Open Sky Collective

Announcement:

2011-09-07T13:12:00.003-06:00

We would like to announce we are changing the name and focus of this project. This project is now the Open Sky Collective. To be sure, we still seek to enact an "integral approach" to issues of social justice, human development and global sustainability - only now we seek to do so from a post-ideological position animated by peer-to-peer and "open source" perspectives. Our focus will become decidedly more political going forward, as we believe we are living in critical times.

Comments and questions are welcome.

Does “magical thinking” Exist?

2011-05-19T15:48:00.006-06:00

Do people ever engage in “magical thinking” ?

by Pascal Boyer

Would you enjoy your cocktail less, if it came in a glass labelled “vomit”?

One solid result of cognitive psychology, or so it would seem, is that most people, regardless of education, opinion or personality, can be induced to think in magical terms given the appropriate stimuli and conditions. People will be reluctant to don a sweater if told that it used to belong to Adolf Hitler. They resist drinking from a glass of water in which an experimenter has briefly dunked a plastic cockroach. There is a great variety of such effects, initially demonstrated by Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff and replicated by many others, including Paul Harris in developmental studies.

This was salutary news for cultural anthropologists, who suspected that there was something deeply wrong with the notion that magical thinking was a prerogative of the Other, either quasi-naked people with bones through their noses, or less exotic peasants and barbarians with “pre-logical” mentality. So – we now know that we all are that Other, so to speak.

But does magical thinking actually exist? Do the experiments actually show it in action?

Post‐Metaphysics and Second Tier Skillfulness

2011-04-07T14:07:00.001-06:00

On The Development of Beliefs vs. Capacities: Post‐Metaphysics and Second Tier Skillfulness

By Tom Murray

This article explores what an integral or second tier approach to belief-holding might entail. What do integralists believe and want others to believe? What relationship to belief (and knowledge, truth, and certainty) might be characteristic of "integral" or "second tier" consciousness? Current developments in Integral Theory (including "Wilber-5" and allusions to post-Wilberian integral theories) are fundamentally concerned about epistemology and method–i.e. questions such as "How do we know?" "What can we know is true or real?" and "How do we justify and promote what we think is true or good?" Any deep investigation into such questions entails developmental, philosophical, psycho-therapeutic, social, and ethical concerns. The ultimate concern is not so much with how we develop beliefs within the integral community, but in how we intend to disseminate or build up worldviews, knowledge, or capacity in our attempts to be of service to the wider circle of humanity (and kosmos). Certainly the goal is not to turn as many of "them" into "us" as we can–or is it? To contextualize these general questions, in Part I of this article I will focus on a specific domain of integral beliefs and models: human development. In Part II will focus on what it might mean to enact a post-metaphysical stance to belief-holding, which is an important aspect of second tier development.

Read More (PDF): Here

Intersubjectivity and Mirror Neurons

2011-04-04T13:59:00.000-06:00

Below Marco Iacoboni, M.D., Ph.D., discusses recent research on mirror neurons and intersubjectivity which suggests how embodied encounters between self and other become shared existential meanings which lead to deep intimate relationships. Iacoboni goes on to detail the dynamics involved in the co-arising of human awareness from the simultaneous functioning of nervous systems, environments and intersubjective experience.

[ h/t Integral Options Café ]

Horizontal and Vertical Evolution

2011-03-17T14:11:00.004-06:00

Horizontal and Vertical: The Evolution of Evolution

By Mark Buchanan

Just suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history.

It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed - billions of years, in fact - the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn't Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.

Strong claims, but others are taking them seriously. "Their arguments make sense and their conclusion is very important," says biologist Jan Sapp of York University in Toronto, Canada. "The process of evolution just isn't what most evolutionary biologists think it is."

Vertical hegemony

How could modern biology have gone so badly off track? According to Woese, it is a simple tale of scientific complacency. Evolutionary biology took its modern form in the early 20th century with the establishment of the genetic basis of inheritance: Mendel's genetics combined with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Biologists refer to this as the "modern synthesis", and it has been the basis for all subsequent developments in molecular biology and genetics. Woese believes that along the way biologists were seduced by their own success into thinking they had found the final truth about all evolution. "Biology built up a facade of mathematics around the juxtaposition of Mendelian genetics with Darwinism," he says. "And as a result it neglected to study the most important problem in science - the nature of the evolutionary process."

In particular, he argues, nothing in the modern synthesis explains the most fundamental steps in early life: how evolution could have produced the genetic code and the basic genetic machinery used by all organisms, especially the enzymes and structures involved in translating genetic information into proteins. Most biologists, following Francis Crick, simply supposed that these were uninformative "accidents of history". That was a big mistake, says Woese, who has made his academic reputation proving the point.

In 1977, Woese stunned biologists when his analysis of the genetic machinery involved in gene expression revealed an entirely new limb of the tree of life. Biologists knew of two major domains: eukaryotes - organisms with cell nuclei, such as animals and plants - and bacteria, which lack cell nuclei. Woese documented a third major domain, the Archaea. These are microbes too, but as distinct from bacteria genetically as both Archaea and bacteria are from eukaryotes. "This was a enormous discovery," says biologist Norman Pace of the University of Colorado in Boulder. Woese himself sees it as a first step in getting evolutionary biology back on track. Coming to terms with horizontal gene transfer is the next big step.

In the past few years, a host of genome studies have demonstrated that DNA flows readily between the chromosomes of microbes and the external world. Typically around 10 per cent of the genes in many bacterial genomes seem to have been acquired from other organisms in this way, though the proportion can be several times that (New Scientist, 24 January 2009, p 34). So an individual microbe may have access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it, including those of other microbe species. "It's natural to wonder if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level," says Goldenfeld.

Lateral thinking

This is all very different from evolution as described by Darwin. Evolution will always be about change as a result of some organisms being more successful at surviving than others. In the Darwinian model, evolutionary change occurs because individuals with genes associated with successful traits are more likely to pass these on to the next generation. In horizontal gene transfer, by contrast, change is not a function of the individual or of changes from generation to generation, but of all the microbes able to share genetic material. Evolution takes place within a complex, dynamic system of many interacting parts, say Woese and Goldenfeld, and understanding it demands a detailed exploration of the self-organising potential of such a system. On the basis of their studies, they argue that horizontal gene transfer had to be a dominant factor in the original form of evolution.

Evidence for this lies in the genetic code, say Woese and Goldenfeld. Though it was discovered in the 1960s, no one had been able to explain how evolution could have made it so exquisitely tuned to resisting errors. Mutations happen in DNA coding all the time, and yet the proteins it produces often remain unaffected by these glitches. Darwinian evolution simply cannot explain how such a code could arise. But horizontal gene transfer can, say Woese and Goldenfeld.

The essence of the genetic code is that sequences of three consecutive bases, known as codons, correspond to specific amino acids (see diagram). Proteins are made of chains of amino acids, so when a gene is transcribed into a protein these codons are what determines which amino acid gets added to the chain. The codon AAU represents the amino acid asparagine, for example, and UGU represents cysteine. There are 64 codons in total and 20 amino acids, which means that the code has some redundancy, with multiple codons specifying the same amino acid.

This code is universal, shared by all organisms, and biologists have long known that it has remarkable properties. In the early 1960s, for example, Woese himself pointed out that one reason for the code's deep tolerance for errors was that similar codons specify either the same amino acid or two with similar chemical properties. Hence, a mutation of a single base, while changing a codon, will tend to have little effect on the properties of the protein being produced.

In 1991, geneticists David Haig and Lawrence Hurst at the University of Oxford went further, showing that the code's level of error tolerance is truly remarkable. They studied the error tolerance of an enormous number of hypothetical genetic codes, all built from the same base pairs but with codons associated randomly with amino acids. They found that the actual code is around one in a million in terms of how good it is at error mitigation. "The actual genetic code," says Goldenfeld, "stands out like a sore thumb as being the best possible." That would seem to demand some evolutionary explanation. Yet, until now, no one has found one. The reason, say Woese and Goldenfeld, is that everyone has been thinking in terms of the wrong kind of evolution.

Working with Kalin Vetsigian, also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Woese and Goldenfeld set up a virtual world in which they could rerun history multiple times and test the evolution of the genetic code under different conditions (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 10696). Starting with a random initial population of codes being used by different organisms - all using the same DNA bases but with different associations of codons and amino acids - they first explored how the code might evolve in ordinary Darwinian evolution. While the ability of the code to withstand errors improves with time, they found that the results were inconsistent with the pattern we actually see in two ways. First, the code never became shared among all organisms - a number of distinct codes remained in use no matter how long the team ran their simulations. Second, in none of their runs did any of the codes evolve to reach the optimal structure of the actual code. "With vertical, Darwinian evolution," says Goldenfeld, "we found that the code evolution gets stuck and does not find the true optimum."

Horizontal is optimal

The results were very different when they allowed horizontal gene transfer between different organisms. Now, with advantageous genetic innovations able to flow horizontally across the entire system the code readily discovered the overall optimal structure and came to be universal among all organisms. "In some sense," says Woese, "the genetic code is a fossil or perhaps an echo of the origin of life, just as the cosmic microwave background is a sort of echo of the big bang. And its form points to a process very different from today's Darwinian evolution." For the researchers the conclusion is inescapable: the genetic code must have arisen in an earlier evolutionary phase dominated by horizontal gene transfer.

