and emotion a single mapped event, our awareness of this becomes feeling; and the body/brain keeps these maps on hand for future activation.
My first thought: so that’s why rhythm is so important in poetry. Specific rhythms activate stored cognitive maps and therefore trigger ideas, feelings, memory and prepare us for movement.
June 30th, 2011
blame as a guideline for action – assumptions that guide us
There is a rather good article over at The Atlantic called “The Brain on Trial“. It says (essentially) two things: our behaviour and our biology are irrevocably linked; our common sense intuition about free will and blame as an underpinning for our legal system aren’t an accurate or helpful way to think about what to do with misbehaving members of society. It also suggests ways to pin our system on concepts that are based on something closer to accuracy.
The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more we tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and toward the details of biology. The shift from blame to science reflects our modern understanding that our perceptions and behaviors are steered by deeply embedded neural programs.
Imagine a spectrum of culpability. On one end, we find people like Alex the pedophile, or a patient with frontotemporal dementia who exposes himself in public. In the eyes of the judge and jury, these are people who suffered brain damage at the hands of fate and did not choose their neural situation. On the other end of the spectrum—the blameworthy side of the “fault” line—we find the common criminal, whose brain receives little study, and about whom our current technology might be able to say little anyway. The overwhelming majority of lawbreakers are on this side of the line, because they don’t have any obvious, measurable biological problems. They are simply thought of as freely choosing actors.
Such a spectrum captures the common intuition that juries hold regarding blameworthiness. But there is a deep problem with this intuition. Technology will continue to improve, and as we grow better at measuring problems in the brain, the fault line will drift into the territory of people we currently hold fully accountable for their crimes. Problems that are now opaque will open up to examination by new techniques, and we may someday find that many types of bad behavior have a basic biological explanation—as has happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, and mania.
Today, neuroimaging is a crude technology, unable to explain the details of individual behavior. We can detect only large-scale problems, but within the coming decades, we will be able to detect patterns at unimaginably small levels of the microcircuitry that correlate with behavioral problems. Neuroscience will be better able to say why people are predisposed to act the way they do. As we become more skilled at specifying how behavior results from the microscopic details of the brain, more defense lawyers will point to biological mitigators of guilt, and more juries will place defendants on the not-blameworthy side of the line.
This puts us in a strange situation. After all, a just legal system cannot define culpability simply by the limitations of current technology. Expert medical testimony generally reflects only whether we yet have names and measurements for a problem, not whether a problem exists. A legal system that declares a person culpable at the beginning of a decade and not culpable at the end is one in which culpability carries no clear meaning.
The crux of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology, and to what extent was it him?,” because we now understand that there is no meaningful distinction between a person’s biology and his decision-making. They are inseparable.
While our current style of punishment rests on a bedrock of personal volition and blame, our modern understanding of the brain suggests a different approach. Blameworthiness should be removed from the legal argot. It is a backward-looking concept that demands the impossible task of untangling the hopelessly complex web of genetics and environment that constructs the trajectory of a human life.
Instead of debating culpability, we should focus on what to do, moving forward, with an accused lawbreaker. I suggest that the legal system has to become forward-looking, primarily because it can no longer hope to do otherwise. As science complicates the question of culpability, our legal and social policy will need to shift toward a different set of questions: How is a person likely to behave in the future? Are criminal actions likely to be repeated? Can this person be helped toward pro-social behavior? How can incentives be realistically structured to deter crime?
I found the article interesting in itself, although moral issues are not something I am drawn to normally. What really caught my attention was the way in which such a bodily-based understanding of humanity exposes our assumptions and the kinds of questions these assumptions have us ask about our world. So many of the questions that drive us are really the wrong ones; they are the offspring of erroneous assumptions and not the children of rationality as we often assume.
It made me think of that little girl talked about over at Pharyngula in a couple of posts and her “were you there” question. Myers’ suggestion was that she might have asked a question to open dialogue, to gain new information – a question like “How do you know that?” Oh the assumptions that underlie a social group that requires personal presence to acknowledge something’s authenticity! The self-defeating nature of such a question is immediately obvious as PZ pointed out. None of us were there when Jesus was born, so does that mean it didn’t happen? Gads, imagine if that were taken seriously by the girl’s social group. But I digress on the wings of my mean streak…
The point of this is not the so-obvious error of that particular assumption, but that assumptions in general have a distressing way of leading us astray unless we question them. The assumptions that underlie free will, blame and the idea of a will independent of a body are just as flagrantly destructive as the little girl’s question of “were you there”. But because our whole society is built on them, we just haven’t got around to examining them all that carefully. Much to lose, I suppose – just as the little girl’s family and group must have much to lose by examining their received wisdom.