Goldenfeld admits that pinning down the details of that early process remains a difficult task. However the simulations suggest that horizontal gene transfer allowed life in general to acquire a unified genetic machinery, thereby making the sharing of innovations easier. Hence, the researchers now suspect that early evolution may have proceeded through a series of stages before the Darwinian form emerged, with the first stage leading to the emergence of a universal genetic code. "It would have acted as an innovation-sharing protocol," says Goldenfeld, "greatly enhancing the ability of organisms to share genetic innovations that were beneficial." Following this, a second stage of evolution would have involved rampant horizontal gene transfer, made possible by the shared genetic machinery, and leading to a rapid, exponential rise in the complexity of organisms. This, in turn, would eventually have given way to a third stage of evolution in which genetic transfer became mostly vertical, perhaps because the complexity of organisms reached a threshold requiring a more circumscribed flow of genes to preserve correct function. Woese can't put a date on when the transition to Darwinian evolution happened, but he suspects it occurred at different times in each of the three main branches of the tree of life, with bacteria likely to have changed first.

Today, at least in multicellular organisms, Darwinian evolution is dominant but we may still be in for some surprises. "Most of life - the microbial world - is still strongly taking advantage of horizontal gene transfer, but we also know, from studies in the past year, that multicellular organisms do this too," says Goldenfeld. As more genomes are sequenced, ever more incongruous sequences of DNA are turning up. Comparisons of the genomes of various species including a frog, lizard, mouse and bushbaby, for example, indicate that one particular chunk of DNA found in each must have been acquired independently by horizontal gene transfer (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 17023). "The importance of this for evolution has yet to be seriously considered."

No doubt there will be resistance in some quarters, yet many biologists recognise that there must be a change in thinking if evolution is finally to be understood in a deep way. "The microbial world holds the greatest biomass on Earth," says Sapp, "but for most evolutionists it's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind'. They tend to focus on visible plants and animals."

If a paradigm shift is pending, Pace says it will be in good hands. "I think Woese has done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin," he says. "There's a lot more to learn, and he's been interpreting the emerging story brilliantly."

SOURCE: Archaeology Daily

Internet Connections Create Tipping Points in Cities

2011-02-22T15:17:00.001-07:00

From Integral City:

Internet Connections Create Tipping Points in Cities

by Marilyn Hamilton

Revolution is spreading through the north African and Middle Eastern countries – the inflammation has started in cities and spreads to other cities. Why are these cities the nodes of contagion?

I can’t help notice that all these cities (and nations) were on Thomas Barnett’s New Map in 2004. He included them in his proposition that the world had a functioning core and a “non-integrating gap”. Since 2004 what has changed to shift life conditions in these disconnected cities? Have people been newly or differently connected? Because that seems to be the necessary condition for inciting the revolution – connection.

Using complexity theory (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point“) to explain the phenomenon that we are witnessing, we can see the evidence that in many of those countries more than 15% of the population now has internet connections. This is certainly the case in most Middle Eastern Countries we are seeing in the news – Iran, Iraq, Yemen. When we consider Tunisia and Egypt in the African stats, then we can see that there is almost a predictive quality to this information – where connections grow beyond 10-15% we arrive in the zone of a tipping point where revolution wants to happen.

Cities provide the container. The internet provides the new means of exchange between the citizens inside the city and between citizens of different cities. It would appear that it is time for Thomas Barnett to redraw his map? The equation of City + Internet Connections = Revolution is bringing about a rapid form of integration that is spreading like a virus – maybe even an intelligent virus?

Embodiment, Language and Cognition

2011-02-21T03:25:00.002-07:00

From Fronteirs in Cognition:

Embodied language comprehension requires an enactivist paradigm of cognition

by Michiel van Elk, Marc Slors and Harold Bekkering

Two recurrent concerns in discussions on an embodied view of cognition are the “necessity question” (i.e., is activation in modality-specific brain areas necessary for language comprehension?) and the “simulation constraint” (i.e., how do we understand language for which we lack the relevant experiences?). In the present paper we argue that the criticisms encountered by the embodied approach hinge on a cognitivist interpretation of embodiment. We argue that the data relating sensorimotor activation to language comprehension can best be interpreted as supporting a non-representationalist, enactivist model of language comprehension, according to which language comprehension can be described as procedural knowledge – knowledge how, not knowledge that – that enables us to interact with others in a shared physical world. The enactivist view implies that the activation of modality-specific brain areas during language processing reflects the employment of sensorimotor skills and that language comprehension is a context-bound phenomenon. Importantly, an enactivist view provides an embodied approach of language, while avoiding the problems encountered by a cognitivist interpretation of embodiment.

Read More: Here

The Coevolution of Human Bodies, Minds and Culture:

2011-02-18T10:49:00.002-07:00

Gene-Culture Coevolution

By Kevin N Laland

Many researchers have noted analogies between the processes of biological evolution and cultural change. For instance, both genes and culture are in formational entities that are differentially transmitted from one generation to the next. These similarities have led to the idea that culture evolves, and prompted the development of mathematical models of cultural evolution.

The main scientific approach to the study of how culture evolves is a branch of theoretical population genetics, known variously as `cultural evolution', `gene-culture coevolution', or `dual in-heritance' theory. This intellectual tradition has nothing in common with the nineteenth-century `cultural evolution' schools, which, based on an erroneous view of evolution as progressive, setout to model stages of societal development. Rather, the population genetics approach regards culture as an evolving pool of ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge that is learned and socially transmitted between individuals. Researchers focus on a single trait, such as a preference for drinking milk, or for sons over daughters, and employ a rigorous mathematical approach to describe how the cultural trait changes over time, sometimes coevolving with genetic variation. Where the cultural entity is a discrete package, it has much in common with Richard Dawkins' idea of the `meme', defined as a cultural analogue of the gene (Dawkins 1976).

Stone tools appear in the archeological record approximately two and a half million years ago. If, as is widely believed, lithic technologies and skills were transmitted from one generation to the next, these simple artifacts represent the earliest evidence for culture. In fact, comparative evidence for social learning in a variety of vertebrate species suggests that cultural transmission almost certainly preceded Homo habilis by a considerable length of time. However, social learning in other animals is rarely stable enough to support traditions in which information accumulates from one generation to the next. For at least 2 million years our ancestors have reliably inherited two kinds of information, one encoded by genes, the other by culture.

There is only one evolutionary approach to the study of human behavior that takes up the challenge of understanding genetic and cultural evolution simultaneously by focusing directly on their interaction. Gene-culture coevolutionary theory (or dual inheritance theory), together with evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology, is one of three principal evolutionary approaches that emerged in the aftermath of the human sociobiology debate (Smith 2000).

Conceptually, gene-culture coevolution is like a hybrid between memetics and evolutionary psychology, although its methods are quite different, relying as they do on rigorous mathematical theory. Like memeticists, gene-culture coevolution enthusiasts treat culture as evolving learned know-ledge. Like evolutionary psychologists, these re-searchers believe that the cultural knowledge individuals adopt may sometimes although certainly not always depend on their genetic constitution. Moreover, selection acting on the genetic system is commonly generated or modified by the spread of cultural information. For gene-culture coevolutionary theorists, the `leash' that ties culture to genes tugs both ways. The advent of culture was a precipitating evolutionary milestone, generating selection that favored a reorganization of the human brain, and leaving it specialized to acquire, store, and use cultural information. It was culture, loosely guided by genes, that allowed humans the adaptive flexibility to colonize the world.

Read More (PDF): Here

Kevin Laland is a widely respected biologist at the University of St Andrews. He conducts research on animal social learning, cultural evolution and niche construction. Prof. Laland is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

A Primer on Evolutionary Psychology

2011-02-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

From Center for Evolutionary Biology

Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer

By Leda Cosmides & John Tooby

The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.

In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new ones. This chapter is a primer on the concepts and arguments that animate it.

Read More: Here

Metaphors, Models and Modularity

2011-02-18T10:08:00.001-07:00

From Politics and Culture:

Metaphors, Models, and Modularity

By Gordon H. Orians

Abstract: Conceptions of the human brain range from the blank slate to a strongly modular structure produced by adaptations to problems our ancestors encountered in African savannas. Metaphors and models can help us formulate hypotheses about the level of constraining structure built into the brain. Here I discuss David Sloan Wilson’s use of the immune system as a model for human cognitive flexibility. The immune system has evolved to cope with the challenges posed by disease-causing organisms that are highly diverse, short-lived, and rapidly evolving. I argue that this model is not a good guide to the kind of cognitive structure that has evolved in response to challenges from more stable features of the ancestral environment, for instance, coping with large predators and hostile conspecifics or finding and selecting food.

Read More: Here

Gordon H. Orians is Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Washington. He is a behavioral ecologist whose research has focused on habitat selection, mate selection, foraging theory, and relationships between social systems of birds and the environments in which they function. Together with a psychologist, Judith Heerwagen, he is writing a book on the evolutionary roots of powerful emotional responses to the physical, biological, and social environments.

Caution Needed When Calling Out Climate Cranks

2011-02-14T11:12:00.002-07:00

From The Guardian:

The need for caution when 'calling out the climate cranks

'Environmental protesters in the US aim to challenge the 'climate cranks' - but they must be mindful of the rhetoric they use.

Just what the climate debate doesn't need: a new moniker for those who do not accept the mainstream scientific view of anthropogenic climate change.

According to environmental activists planning a day of protests across the US tomorrow, "climate crank" is set to be the latest name added to the growing list – self-appointed, or otherwise – which already includes sceptic, denier, contrarian, realist, dissenter, flat-earther, misinformer, and confusionist. But, for the protest organisers, the term "crank" more accurately describes this grouping:

For years, climate "sceptics" have denied the near-unanimous scientific consensus around global warming in an effort to delay action. They're not "sceptics" - they're cranks, and it's time to unmask those who are holding our nation's climate policy hostage. We're taking action to call out the climate cranks, shift the climate debate in Washington and, yeah, we are looking to make news.
The rallying cry seems to be centred around Mark Hertsgaard, the Nation's environmental correspondent and author of a new book called Generation Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. The idea behind the day is to "name and shame the climate cranks sabotaging our nation's response to climate change".

Peter Rothberg, a fellow Nation journalist, has written a blog detailing his colleague's efforts:

On Tuesday, February 15, Mark and supporters will head to Capitol Hill, the Fox TV bureau, the Chamber of Commerce and other hotbeds of climate denial. The goal? Put the climate cranks on the spot and make them explain - on camera and in front of kids - why they have condemned the young people of 'Generation Hot' (as Mark calls them), to spending the rest of their lives coping with the hottest climate in human history.
In his book, Hertsgaard offers further explanation:

We will highlight the ludicrousness of their anti-scientific views, which alone should discredit them from further influence over US climate policies. And we will show how our nation could still change course—for example, if the federal government were to use its vast purchasing power to kick-start a green energy revolution that would create jobs and prosperity across the land. We welcome your help and constructive suggestions for how to achieve these goals and invite you to join us.
This is far from being the lone effort of a man with a book to sell. In addition to the Nation magazine, Hertsgaard also has the support of the Sierra Club, 350.org, Kids vs. Global Warming, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and Grist.

It will be interesting to see who they manage to confront on camera. I certainly endorse any effort to expose and challenge those with a vested interest in ignoring the science – one only has to witness Senator James Inhofe's performance last week to see why this is so necessary – but, if I'm honest, I'm left wondering whether this new exercise in name-calling will only serve to distract from the important task at hand.

I'm also concerned by the accompanying video Hertsgaard has recorded to help promote both his book and his cause. I very much share his fears about what climate change might mean for his children – I have written as much myself – but I'm worried his message might be easily batted back at him by those he seeks to challenge because of his use - on occasion - of hyperbole. For example, he talks about his fears that "because of these cranks, my daughter might not have enough water to drink by the time she's my age". Why? "Because California's snowpack will have melted." Judging by his apparent age, I'm guessing he means in about 40 years' time.

I hope he's got a peer-reviewed paper at hand to back up this point because otherwise he'll have the likes of ClimateDepot's Marc Morano on his back filling up the sceptics' echo chamber with wilful misinterpretations about how Hertsgaard thinks that sceptics are going to kill his daughter by denying her water. Or something.

If environmentalists are going to play the science card – as they should – the one thing that the last few years of the climate debate should have taught them is that they have to get their statements about what the science says spot on. Namely, not be prone to cherry-pick or exaggerate in order to make a point. We're all guilty of it from time to time, but, wherever possible, it is far better to let those we seek to challenge make such slip-ups - particularly so when trying to expose the weaknesses and flaws that underpin their own position.

Neuro-electrical Fields

2011-02-02T23:22:00.001-07:00

From PHYSORG.com:

Neurobiologists find that weak electrical fields in the brain help neurons fire together

The brain -- awake and sleeping -- is awash in electrical activity, and not just from the individual pings of single neurons communicating with each other. In fact, the brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. The fields were once thought to be an "epiphenomenon, a 'bug' of sorts, occurring during neural communication," says neuroscientist Costas Anastassiou, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

New work by Anastassiou and his colleagues, however, suggests that the fields do much more—and that they may, in fact, represent an additional form of neural communication.

"In other words," says Anastassiou, the lead author of a paper about the work appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, "while active neurons give rise to extracellular fields, the same fields feed back to the neurons and alter their behavior," even though the neurons are not physically connected—a phenomenon known as ephaptic coupling. "So far, neural communication has been thought to occur at localized machines, termed synapses. Our work suggests an additional means of neural communication through the extracellular space independent of synapses."

Extracellular electric fields exist throughout the living brain, though they are particularly strong and robustly repetitive in specific brain regions such as the hippocampus, which is involved in memory formation, and the neocortex, the area where long-term memories are held. "The perpetual fluctuations of these extracellular fields are the hallmark of the living and behaving brain in all organisms, and their absence is a strong indicator of a deeply comatose, or even dead, brain," Anastassiou explains.

Previously, neurobiologists assumed that the fields were capable of affecting—and even controlling—neural activity only during severe pathological conditions such as epileptic seizures, which induce very strong fields. Few studies, however, had actually assessed the impact of far weaker—but very common—non-epileptic fields. "The reason is simple," Anastassiou says. "It is very hard to conduct an in vivo experiment in the absence of extracellular fields," to observe what changes when the fields are not around.

To tease out those effects, Anastassiou and his colleagues, including Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems, focused on strong but slowly oscillating fields, called local field potentials (LFP), that arise from neural circuits composed of just a few rat brain cells. Measuring those fields and their effects required positioning a cluster of tiny electrodes within a volume equivalent to that of a single cell body—and at distances of less than 50 millionths of a meter from one another.

"Because it had been so hard to position that many electrodes within such a small volume of brain tissue, the findings of our research are truly novel," Anastassiou says. Previously, he explains, "nobody had been able to attain this level of spatial and temporal resolution."

An "unexpected and surprising finding was how already very weak extracellular fields can alter neural activity," he says. "For example, we observed that fields as weak as one millivolt per millimeter robustly alter the firing of individual neurons, and increase the so-called "spike-field coherence"—the synchronicity with which neurons fire with relationship to the field."In the mammalian brain, we know that extracellular fields may easily exceed two to three millivolts per millimeter. Our findings suggest that under such conditions, this effect becomes significant."

What does that mean for brain computation? "Neuroscientists have long speculated about this," Anastassiou says. "Increased spike-field coherency may substantially enhance the amount of information transmitted between neurons as well as increase its reliability. Moreover, it has been long known that brain activity patterns related to memory and navigation give rise to a robust LFP and enhanced spike-field coherency. We believe ephaptic coupling does not have one major effect, but instead contributes on many levels during intense brain processing."

Can external electric fields have similar effects on the brain? "This is an interesting question," Anastassiou says. "Indeed, physics dictates that any external field will impact the neural membrane. Importantly, though, the effect of externally imposed fields will also depend on the brain state. One could think of the brain as a distributed computer—not all brain areas show the same level of activation at all times.

"Whether an externally imposed field will impact the brain also depends on which brain area is targeted. During epileptic seizures, pathological fields can be as strong as 100 millivolts per millimeter—such fields strongly entrain neural firing and give rise to super-synchronized states." And that, he adds, suggests that electric field activity—even from external fields—in certain brain areas, during specific brain states, may have strong cognitive and behavioral effects.

Ultimately, Anastassiou, Koch, and their colleagues would like to test whether ephaptic coupling affects human cognitive processing, and under which circumstances. "I firmly believe that understanding the origin and functionality of endogenous brain fields will lead to several revelations regarding information processing at the circuit level, which, in my opinion, is the level at which percepts and concepts arise," Anastassiou says. "This, in turn, will lead us to address how biophysics gives rise to cognition in a mechanistic manner—and that, I think, is the holy grail of neuroscience."

More information: The work in the paper, "Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons," published January 16 in the advance online edition of the journal.

Source: Here

On Neuroplasticity

2011-02-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

The dogma used to be that the adult brain was a rigid, unchangeable organ, but that pessimistic perspective is now being radically revised. Psychiatrist Dr Norman Doidge journeyed into the labs and lives of the 'neuroplasticians' -- once scientific mavericks, they're challenging the old neurological nihilism. Professor Jeffrey Schwartz is one. They both join Natasha Mitchell in discussion to reveal how the human brain has underestimated itself!

Listen Now - 13092008 Download Audio - 13092008

All In The Mind is Radio National's weekly foray into the mental universe, the mind, brain and behaviour - everything from addiction to artificial intelligence.

Naomi Klein On Our Addiction To Risk

2011-02-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

Days before the talk below, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?

A defining quote from the talk:

"The bottom line is that we badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes—and we need heroes willing to take different kinds of risks. Risks that confront recklessness head-on, and that put the precautionary principle into practice—even if that means direct action.

Like the hundreds of young people getting arrested blocking dirty power plants, or fighting mountain top removal coal mining. Like the indigenous people and ranchers in the US banding together to stop a new pipeline carrying tar sands oil. The organizers call it the “Cowboys and Indians coalition”—a new twist on an old myth.

Most of all we need stories that replace linear narratives of endless growth with circular ones that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it Karma if you like. Call it Physics: action and reaction.

Or call it precaution: the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit."

Protein Predicts Which Cancers Will Spread

2011-02-02T18:31:00.001-07:00

From The New Scientist:

Protein Predicts Which Cancers Will Spread

All cancer is bad, but tumours prone to forming secondary growths or "metastases" elsewhere in the body are the real killers. In future, levels of a modified protein present in many types of tumour may help predict whether cancer is likely to spread.
The discovery holds promise for singling out people at high risk of metastases for more aggressive treatment.

Peng Loh of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, and Ronnie Poon of the University of Hong Kong studied tumours from 99 people with liver cancer. By measuring levels of a modified protein, they could identify those who went on to develop secondary tumours within two years, with more than 90 per cent accuracy.

The results were similar for 14 people with rare adrenal gland cancers. That's encouraging, because the adrenal cancers arise from a completely different class of cell from those that form liver tumours. What's more, high levels of the protein were also found in cultures of metastatic cells from tumours of the colon, breast, head and neck.
"This biomarker may be useful for many types of cancer," says Loh. If so, subjects at high risk could be monitored more closely for signs of spread and treated accordingly. For example, if caught early, secondary growths of some types of cancer can be wiped out using a probe that zaps them with radio waves.

Modified Enzyme

The protein being monitored is a modified form of carboxypeptidase E, an enzyme normally involved in processing proteins before they are secreted from the cell. Its altered form moves to the nucleus, where it ramps up the activity of a gene involved in metastasis.

The results now need to be repeated in larger groups of patients, with different types of cancer. This validation will be the crucial step, cautions Amato Giaccia, a specialist in metastasis at Stanford University in California.