May 27th, 2011
4AM and impermanence
I’ve been awake since 3AM, listening to the cars shush along 12th, the cats roam the kitchen counter tops, a breakable something hit the floor, the dog snore, and the breathing of one of my children. I’ve been roaming, mentally, things I saw today while I was out (briefly) walking, the nature of poetics, the idea of doing a PhD, and an article in Seed that I read today.
“Buddhism and the Brain” includes the sub-title,
Many of Buddhism’s core tenets significantly overlap with findings from modern neurology and neuroscience, so how did Buddhism come close to getting the brain right?
The author, David Weisman, posits an underlying empiricism as the reason why Buddhism and its tenets survive the data now surfacing from neuro-scientific and cognitive labs.
Early on, Buddhism grasped the nature of worldly change and divided parts, and then applied it to the human mind. The key step was overcoming egocentrism and recognizing the connection between the world and humans. We are part of the natural world; its processes apply themselves equally to rocks, trees, insects, and humans. Perhaps building on its heritage, early Buddhism simply did not allow room for human exceptionalism.
And really Weisman is probably right. All one has to do is let go of the idea of human exceptionalism and apply what we already understand about life to ourselves. (Just imagine our lives if Descartes had been able to do this.) What I find so fundamentally amazing is not that Buddhists could do this but that we in the West could found a civilization on what is so deeply illusory, the idea that we humans are somehow out of the natural world’s material loop.
If you’ve read Plato, don’t you find it freaky that people took the idea of an Ideal seriously? As if a non-material thing were a thing at all? And even freakier, that most people in the West still take the non-material cause as gospel? I mean how many windows do we need to fall from in order to get that gravity functions just as well on the human body as it does on an apple?
When I went into surgery it was with the understanding that my life had been irrevocably altered. I have a new abdominal wall, and what that means is that I must take that into account for the rest of my life. I knew there was a chance I could die, and I knew that it was a small chance, but I went into the OR having prepared for the possibility. My last act pre-op was to read poetics. I remember thinking, well if I die at least I went out on poetics.
Funny.
And of course I didn’t die, but at the same time I did. What I was before is really gone, and in these slow days of healing, I’ve begun to realize that this means I have no idea what the rest of my life will actually be like. I know I have to be concerned with my bodily health, and that my mental life will still matter, but my previous life-maps? All suspect.
I have curiously little feeling about this. I am neither sad about what’s gone nor excited by the unknown. I’m not numb, but the future seems plainly invisible, immaterial, simply not existent. I find that what exists are the shushing cars, not the imaginative play about where the drivers are going. Does that make sense to you?
This could be 4AM, it could be the relative silence of the very-early-morning city. It could be the effect of a traumatized but healing body on the sense of self-integration that Weisman notes is how we may feel but isn’t how it actually is. Anatta. The non-self self concept meant to constantly reinforce the idea that we are part of the ever changing world, that we ourselves fade and bloom cyclically.
I suppose like most things difficult, finding a way to gently remind the self of the empirical nature and necessities of continued life is key to sustained success. And for me now, the fact that something about me died as I came to consciousness after surgery, the fact that I have a radically unknown future, none of this really matters against the fact that right now I am breathing. It is breathing itself that is my anatta.
What does this mean for me and poetry? No idea. Right now I’m going to go back to listening to the city wake.
May 7th, 2011
prognostication at its most useful
At Boston.com there is an article about prognostication of the scientific sort. Written by Graeme Wood, it is called What will happen to us? Forecasters tackle the extremely deep future. (via Arts & Letters Daily)
In the wake of Claude Choules’ death on May 5 2011 (he was the last known combat veteran of WWI) the case for the Watch Tower prediction that our world would pass away with the World War I generation, is getting a bit thin. Apparently JWs have noticed and are not emphasizing this on their door-to-door missions. But there is always hedging room. You can say, for example, that it it isn’t the generation alive at the time that matters, but any generation that understands what happened. What a useful reasoning tool! Now all you have to do is define what is “really” meant by “understands”.
As Wood’s article says, we can’t avoid peering forward. It is a defining characteristic of our type of being human. The question is why you predict and what tools you use to assess the match between prediction and reality, once the future becomes the past. If you do as most theologically-based predictions do, you rationalize away the failures and keep right on with the broken tools. You get failure after failure but you get to keep the same basic prediction. That has its pluses.