Giaccia warns that earlier promising biomarkers for cancer spread have failed to provide reliable predictions in subsequent studies. "That's when you don't hear of these things anymore," he says.

reference: The Journal of Clinical Investigation

Coping with Brain Injury: Caregiving Strategies

2011-01-31T12:52:00.000-07:00

It's certainly not easy to be the caregiver for someone with a serious brain injury. Depression, sense of loss and frustration are likely consequences. This informative interview explores strategies to avoid isolation and anger, and points the way toward resources to make the job easier.

Dialectical Thinking as an Approach to Integration

2011-01-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

The Development of Dialectical Thinking as an Approach to Integration

By Michael Basseches

This article offers a description of dialectical thinking as a psychological phenomenon that reflects adult intellectual development. While relating this psychological phenomenon to the various dialectical philosophical perspectives from which the description is derived, the article conceptualizes dialectical thinking as a form of organization of thought, various aspects of which can be identified in individual adults' approaches to conceptualizing a range of problems, rather than as one particular stream of intellectual history.

The article provides a range of examples of dialectical analyses, contrasting them with more formalistic analyses, in order to convey the power, adequacy, and significance of dialectical thinking for the sorts of challenges that this journal embraces. It suggests that events in all areas of life demand recognition of the limitations of closed-system approaches to analysis. Approaches based instead on the organizing principle of dialectic integrate dimensions of contradiction, change and system-transformation over time in a way that supports people's adaptation when structures under girding their sense of self/world coherence are challenged. Higher education and psychotherapy are considered as examples of potential contexts for adult intellectual development, and the conditions that foster such development in these contexts are discussed.

The article as a whole makes the case for consciously attempting to foster such development in all our work as an approach to integration.

Read the Entire Paper: Integral Review - Issue 1 (2005)

The Economic Injustice of Plastic

2011-01-25T22:22:00.000-07:00

Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries "first and worst," with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet:

Anthony "Van" Jones is founder of the Ella Baker Center for human rights, based in Oakland, California, and of Green for All, an NGO dedicated to "building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty." His work points to the connection between green energy and job creation. He's the author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. In 2009, US President Obama appointed Jones his Special Advisor on Green Jobs; Jones resigned the position later that year.

Jones is a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress and a senior policy advisor at Green For All. He holds a joint appointment at Princeton as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Integral Methodological Pluralism in Practice

2011-01-25T11:26:00.006-07:00

Integral Research as a Practical Mixed-Methods Framework: Clarifying The Role of Integral Methodological Pluralism

By Jeffery A. Martin

The mixed methods community could represent a significant opportunity to place Integral Theory at the very heart of the academy. Methodological communities often define what is and is not acceptable within academic research. Soon, the mixed methods community will need to move beyond designs involving a relatively small number of intra-study methods to larger intra- and intermethodological frameworks.

Integral Theory is well positioned to provide key portions of these needed frameworks and assume a more central role within the academy. This article begins by examining and clarifying some core definitional issues with Integral Methodological Pluralism and Integral Research. It next defines the current state of the mixed methods community and the opportunities provided. Finally, it discusses how Integral Methodological Pluralism and Integral Research are positioned to take advantage of these opportunities.

Read More: Here

JEFFERY A. MARTIN is currently a graduate student at California Institute of Integral Studies and Harvard University. His research interests include methodology, psychological effects on experimentation, and consciousness studies. Jeffery is the author, co-author, or co-editor of over 15 books and director of the Center for the Study of Intent.

Fassin on Survival and the Politics of Life

2011-01-25T09:54:00.009-07:00

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, illuminating important issues about the AIDS epidemic, social inequalities in health, and the changing landscape of global health. More recently, he has developed a new domain of inquiry he terms “political and moral anthropology,” analyzing the reformulation of injustice and violence as suffering and trauma, the expansion of an international humanitarian government, and the contradictions in the contemporary politics of life. His present project, a contribution to an anthropology of the state, explores the political and moral treatment of disadvantaged groups, including immigrants and refugees, through an ethnography of police, justice, and prison.

Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life

By Didier Fassin

What is the human? One way to confront this question has been, since antiquity, to distinguish the human from the animal, or rather to ask how humans are not just animals. It is well known that Aristotle’s answer was to affirm that “man is by nature a political animal” and that speech—or language—yields him this exclusive quality by giving him “a sense of good and evil, of just and unjust.”1 During the twentieth century, this question about the human has been reformulated, in a philosophical lineage from Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, into a question about “life,” sometimes even rephrased in terms of “biopolitics”—or more precisely, as I have argued, of “politics of life.”2 The distinction between man and animal has thus become a difference between physical or biological life, which man has in common with the rest of the animal kingdom, and social or political, life, which renders him unique.

Born from the experience of two world wars and two totalitarianisms, this reading of the human condition recently took a tragic turn and a radical form which became central in the analysis of the situation of the refugees and the displaced, the poor and the dominated, with the camp presented as the biopolitical figure par excellence. In light of what can be considered as Jacques Derrida’s legacy, but also of my fieldwork in townships and former homelands in South Africa, I will discuss here this vision of the politics of life which has exerted an increasing influence in the humanities and social sciences during the last decade, and I will propose an alternative reading.

“Long before the experience of survival that I am presently facing, I wrote that survival is an original concept which constitutes the very structure of what we call existence. We are, structurally speaking, survivors, marked by this structure of the trace, of the testament. That said, I would not endorse the view according to which survival is more on the side of death and the past than of life and the future. No, deconstruction is always on the side of the affirmation of life.”3 A few weeks before his death, Jacques Derrida gave his last interview in which he developed at length his conception of life as survival. Suffering from a terminal disease, he confided: “Since certain health problems are becoming more pressing, the question of survival and reprieve, which has always haunted me, literally, every moment of my life, in a concrete and tireless way, takes on a different color today.” In reference to a sentence he had used in one of his books (“I would finally like to know how to live”) he commented with a penetrating irony: “No, I never learned to live. Definitely not! Learning to live should mean learning to die. I never learned to accept death. I remain impervious to being educated in the wisdom of knowing how to die.”

However, beyond the emergency of this “shrinking time of reprieve” (which he rejected with humor, saying, “we are not here for a health bulletin”), it is the more general problem of survival on which the philosopher wanted to meditate: “I have always been interested in the question of survival, the meaning of which does not add to life and death. It is originary: life is survival.” In fact, both dimensions were for him intimately related, the personal experience repeating the existential experience, the circumstantial ordeal making the structural reality more evident and more painful. How else to understand that on the verge of death, thinking about survival could become so insistent in this interview, until the final profession of faith? “Everything I say about survival as a complication of the opposition between life and death proceeds from an unconditional affirmation of life. Survival is life beyond life, life more than life, and the discourse I undertake is not about death. On the contrary, it is the affirmation of a living being who prefers life and therefore survival to death, because survival is not simply what remains; it is the most intense life possible.”

I want to show that Derrida’s conception of life as survival, in its polysemy and even its ambiguity, may offer an alternative to conceptions of life which, from Benjamin to Agamben, and in a quite different perspective, from Lamarck to Canguilhem, have presented a seductive dualistic framework for the humanities and social sciences. Both visions are inherited from Aristotle. On the one hand, life is presented as biopolitical fact: “Behind the long strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may be killed,” affirms Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer, where he develops his theory of “bare life.”4 From the “politicization of life” in totalitarian systems to the “isolation of the sacred life” in contemporary democracies, he therefore establishes a continuum of the power over life. On the other hand, life is conceived as a biological phenomenon: “any datum of experience possible to trace as a history comprised between its birth and its death is living, is the object of biological knowledge,” writes Georges Canguilhem for the entry “Life” in the Encyclopedia Universalis.5 He presents life successively as “animation,” “mechanism,” “organization,” and “information,” in a chronological review of biological theories extending from ancient conceptions to contemporary genetics—and everyone knows that the genome is often said to be the “code of life.”

In other words, these two readings present life as what can be put to death (for Agamben), and as what is comprised from birth to death (for Canguilhem). The social sciences have largely drawn from these two repertoires: the former has been used to comprehend the government of populations and human beings; the latter has nourished the sociology and anthropology of sciences and techniques. However different they may be, these two models rest on the same premises. Both treat life as a physical phenomenon, whether it is “bare life” or “biological life” (both philosophers insisting that it is the dimension shared with the entire animal kingdom). And both assume that life can be separated, for scientific or political reasons, from life as an existential phenomenon, whether it is called “qualified life” or “lived experience” (by Agamben and Canguilhem respectively).6 It seems to me that Derrida’s reflection shatters this distinction: “survival” mixes inextricably physical life, threatened by his cancer, and existential experience, expressed in his work. To survive is to be still fully alive and to live beyond death. It is the “unconditional affirmation” of life and the pleasure of living, and it is the hope of “surviving” through the traces left for the living.

There is, I believe, in this revelation much more than the last testimony of a philosopher who did not accustom us to such clarity and simplicity. I see it as an ethical gesture through which life is rehabilitated in its most obvious and most ordinary dimension—life which has death for horizon but which is not separated from life as a social form, inscribed in a history, a culture, an experience. I consider the consequences of this gesture to be decisive for the humanities and social sciences: or so I want to argue here.

Too often, in recent years, anthropologists and sociologists have tended, under the influence of the philosophical conceptions of life presented above, to take for granted the distinction between the forms of life they affirm—qualified life versus bare life or physical existence versus existential experience. Indeed this reductionism, when it is employed in the study of biological sciences, is fully justified, although its definition of life often seems hegemonic, or at least forgetful of other possibilities: some even speak of “life itself.” Conversely, when it is applied to the study of human government, it generally has the effect of disqualifying as inferior the lives of individuals or groups that society appears to reduce to their condition of “bare life”: refugees, excluded, marginalized, sick. Having been myself receptive to this dualism, and still sympathetic to the philosophers who proposed it, but also having observed among many colleagues and students the attraction exerted by this paradigm of bare life, I am sensitive not only to the intellectual risk but also to the ethical danger represented by its indiscriminate use in the humanities and social sciences. This is why I will concentrate my critical analysis on the biopolitical rather than biological reading of life.