In 1995-DEC, Newsweek quoted Witnesses spokesperson Bob Pevy as saying: “The end is still close. We just can’t put numbers on Jesus’ words.” article here
Meh.
You can, however, as a prognosticator or futurist strive for accuracy. You won’t get it, not completely, not ever. You can begin an approach, but your tools need to function. That means there needs to be some way to check the match between what is predicted and what actually occurs, and there needs to be a system of checks and balances that comes from some set of someones who don’t share your narrative desire. Normally we call this science. Not perfect but as prognostication goes, better than anything theology has ever produced. Unless of course, Jesus is actually living amongst us and….oh but wait, isn’t he coming on May 21?
Still, we’re all aware of the failed doomsday predictions of science.
“Space travel is bunk.” — Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of the UK, 1957 (two weeks later Sputnik orbited the Earth).
That’s funny. Man Sir Jones must have foregone his morning eggs for quite a while after Sputnik became common knowledge.
“Stomach ulcers are caused by stress” — accepted medical diagnosis, until Dr. Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastric inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium.
Nasty. Experimenting on yourself is generally a really bad idea. Still it does show why theological and scientific prognostications are fundamentally different. When the JWs get it wrong, they just say they were right really, they just can’t put a number to Jesus’ words. When scientists get it wrong they change their thinking about causes.
That’s a really big deal, you know.
So that’s why the futurists Wood speaks about in his article provide at least some useful thinking about what we can actually know about the future. Of course we know that they will all turn out to be wrong to some degree, but some basics will be correct. It’s these basics that make their work useful in ways theological predictions are not.
But let’s talk about what “useful” means here. The thing about theological predictions is that they do have a use, but it is only for the already committed. Those predictions are made to orient the “natives” to the normative structure, the “clan” goal, which is always survival. And there is nothing like immanent death to promote one’s deep interest in survival.
If, however, you’re not interested in maintaining the fiction, the “useful” comes to mean something more like adapting your fiction to the best possible match with the non-fiction thing called fact.
That’s what futurists of Wood’s article try to do. Now, having said that, their place-in-time is deeply apparent. The stuff about machines, and the fear that if we upload our consciousness into machines we won’t be human anymore. That was fun. A bit like being afraid of Cthulhu, but fun anyway.
Why? The idea that we can upload our consciousness presumes so much that is Western narrative and not science. Like the idea that downhill ski-jumping at a competitive level could damage women’s ovaries and reproductive capacity, these narratives of ours masquerade as science but aren’t. They are narratives, stories we tell each other and as such have various uses much akin to the theological ones mentioned above.
Upload consciousness? Get rid of the body? Jeez. Pay attention dudes. Our bodies are our consciousness. Uploading consciousness is like uploading yellow without light and without light receptors and light processors (eyes and the visual cortex).
And the idea that we are, evolutionarily speaking, post-biology is deeply odd to me. Have these guys never seen someone die of cancer? Never had a flu bug that put them down? But to be fair, machines have changed things. As I pointed out in some earlier post (a meditation from hospital I seem to remember) that without the recent discovery of a bug fix for Rhesus negative women, all my children would have died in infancy. And without the possibility of surgical intervention in my near future, and the current wonders of the IV drip and attendant medicines, I would have died in agony at least 2 years ago.
I am not denying machines their power and increasingly important place in human evolution. What I am saying is that they are acting like the odd genetic abnormality of an opposable thumb did in some distant ancestors. That weird appendage changed everything. Machines will probably do the same, but that is part of the whole process of environmental change. And biology (sexual selection being a big part of this and the mutations such selection makes possible) is one aspect of the larger environment (adaptive pressure being a big part of the relationship between biological units and environmental conditions, i.e. differential reproduction).
Where do you draw the line between biological evolution and environmental change? Is the use of a a stone to break shelled food by a raven a biological adaption or an environmental change? What about the use of a termite stick by a chimp? The chopper stone made possible by the mutation that made grasping it possible? The scrapped hide that the stone made a realistic additional tool in the kit? The dress that came to be from the hide?
I suspect that where the line is drawn has to do with our old narratives of human special origin. We cannot help but see ourselves as different in some fundamental way. It’s part of our sense of “us” to do this. Like the JWs and other narrtively-based groups, us versus them is fundamental to continued existence. They didn’t make that up, it came with the hard-wiring.
Anyway, so what is useful from such scientific prognostications? Well this process of unearthing our assumptions for one. Another is the obvious orientation to the future, and its hopeful effects on present behaviour. It’s apparently really hard for human groups to act in a way that minimizes our current status and abundance in order to foster people we will never even meet.