In the first part, I will therefore trace the genealogy of this tragic vision of the politics of life, from Benjamin to Arendt to Agamben, but not Foucault, for reasons I will explain. I want to show that no necessary line was followed; instead, specific alternatives were opened: in fact, the exploration of the politics of life could certainly have followed other paths. In the second part, I will evoke South African lives in the time of AIDS, focusing on biographies of the afflicted and ending with the most publicized of them. I actually read the interview with Derrida while conducting my research in the townships and former homelands of a country with which the French philosopher was quite familiar, since he actively fought the apartheid regime. The resonance of his words with the interviews I was collecting for my fieldwork immediately struck me: this coincidence is what drove me to consider the anthropological consequences of the concept of survival.

Genealogy

“To survive, in the usual sense of the word, is to continue to live, but also to live after death,” Derrida explains in his last interview, adding: “Speaking of translation, Benjamin underlines the distinction between überleben, to live after death, as a book can survive the death of its author or the child the death of parents, and fortleben, to continue to live.” It is therefore in reference to Benjamin that Derrida proposes the dual meaning of his experience of survival: to live beyond and to keep on living, at the frontier of the biographical and the biological. However, of this profound reflection there remains little trace. Those who claim to be Benjamin’s heirs are generally inclined to refer to his critique of violence. Conversely, I want to examine the forgotten alternatives and tragic choices in the genealogy of contemporary philosophies of life.

Mere life

In his essay “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin proposes this surprising parallel: “Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life than from its afterlife.”7 There is therefore a life of the original and a survival through its “translation,” but also through its “glory”—and more generally a life that escapes materiality, a life that is “not limited to organic corporeality.” This intuition allows him to shift from literary work to a more general reflection on life: “In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history.” What is true for the work of art is also true for the human being. The full recognition of his life lies in this history where nature is inscribed. Biography prevails over biology, and history over nature.

Two years earlier, however, Benjamin had published another article, titled “Critique of Violence,” which ended with a discussion of life in reference to revolutionary violence: “The proposition that existence stands higher than just existence is false and ignominious, if existence means nothing more than mere life.”8 He later expands on this distinction: “Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than any other of his conditions and qualities, not even with the uniqueness of his bodily person.” In other words, “however sacred man is,” it cannot be a consequence of his “bodily life,” as implied in the “dogma of the sacredness of life.” This is why, for Benjamin, not all violence should be condemned: if “lawmaking violence,” which is “executive,” and “law-preserving violence,” which “serves it,” are “pernicious,” he writes, then by contrast, violence exerted over other men for a superior good may be necessary, since it is respectful of life, not as “mere life” but as “that life that is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife.” There is something in life that is not reducible to its physical dimension but includes and exceeds it.

The formulation of the concept of “mere life,” as contrasted with “just life,” and the critique of “the sanctity of life,” as opposed to the “sacredness of man,” have given birth to numerous comments and to a philosophical descent that has nourished a tragic perspective in the humanities and social sciences. We should take its measure and consider its consequences. First, it establishes a distinction in the sacredness of the human between the uniqueness of the bodily person and the continuity of his or her life beyond this material dimension. Second, it institutes a hierarchy between the two, just existence being above mere life. There is a dual operation, therefore, of differentiation and evaluation. Contemporary approaches preserve this reading of life. In Benjamin’s own mind, however, it did not exclude a more tempered view, according to which life integrates its various forms without rupture, linking bodily existence and immaterial survival, nature, and history.

Life itself

An admirer of Benjamin whose work she prefaced, Hannah Arendt positioned the question of life at the center of her interpretation of the French Revolution: “Behind the appearances was a reality, and this reality was biological and not historical, though it appeared now perhaps for the first time in history.” This biological theory of revolutionary movements, which is explicitly a critique of Marxism, is more complex than it seems. On the one hand, Arendt conceives of it as the production of a social body: “The biological imagery underlies and pervades the organic and social theories of history, which all have in common that they see a multitude—the factual plurality of a nation or a people or society—in the image of a supernatural body driven by one superhuman, irresistible, general will.” On the other hand, Arendt sees the physical force as the ultimate justification of revolutionary violence: “It was under the rule of this necessity that the multitude rushed to the assistance of the French Revolution, inspired it, drove it onward, and eventually sent it to its doom, for this was the multitude of the poor.” There is therefore implicitly a dual dimension in this theory of life as the source of the revolution. It is organicist (the unified multitude) and materialist (the pressing necessity) at once: “This raging force may well nigh appear irresistible because it lives from and is nourished by the necessity of biological life itself.” Associating both dimensions, Marx “strengthened more than anybody else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life process of society is the very center of human endeavor.” Also a critic of the sacralization of life, Arendt however dissociates herself from Benjamin by her rejection of Marxist theory from which he drew his theory of history. Indeed, between the two, the Leninist project has turned into the Stalinist totalitarianism, the crimes of which are increasingly acknowledged.9

The analysis of the human condition that Hannah Arendt presented two years earlier adopts a less dramatic position. “Vita activa,” distinguished from “vita contemplativa,” comprises three components: labor, work, and action. Even as the philosopher attempts to grasp “the ever-recurrent cyclical movement of nature,” she immediately adds: “The birth and death of human beings are not simple natural occurrences, but are related to a world into which single individuals, unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable entities, appear and from which they depart.” Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of mankind is only possible under this condition: the survival of humanity occurs through the birth and death of human beings, who are unique, in other words, irreducible to their natural existence. The two dimensions are indissociable. On the one hand, life, “limited by a beginning and an end, follows a strictly linear movement whose very motion nevertheless is driven by the motor of biological life which man shares with other living things and which forever retains the cyclical movement of nature.” On the other hand, life, “specifically human, is itself full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography.” Referring to Aristotle, she therefore opposes “this life, bios” with “mere zoē ,” history and language establishing what is the human proper.10

Within a few short years, Arendt thus proposes two quite distinct readings of life. The premises are identical: life as a natural phenomenon is differentiated from life as a historical phenomenon; biology is contrasted to biography. However, the relation between the two is, in one case, conflictual and tragic; in the other, it is harmonious and reconciled. In her essay on the French Revolution, she affirms that biological life placed at the center of politics dooms human beings to hard times. In her study of the human condition, she asserts that separating bodily existence from human experience is fortunately impossible. She criticizes Marx on the first front. She returns to Aristotle on the second one. Here, the distinction between bios and zoē suggests complementarities rather than contradictions.

Bare life

Relying on the same philosophical corpus, Giorgio Agamben follows a quite distinct path in his inquiry on homo sacer. This “figure of the archaic Roman law in which the character of sacredness is tied for the first time to a human life as such” signifies that certain criminals may be considered as human beings whose ritual killing is forbidden but whose possible murder is covered by impunity. This paradox of the homo sacer becomes the point of departure of a profound reflection on “sovereign power and bare life,” with a parallel drawn between the king’s body and the refugee’s condition. According to Agamben, these extreme cases—the power of the former and the vulnerability of the latter—are inscribed in the long history of the politicization of physical life and of a sovereignty founded on exception. Following Arendt’s proposition, Agamben radicalizes the Aristotelian distinction. On the one hand, he accentuates differences and hardens significations: he contrasts zoē, “the simple fact of living common to all living beings,” which is “excluded from the polis in the strict sense and remains confined to the sphere of the oikos,” with bios, “the way of living proper to an individual or a group,” which is also a “qualified life, a particular way of life.” Between the two, no possible path is envisaged. On the other hand, he underscores, almost contradictorily, the confusion: “politics appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized”; consequently, “in the politicization of bare life, the humanity of living man is decided.” Thus the Western world is marked, from its very origin, by the inscription of biological life in the heart of political life. This aporia of separation and confusion of bios and zoē would therefore be the ultimate truth of our modernity: “The decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter in a zone of irreducible indistinction.” Homo sacer, long ago confined to the margins of society, is thus presented as the central figure of our world.11

Continuing this first exploration of the relation between life and politics, Agamben offers a second inquiry dealing with the state of exception, which he conceives as “the original means of referring to and encompassing life” and as “no-man’s land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life.” This study finds a particular international resonance in the post-9/11 context marked by the multiplication of procedures of exception, from the U.S. Patriot Act to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. The state of exception may serve as “paradigm of government” inasmuch as, drawing the consequences of Benjamin’s famous affirmation that “the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” Agamben considers that, far from being exceptional, the state of exception has become a “technique of government” which “threatens radically to alter—in fact has already palpably altered—the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forces.” Therefore, he can assert that, from a juridical perspective, the Lager where the Nazis confined Jews is “the only thing to which could possibly be compared” the prisons in Afghanistan where the U.S. army detained Taliban forces. By doing so, he merely illustrates the general thesis he had introduced earlier: “Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” He explains that this thesis “throws a sinister light on the models by which social sciences, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world’s cities, without clear awareness that at their very center, lies the same bare life (even if it has been transformed and rendered apparently more human) that defined biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.” The radicalism of this proposition, though it provoked critical reactions, also elicited an intense echo in the humanities and social sciences, as bare life, the exception, and the camp became ordinary figures to think about our world, its repressive policies as well as its humanitarian practices.12

Thus, if Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt kept a door open to a possible reconciliation between bodily existence and political life, nature and history, biology and biography, Giorgio Agamben definitely excludes this hypothesis. For him, the two forms of life are simultaneously incompatible and confused—for the worse. On the one hand, they exclude each other, and bare life increasingly prevails over qualified life. On the other hand, they include each other and bare life blends itself into qualified life. We therefore observe a “separation of the humanitarian and the political” which is the extreme expression of the “interlacement of bios and zoē.” In this perspective, a continuum exists between the concentration camp and the refugee camp: “The stadium in Bari into which the Italian police in 1991 provisionally herded all illegal Albanian immigrants before sending them back to their country, the winter cycle-racing track in which the Vichy authorities gathered the Jews before consigning them to the Germans, the Konzentrationslager für Ausländer in Cottsburg-Sielow in which the Weimar government gathered Jewish refugees from the East, or the zones d’attente in French international airports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are detained will then all equally be camps.” According to this worldview, no way out can be envisaged: “There is no return from the camps to classical politics.”13

Beyond this radical pessimism, the tragedy of the extension of homo sacer to contemporary societies thus suggests two further remarks. On one side, there is a hierarchical conception of lives (physical life being reduced to bare life) which is also a hierarchical conception of human beings (between those who only have their bare life left and those whose life is qualified). On the other, there is an undifferentiated conception of politics (the distinction between deportation toward the home country and deportation toward the extermination camps becoming secondary) ,which is also an undifferentiated conception of the polis (since in both cases no return to politics is possible). Without caricaturing the thesis of the Italian philosopher, whose critical power is certainly provocative, it remains that this reading of the politics of life may be said to be nondemocratic because of the hierarchy of lives it supposes, the indistinction of the political it implies, and perhaps even more the disappearance of subjects.

Epilogue 1 (Foucault’s absence)

One might be surprised by the absence of reference to Michel Foucault in a genealogy of biopolitics—here considered as politics of biological life. Is he not the one who coined the word as one of the two expressions of biopower, “the power to make live and let die” in which he saw the entry in our political modernity?14 Is he not the author with whom Giorgio Agamben engages his own reflection on “the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of state power, and politics turns into biopolitics”?15 One should certainly answer affirmatively to both questions but also add that in fact, as I have tried to show elsewhere, it is not life that interests Michel Foucault when he speaks of biopolitics, but “populations” considered as a modern invention.16

In The Will to Knowledge, he characterizes biopolitics as the technologies of regulation of populations. Subsequently, in his course on The Birth of Biopolitics, he actually explores the emergence of political economy and liberal reason. In other words, if biopower is initially described as a power over life which substitutes itself to sovereign power as a right to kill, and even if Foucault briefly relates the question of biology and of politics in his genealogy of the racial discourse in his lectures Society Must Be Defended, he essentially delivers a biopolitical theory without life, if I dare say.17 However, he suggests a remarkably fruitful insight with his famous assertion: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence, modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”18 What this government of life was remains an open question. His followers will often close its potentialities. But it should be reminded that, for a series of reasons from his personal commitments to various social movements and political protests of his time to his later theoretical orientation toward the ethical dimension of the government of the self and others, Foucault had a very democratic sense of public and private life.

Biographies

“We are all survivors on reprieve (and from a geopolitical point of view, the emphasis is mostly, in a more unequal world than ever, on the billions of living beings—human or not—who are denied not only the basic ‘human rights’ which go back two hundred years ago and are increasingly expanded, but also the right to a life worth living).” This aside is quite noteworthy in Jacques Derrida’s last interview, which is otherwise essentially personal. Nevertheless, it is not surprising given his commitments to numerous causes and particularly—we may have forgotten—to the struggle against apartheid. It invites a political turn to the restitution of his experience, and which would inscribe it in a broader interrogation of global inequality in terms of life and survival.

It is in this direction that I will continue my inquiry by examining three biographical fragments collected in the townships of Soweto and Alexandra, near Johannesburg, and ending with a public figure, in each case to underline the extent to which physical existence and qualified life find a complex and subtle articulation—not in the tragic mode of the exception but in the ordinary experience of persons within a democratic space.

This research concerns AIDS in South Africa from 2000–2005, when the country became the most severely affected with the disease in the world (with approximately five millions infected individuals, about one fifth of the adult population.)19 The epidemic revealed profound inequalities that the politics of segregation and later the regime of apartheid had deepened. The most visible of these disparities concerned access to antiretroviral drugs, complicated by the government’s reluctance to implement an effective health care and prevention policy. Each of the four persons I evoke was confronted by the issue of survival, as was, in a tragic way, the entire country, or rather part of it: the director of the Centre for Actuarial Research at the University of Cape Town, Rob Dorrington, anticipated a twenty-year decrease in the life expectancy of African people over two decades, and the director of the Medical Research Council of South Africa, Malegapuru Makgoba, dramatically announced that the day would come when Blacks would be a minority. My reflection on the four cases is mostly presented around extracts of interviews, but it is embedded in ethnographic work conducted over six years, which allows me to venture some of the interpretations I propose and to draw a parallel with the same kind of oral material from Derrida’s last interview.

I know I will survive

In her small house in Alexandra where her illness, now in a terminal phase, confines her, Sophia greets me with these words: “Such a long time since I last saw you,” adding with a sad smile: “Next time I will be dead.” She knows how serious her condition is and she has actually made arrangements for her funerals. However, a little while later, she tells me: “I think I will survive: I have this belief. I know I will survive.” How can we take into account this tension between the anticipation of death and the expectation of survival? And how can we fail to draw a parallel between this formulation—and maybe experience—and that of Derrida?

Certainly at first glance, one could see a contradiction here: the acknowledgment of a death foretold versus the denial of an intolerable perspective. Rather than contradiction, one should actually speak of ambiguity, a sort of psychological hesitation between realism and optimism. A religious reference enhances this interpretation. “I will succeed, because my church helps me a lot, even the priest helps me a lot.” The numerous, mostly Christian African churches (Sophia is Methodist) recruit many of their believers among AIDS patients, to whom they promise a survival that is both physical healing, moral rebirth, and spiritual felicity in the hereafter. The distinction between the three promises is never clear and it is precisely this uncertainty that makes painful moments livable and sometimes even happy. Between natural life, good life, and eternal life, frontiers are porous; and AIDS patients consider survival in all these registers simultaneously. When Sophia strangely exclaims: “I don’t want this virus to destroy my life!” she is therefore beyond the apparent contradiction between her words and her condition.

Yet on second glance—though this is not incompatible with the previous analysis—one must consider the tension observed in her assertions in a deeper sense. Sophia knows she will die; she has seen a priest to tell him exactly the way she wants her burial, even choosing the music to be played that day. The survival to which she alludes when she says “I know I will survive” corresponds to two orders of reality. On the one hand, it is the life that remains to be lived, from which she wants to benefit as fully and as significantly as possible. She intends to use her reprieve to visit her father’s tomb and carry out a ritual of separation and reparation. She must talk to him and tell him about her disease, her boyfriend’s death, her son’s birth. But the time that remains is also composed of moments of happiness. She just met a man who is in love with her and to whom she has revealed her status. He keeps on coming and his company comforts her. She confides in him about her illness, her symptoms, her medicines, her fears, and the impossibility of living a normal life as a couple. Her physical existence thus nourishes her affective life without, however, any confusion between the two.

On the other hand, there is life that will survive her death and will allow her to exist for others beyond her bodily disappearance. She will leave a child whom she knows will be the object of disputes between his maternal and paternal families, in particular because of the foster grants that grandparents receive from the state for taking care of orphans. But in order for her son to remember her long after her death, Sophia has made, a memory-box, as patients often do with the help of nongovernmental organizations. It contains various objects such as clothes and a shoe, a photo of her before she became emaciated by the disease, a tape on which she has recorded a few minutes of an autobiographical narrative, a notebook where she keeps a written version of her history, and a print of her palm on a piece of plaster. Survival thus means for Sophia “to continue to live” and “to live beyond death,” as Derrida asserts in his interview. She says it with simple but profound words that I have heard more than once in South Africa.

It’s just normal life

It is by speaking with Mesias that I understood how greatly forms of life were interconnected without being confused and were reflected upon by my interlocutors, including in Soweto, where I had first met him. “The only thing is that the challenge of life will be when you wake up in the morning—as long as you wake up in the morning. Because, you know, our process is to be born and to die—but in between that is life.” Intrigued by this formulation in the style of Arendt, I inquire about what this means more specifically for him: “My life: it’s just normal life. Normal life is what people live out of it. That is normal life: having food in your stomach, having somebody next to you, being respected in your community.” Physiological life, affective life, and social life: a trilogy of qualified lives that do not draw separation between the body and society. This description precisely corresponded to what Mesias had finally attained after many years when none of these three conditions was met. But what did he mean by this remarkable formulation—“normal life”? In light of the multiple exchanges I have had with him over several years, I have the impression that it had a dual signification: first, it is an ordinary life (it is in the norm considered as the statistical mean); second, it is a moral life (it is in conformity with the norm in the sense of what is good). In fact, both this ordinary life and this moral life were a new experience for him, since until that point he had only known uncertainty and disorder in his private and public life.

Originally from the province of Limpopo in the north of the country, when Mesias arrived in the city, he lived the turbulent and precarious life typical of many adolescents and youth in the last years of the regime of apartheid. He spent some time with a prostitute, then met a woman with whom he had a baby who died of AIDS a few months later. This is how both of them discovered their viral status. They eventually broke up and he settled in the small town where his family resided. Mesias lived there with a new companion to whom he did not disclose his medical condition and who learned one day that she too was infected. More than worrying about his own disease, it was the consciousness that he might have transmitted it to the woman he loved that had profoundly affected Mesias. His partner had initiated him to the Zion Christian Church, the most important religious group in South Africa, and this experience accelerated his moral conversion. He adopted a handicapped child, quit drinking and going out, and participated in AIDS prevention campaigns. He soon gained the esteem of his neighborhood and even beyond, since he often spoke on the radio about his condition and the promotion of risk-free practices. The disability grant he received from the state as a right because of his illness gave him for the first time the opportunity to have a decent and independent existence: he could even rent a house. His disease evolved into a social resource, not only because of its economic consequences but also due to its moral and even civic implications. He had “learned how to live,” to use Derrida’s words. Just like many other patients I met in South Africa.