There are societies that build in some 7-generation kinds of thoughts that try to do this. But those systems can only work if the environmental resources and pressures are enough to meet basic need and allow for the possibility of human dignity for the majority of the individuals in the society (a combination of autonomy, mastery and purpose, I suspect). And current conditions undermine those kinds of societies.
I don’t know about you but I don’t think Homo sapiens will survive. They will evolve I bet, and be something as unlike to us as we are to Lucy (Australopithecus don’t survive today, they turned into us instead). Of course that’s if we survive the environmental changes wrought by both us and any comet currently inbound. But that’s what machines may make possible isn’t it? Just as the successful mutation of our displaced thumbs made chopping stones workable, machines made it possible for my children (and many others) to survive long enough to contribute ideas, and selves, to society.
And a final use for prognostication? It’s really, really fun to do. Especially when one can later check on it for any signs of veracity. This gives one the opportunity to do it again, check the facts, introspect for assumptions, stir it all, and come up with a newer, more nourishing idea cake. Delightful morning mediation.
May 3rd, 2011
the question “what is poetry”, part 1
I’m not sure the question “What is poetry?” is sensible. That is, I’m not sure it really has an answer, or that it has anything to do with the world. It’s more a question that creates a world, and which answers that creation’s questioning with its own image.
If you read poets on poetry, there appear to be many things of which poetry is capable. I want to argue that all of these things are possible—to empower feeling, to lift imagination, to redress cultural/political/economic/aesthetic wrongs, to free the soul, to free the self—because of certain assumptions about words, things and change.
In Philosophy in the Flesh, one of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s (L&J) contributions to embodied cognition, there is a chapter on metaphysics and the metaphors that underlie such philosophical pursuits. They show that in order for us to ask questions about the nature of Being, we must first assume certain things. These assumptions, as always with human beings, are based ultimately on our embodied nature and take their cue from things of which we are capable physically, operating as physical creatures in a physical world. L&J list four basic folk theories that need to be in place to support the question, for a description of Being to be possible.
1) “The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it.” This is the folk theory of “the Intelligibility of the World.”
2) “Every particular thing is a kind of thing.” Folk theory: There are general kinds of things.
3) “Every entity has an “essence” or “nature,” that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and is the causal source of its natural behavior.” Folk theory: Essences exist.
4) “There is a category of all things that exist.” Theory: There is an all-inclusive category.
Being is a kind of thing. It has an essence (or is an essence). Specific beings are instances of the general category Being.
These are assumptions, not truths. An appalling thought really, given it’s the basis of all (?) Western thought. Certainly these assumptions are the basis of religious thought and, I think, the basis of the question “What is poetry?”.
Seamus Heaney, in his book The Redress of Poetry gives poetry at least two distinct defining properties. The first has poetry as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” The second follows Simone Weil’s Christian metaphysics and gives poetry the power of redress. Poetry acts from the imagination (and imagination’s access to Being) to balance justice (in reality) as it swings in the gale winds of human religious, political and economic fervor. But there is an addition here, to the basic four assumptions. Heaney quotes Weil: “Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin.” If you take the four folk theories above and add the idea of moral balance and its required patterned-change-as-god (i.e. the good will prevail), then you have the assumptive basis of Heaney’s question. When he asks “What is poetry?” Heaney has been created by the world of those five assumptions, and so, of course, the question he asks and the answer he finds—poetry’s power of redress—necessarily comes.
Does this make the question or answer wrong? No. Is either therefore correct? No.
Before I close part one of this post, I want to mention Heraclitus. L&J bring him into the Pre-Socratics chapter in the metaphysics section. They quote him:
Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on.
Sounds so new-agey, don’t you think? That impediment aside, the point of this is to show that the basic assumptions can be utilized to address Being as Change or Pattern. Being doesn’t have to be a Thing, it can be a Way all without giving up the four basic assumptions.
Can the assumptions be forgone? And if not “what is poetry?” then how to query to experience of reading Heaney’s The Haw Lantern?
More later: Earle Birney and the idea that poetry is a magic spell.
May 2nd, 2011
false beliefs and happiness
False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to live in stable societies, which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate.
Some of our cultural wisdom about happiness looks suspiciously like a super-replicating false belief…Economists and psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness, and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter …Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being…this particular false belief is a super-replicator because holding it causes us to engage in the very activities that perpetuate it.”
“Children bring happiness” is another super-replicator, according to Gilbert. Oh yes it is. And yes, of course I love my children, and what’s true is that I have given a very great deal of my life to them. As I have to my various bosses over the years.