I am not of the dying type

At the end of a lengthy interview she gave me, Magda, whom I had known for a long time, stated: “People say, ‘Yeah, you’re going to die because you’re HIV-positive.’ Myself, I used to say, ‘I am not of the dying type.’ I am living, I am being strong, because I am not scared of anybody now.” Still a young woman, Magda has had a particularly hard life. During her childhood, raised by her grandmother in rural Lesotho, she was the victim of repeated rapes by one of her uncles. When her mother, a migrant worker, asked her to join her in her new homestead in KwaZulu-Natal, Magda was subjected to the authority of a violent stepfather who constantly abused her sexually. At the age of eighteen, she left for Johannesburg, where, without resource or shelter, she slept with men she would meet on the street in exchange for a meal or a drink. She did not consider this activity as prostitution, which she regarded as organized sex work in hotels. She thought of herself as merely surviving, using a Zulu word, phanding, which means to scratch the ground to find food. She later had several jobs and various boyfriends. With one of them she had a child who died of AIDS at a very young age. Having fallen ill herself, she rented a shack in Alexandra on her own and started a new life.

A local nongovernmental organization financed by international funds and involved in home-based care hired her. Since she also started to receive a disability grant from the state because of her medical condition, her economic situation improved rapidly. She then decided to have a child, but to avoid the tragic fate of her first-born, she volunteered to participate in a clinical trial in the Soweto hospital. She received antiretroviral drugs for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission and later for the treatment of her illness. At that time, the government was still hesitant about the efficacy and risk of these medicines and had not authorized their use in public health facilities. The child was born healthy and Magda’s condition also notably improved.

Through her association with the social workers and physicians involved in the combat against AIDS, she herself became an activist. She went to numerous marches and spectacular protests against the government, with several newspaper articles about her appearing in the national and even international press. Magda was able to recapture her life, of which violence, misery, and disease had seemed to rob her. She even built, on the basis of her threatened biological life, a political project which gave a new meaning to her public life just as she founded a family project which introduced a new sense to her private life, therefore escaping the alternative between the polis and the oikos. And like Jacques Derrida, she never “learned to accept death.” Her bodily survival, which was unlikely when her disease was discovered, was a reprieve gained over her death toll through a series of social engagements and political combats which had biological life for their object.

Epilogue 2 (Achmat’s presence)

The figure of Zachie Achmat towers above the world of AIDS in South Africa. Co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign, he was much more than its official chairperson: he literally embodied its struggle. A member of the African National Congress, he was engaged in the battle against apartheid. Echoing Chris Hani’s famous prophecy of 1990 that AIDS would be the next challenge the country would face once the white supremacist regime was abolished, Achmat went from one fight to the next. Raised in a township designated for Colored people, being a gay activist and an AIDS patient, he is committed to his core to these different causes.

However, it is the Treatment Action Campaign that has won him national and international recognition. This organization initially fought the pharmaceutical industry because their medicines were financially inaccessible to the great majority of patients on the African continent, and later the government whose heterodox beliefs led to the blockage of the distribution of antiretroviral drugs in hospitals. The repertoire of actions of the Treatment Action Campaign was wide and provocative, making use of the street, the media, and the judicial system. Memorably, in the case they brought before the Pretoria High Court against the Health Minister in the name of the constitutional right to live, the judge obliged the government to implement without delay the effective prevention of mother-to-child transmission.20 During all the years of struggle, Achmat remarkably refused to take drugs that he was prescribed, affirming that he would only start his treatment when it would be available to all South Africans.

Far from being a passively endured tragedy, disease became an actively mobilized resource. Of his private suffering, Achmat was making a public cause. By placing his physical existence at stake, he was disrupting the supposed separation of the biological and the political. He was defending a biological citizenship that was also a political citizenship.21 Many of the struggles led during the 1990s and subsequent decade for access to health care in various parts of the world—from the health exception of the World Trade Organization in Doha to the medical aid of the state for undocumented immigrants in France—are examples of the numerous instances when life was used as a resource to obtain rights which certainly cannot be reduced to their biological dimension: because they are precisely rights and not obligations, they must also be regarded as political. Such struggles put democracy to the test as much as they enliven it. A reading that simplifies the politics of life eludes this dialectic, in which social agents are part and parcel.

Conclusion

Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview, not only shifts lines that are too often hardened between biological and political lives: it opens an ethical space for reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has often taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus unveiled the way in which individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era.

However, through indiscriminate extension, this powerful instrument has lost some of its analytical sharpness and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the binary reduction of life to the opposition between nature and history, bare life and qualified life, when systematically applied from philosophical inquiry in sociological or anthropological study, erases much of the complexity and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed. On the other hand, the normative prejudices which underlie the evaluation of the forms of life and of the politics of life, when generalized to an undifferentiated collection of social facts, end up by depriving social agents of legitimacy, voice, and action. The risk is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for ethical attention.

In fact, the genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main founders of these theories expressed tensions and hesitations in their work, which was often more complex, if even sometimes more obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in the humanities and social sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to fragments from South African lives that I have described and analyzed in more detail elsewhere, suggest the necessity of complicating the dualistic models that oppose biological and political lives. Certainly, powers like the market and the state do act sometimes as if human beings could be reduced to “mere life,” but democratic forces, including from within the structure of power, tend to produce alternative strategies that escape this reduction. And people themselves, even under conditions of domination, manage subtle tactics that transform their physical life into a political instrument or a moral resource or an affective expression.

But let us go one step further: ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what human beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives permanently question what it is to be human. “The blurring between what is human and what is not human shades into the blurring over what is life and what is not life,” writes Veena Das. In the tracks of Wittgenstein and Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of life “not only obscures the mutual absorption of the natural and the social but also emphasizes form at the expense of life.”22 It should be the incessant effort of social scientists to return to this inquiry about life in its multiple forms but also in its everyday expression of the human.

NOTES
1. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), I, 1253a, 28–29.
* This text began as a paper titled “Survivre” I wrote for the posthumous homage paid to Jacques Derrida on December 11, 2004, at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. It extends its initial honorific intention to engage a reflection around his last thoughts. I am grateful to Linda Garat for her thorough copy-editing of the manuscript.

2. The concept of biopolitics appears in Michel Foucault’s work in the mid-1970s, most notably in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978). I have shown that biopolitics as he conceived it had little to do with politics of life, in “La biopolitique n’est pas une politique de la vie,” Sociologie et Sociétés 38, no. 2 (2003): 35–48.

3. The interview was published in Le Monde, August 19, 2004, under the title “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même” (“I Am at War with Myself”). It was translated in English by Robert Knafo and appeared as Jacques Derrida: The Last Interview (New York: Studio Visit, 2004). The excerpts I cite are, however, my own—more literal—translation from the original text.

4. It is well known that the statement of “an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism” has been quite controversial in Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10.

5. It is remarkable that the only entry for “life” in the Encyclopedia universalis (Paris: Editions Encyclopedia Universalis, 1990) concerns the sole dimension of the living from the perspective of biological sciences, just as it is noticeable that the French Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, ed. Monique Canto-Sperber (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), has no entry for the word “life,” as if there was no ethical or moral dimension to the concept of life.

6. According to Canguilhem, it is necessary to differentiate “the present and past participles of the verb to live,” in other words, between “the living and the lived” (le vivant et le vécu). For Agamben, referring to Plato’s and Aristotle’s supposed distinction, bios is opposed to zoē as the “qualified life” to the “bare life.”

7. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 71.

8. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1978), 299–300.

9. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 53–54, 108. As is well known, Arendt wrote the introduction to the English edition of Benjamin’s Illuminations.

10. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 96–97.

11. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 81, 1–8.

12. Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Atell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1–8, citing Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 259; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181–82.

13. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 133, 188, 202.

14. This is my more accurate translation from Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir: Histoire de la sexualité, volume 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 214. Compare the current English translation: “power to foster life and disallow it to the point of death.” Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138.

15. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5.

16. Didier Fassin, “Another Politics of Life Is Possible” Theory, Culture & Society, 26, no. 5 (2009): 44–60.

17. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), and The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

18. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 143.

19. Fassin, When Bodies Remember: Politics and Experiences of AIDS in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). The biographies evoked in the following pages are developed in more detail in the book.

20. The 1996 Constitution stipulates: “Everyone has the right to life” (Chapter 2: “Bill of Rights”, Section 11: “Life”). See http://www.constitutionalcourt.org.za/site/theconstitution/eng
lish-09.pdf.

21. The concept of biological citizenship has been proposed in Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), and expanded in Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

22. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 15.

Control and Consciousness

2011-01-25T08:45:00.002-07:00

From On The Human:

Control: Conscious and Otherwise

By Christopher Suhler and Patricia Churchland

An important notion in moral philosophy and many legal systems is that certain circumstances can mitigate an individual’s responsibility for a transgression. Generally speaking, such situations are considered extenuating in virtue of their exceptional influence on a person’s ability to act and make decisions in a normal manner. The essence of the case for diminished responsibility is that these special circumstances impede the ability of a normal person to exercise self-control.

In recent years, however, this notion of diminished responsibility has come to wider attention in a quite unexpected way. Some researchers, drawing on findings from social psychology, have argued that situational forces may play a much larger role in behavior than traditionally assumed. The situational forces in question are often entirely ordinary, mundane and seemingly trivial. Given that such influences are pervasive, the general issue raised concerns control in commonplace cases. According to a condensed version of this view – which we call the Frail Control hypothesis for convenience – even in unexceptional conditions, humans have little control over their behavior. If correct, this line of argument could have widespread and dramatic ramifications, notably for our practices of attributing moral and legal responsibility. (We note that although in certain rare cases control and responsibility come apart, in most cases of moral and legal responsibility attribution, control and responsibility are closely linked.)