Gilbert’s solution is giving up using our imagination to assess our response to a hypothetical future and start using other people’s reports whilst they are in the hypothetical situation.
If I offered to pay for your dinner at a restaurant if you could accurately predict how much you ere going to enjoy it, would you want to see the restaurant’s menu or some randomly selected diner’s review? If you are like most people, you would prefer to see the menu, and if you are like most people, you wold end up buying your own dinner. Why?
Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average.
Heh. That’s funny. And true, of course. I have this friend who is always saying that she has never done the “normal” thing in all of her life. I keep thinking about how many, many of the people I’ve known have said that exact same normal thing. And, even funnier, when I tell people I am normal, the vast majority laugh. They think I’m kidding. I’m not.
Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates. After all, surrogation is only useful when we can count on a surrogate to react to an event roughly as we would, and if we believe that people’s emotional reactions are more varied than they actually are, then surrogation will seem less useful to us than it actually is. The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.
So recognition of our herdness is a doorway to happiness. But instead of simply following mindlessly, it might pay dividends to watch the reactions of those in front of us as they (variously) go over the cliff or deeper into the orchard and guide our feet based on how they feel whilst in the midst of their own futures.
An idea worth a great deal of thought, and I suspect, practice.
May 2nd, 2011
“theories” we live by OR the stories that story us
If you’ve ever heard a creationist say evolution is “just a theory” you know that there is more than one meaning attached to the word “theory”. Keep that in mind while you read this, and later, when you think about the implications.
It seems that our theories about how people of our gender usually feel can influence our memory of how we actually felt. Gender is but one of many theories that have this power to alter our memories. For instance, Asian culture does not emphasize the importance of personal happiness as much as European culture does, and thus Asian Americans believe that they are generally less happy than their European American counterparts. In one study, volunteers carried hand held computers everywhere they went for a week and recorded how they were feeling when the computer beeped at random intervals throughout the day. These reports showed that the Asian American volunteers were slightly happier than the European American volunteers. But when the volunteers were asked to remember how they had felt that week, the Asian American volunteers reported that they had flet less happy and not more. In a study using similar methodology, Hispanic Americans and European Americans reported feeling pretty much the same during week, but the Hispanic Americans remembered feeling happier than the European Americans did. Not all theories involve some immutable characteristic of persons, such as gender or culture. For example, which students tend to score highest on an exam—those who worry about grades, or those who don’t ? As a college professor, I can tell you that my own theory is that students who are deeply concerned about their performance tend to study more and hence outscore their more lackadaisical classmates. Apparently students have the same theory, because research shows that when students do well on an exam, they remember feeling more anxious before the exam than they actually felt, and when students do poorly on an exam, they remember feeling less anxious before the exam than they actually felt.
We remember feeling as we believe we must have felt. The problem with this error of retrospection is that it can keep us from discovering our errors of prospection…
Interesting don’t you think? Humans are so not natural scientists in some really important ways. But such “theories” and their effects explain a great deal, no?
May 2nd, 2011
now whose fault was that?
From Stumbling on Happiness:
The eye and the brain are conspirators, and like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness. Because we do not realize that we have generated a positive view of our current experience, we do not realize that we will do so again in the future. Not only does our naïveté cause us to overestimate the intensity of duration of our distress in the face of future adversity, but it also leads us to take actions that may undermine the conspiracy. We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom. The process by which we generate positive views are many: We pay more attention to favourable information, we surround ourselves wtih those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically. These tendencies make it easy for us to explain unpleasant experiences in ways that exonerate us and make us feel better. The price we pay for our irrepressible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.
In other words, we are best trying and failing because that way if we get what we want we win and if we don’t then we’ll (in the shape of our “conspirators”) make ourselves feel better by either making it someone else’s fault or saying something to the effect that out of the disaster a rose did bloom. And because we don’t handle choice all that well, just pick one thing and go for it. That will make us happier than biding – waiting for the right choice to manifest. (Gilbert explains this in the preceding chapters. Read the book. It’s interesting.) And since there is no right choice, since there is no outside agency to designate an absolute right and and an absolute wrong, what is right is just a choice.
This is starting to feel a bit like it’s leading to a neuro-cognitively based hedonism. I do hope so. I mean what better reason to choose something than pleasure? Yes! I love being human.
May 2nd, 2011
brain on song
This is one of the autotuned science-based vids. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Whoever put it together had a sense of feeling about it as a video rather than just as a interesting way to present science. Anyway, I did like this.
via Wimp