While agreeing that moral philosophy and the law can benefit from a greater understanding of developments in psychology and neuroscience, we suggest that the Frail Control challenge is markedly weakened once a wider range of data is considered. In our assessment, the Frail Control hypothesis underestimates the vigor of normal goal-maintenance in the face of distractions, and neglects the role of nonconscious aspects of control as displayed, for instance, in the exercise of cognitive, motor and social skills. Furthermore, a large psychological literature has demonstrated that nonconscious, automatic processes are pervasive and anything but “dumb”. Instead, they are often remarkably sophisticated and flexible in performing functions such as goal pursuit that were once considered the sole province of conscious cognition.

On the basis of these and other data, we develop an account of control that we believe goes some way toward sharpening the meaning of control – including nonconscious control – in a way that accommodates the role of nonconscious processes in nearly everything we do. the general conclusion we will be arguing for is that nonconscious processes can support a robust form of control and, by extension, that consciousness is not a necessary condition for control. One notable feature of our account is a model of control in which neurobiological criteria, rather than intuitive or behavioral criteria alone, define the boundaries of control. A significant virtue of this account, in light of the pervasiveness of automatic processes in our cognitive lives, is that it is agnostic as to whether the underlying processes are conscious or nonconscious.

Frail Control

A leading advocate of the Frail Control hypothesis is the philosopher John Doris (e.g., Doris, 1998, [7]). He bases his claims on a range of data from social psychology showing that choices can be affected by various manipulations, such as priming (often below the level of consciousness) or ostensibly banal environmental features. For example, subjects exposed to words related to rudeness on a scrambled-sentence task are subsequently more likely to interrupt a (staged) conversation between the experimenter and another person than are subjects primed with words related to politeness or controls who are not primed (Bargh et al., 1996) [8]. Other studies show that people are more likely to litter in a particular setting when it is heavily littered than when the same setting is clean (Keizer et al., 2008) [9]. (For reviews, see Bargh & Morsella, in press; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) [3, 10].

Adding to the surprise, the data appear to show that very minor environmental influences can at times produce large effects. Among the examples Doris cites are the finding by Isen and Levin (1972) [11] that “[p]assersby who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than passersby who did not find a dime” (Doris & Murphy, 2007) [12, p. 34] and the finding by Darley and Batson (1973) [13] that “[p]assersby not in a hurry were six times more likely to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress than were passersby in a hurry” (Doris & Murphy, 2007) [12, p. 34].

These data are connected to the issue of responsibility in the following way: if your choice is strongly affected by situational factors in ways that you are unaware of, then you plausibly have an excuse for your actions. Doris echoes widespread philosophical assumptions when he says that to be responsible we must have normative competence, meaning that we consciously weigh the evidence, effectively deliberate, and make a decision (Doris, 2002) [14, p. 136]. If the deciding and weighing is below the level of consciousness, normative competence is compromised. No normative competence, no responsibility. (Other statements of Frail Control positions can be found in Wilson (2002) [15], Harman (1999) [16], Bargh (2008) [17], Wegner (2002) [18], and Appiah (2008) [19], as well as a recent news feature in Nature (Buchanan, 2009) [20].

The conclusion that our actions are much more frequently excusable than hitherto assumed could have monumental implications for the law, both criminal and civil, as well as our daily social interactions. A rather different picture of control emerges, however, once the range of data is expanded to include neurobiological, clinical, and other behavioral data, as well as considerations from evolutionary biology.

The co-evolution of control and situational responsiveness
The co-evolution of sensitivity in responding to a diverse array of environmental stimuli and the capacity for executive control is highly probable (Baumeister, 2005; Dennett, 2002) [2, 21]. Generally speaking, if an organism is to reap the benefits of adaptive responsiveness to its environment, it must also be able to control how and to what it responds.

Observations of mammalian behavior suggest that mature animals do indeed regularly exhibit control. A cougar that can carefully stalk a deer will do better than one who just runs after it; antelope that go skittering off every time they glimpse a lion in the distance are apt to waste excessive amounts of energy. And laboratory experiments show that rats can defer gratification to obtain a larger reward (Dalley et al., 2004) [22] or be trained to stop an already-initiated bar press (Eagle et al., 2008) [23]; relevant behavioral differences in these tasks are described as differences in the capacity for control, and the circuitry underlying these capacities is an object of study.

Mechanisms for exercising control in numerous species, hominins included, were probably selected for in conditions that favored being able to defer gratification, wait for the advantage, plan ahead, undertake a complex, multi-step action, and so on. In discussing control as a deep and general feature of animal behavior, Baumeister makes the point that the desire for control, both of physical and social conditions, is fundamental to reproductive success. He thus remarks that “if control is part and parcel of getting most of the things one wants in life, a person could evade wanting control only by not wanting anything” (Baumeister, 2005) [21, p. 96]. The pursuit of goals and achievement of them requires some measure of control, and the longer the lag time or the more obstacles in the path, the greater the need for control.

In the social environment of one’s own species, the capacity to exercise control and select an appropriate action is perhaps even more critical. For example, hierarchy is extremely important in chimpanzee and baboon troops. If an individual is to avoid social ostracism (or worse), he must be able to exert substantial control in managing feeding (Tomasello et al., 2003) [24] and mating (Crockford et al., 2007) [25] opportunities, and in seeking entry into new troops (Sapolsky, 2002) [26].

In modern human culture, exercising control to adjust to and thrive in one’s social environment is likewise paramount. In line with this, Baumeister (2005) observes that humans have an expanded repertoire of ways to satisfy the desire for control [21]. Humans exhibit control by, for instance, attending school, learning to build a house, maintaining a garden or farm animals, or going to work regularly, and such control tends to pay off over the course of a lifetime (Bembenutty & Karabenick, 2004; Mischel et al., 1989) [27, 28]. Skills of self-discipline and self-control are acquired by maturing children as a result of social pressure from many directions, including from peers (Blair & Diamond, 2008) [29].

In circumstances where nothing much hangs on doing A rather than B, vigilance may be lower and situational factors more significant. While pursuing a goal, one can encounter many “fringe” choices – whether to pick up a piece of litter, for example. Nevertheless, how one decides these fringe choices has very little to do with the normal function of executive control in pursuit of a goal. While attending to a task that has interrupted the pursuit of an important goal, people typically experience frequent intrusive thoughts about the goal, getting back to the goal, how to complete the current task quickly, and so on. Demonstrated experimentally and sometimes referred to as the Zeigarnik effect (Förster et al., 2005; Zeigarnik, 1927) [31, 32], this phenomenon implies that nonconscious processes continue to keep the goal high in priority until resumption of the goal-related action, no matter the interruption by task-irrelevant contingencies. Rather than frail control, this phenomenon and the others described above bespeak rather stalwart and sturdy control.

Read More @ National Humanities Center

Understanding the Rise of China

2011-01-25T06:00:00.001-07:00

Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: 'How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise?' Jacques examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will soon become:

TED Profile:

Martin Jacques is the author of When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. He is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy, and a visiting research fellow at the LSE’s Asia Research Centre. He is a columnist for the Guardian and the New Statesman.

His interest in East Asia began in 1993 with a holiday in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. After that, he found every reason or excuse he could find to spend time in the region, be it personal, for newspaper articles or television programs. In 1977, he became editor of Marxism Today, a post he held for fourteen years, transforming what was an obscure and dull journal into the most influential political publication in Britain, read and respected on the right and left alike.

In 1991, he closed Marxism Today and in 1994 became the deputy editor of the Independent newspaper, a post he held until 1996. In 1993 he co-founded the think-tank Demos.

An Introduction to Integral Theory

2011-01-21T09:54:00.003-07:00

Adapted from the Drishti Centre for Integral Action website:

A Closer Look at Integral Theory

By Gail Hochachka

Integral is the farthest reach of inter-disciplinary to date. It links "divergent" disciplines (such as the natural sciences, economics, politics, culture, psychology, and spirituality), including both the exterior (objective) aspects of life with the interior invisible (subjective and inter-subjective) aspects of individuals and cultures. In doing so, the integral approach provides a more comprehensive framework for analyzing problems and for crafting elegant solutions that more appropriately reflect the complexity of life. This makes the integral approach useful for understanding, and working with, the current eco-social issues prevalent in communities throughout the world.

What follows is an overview of three key tenets of integral theory, with a final note on how these are brought together in an integral approach to social change and sustainable development.

The integral approach reveals the interior side of life

The integral approach weaves together the internal and external components of reality. Alongside an understanding of the nature and complexity of interconnected systems, there is also recognition of interior dynamics (psychological, cultural and spiritual) in the system. An integral approach, therefore, retains the existing practices that focus on the "exterior" components of life, such as biological systems, economic initiatives, social organizing, governance and sustainability, and also works with the interior components, such as worldviews, values, and awareness. These interior parts of society inform our opinions and decision-making, essentially guiding the ways we make meaning of our surroundings and interactions.

With an understanding of interiority, it becomes easier to identify the underlying values, needs, worldviews and motivations that arise when engaged in the work of social change. This enables a more effective working dynamic between and among individuals and communities, as well as more psychologically sophisticated way of collaborating with colleagues, staff, employees and project coordinators.

The integral approach recognizes and includes the individual and collective domains Integral theory recognizes both individual and the collective, interior and exterior domains of reality, or the four quadrants. These are depicted in diagram 3 and include:

Behavior and physiology (individual, exterior, such as physical health, actions, land-use practices.
Self and experience (individual, interior), such as awareness, values, and mental models.
Systems (collective, exterior) like economic systems, political systems, judicial systems, and ecosystems; and
Culture (collective, interior) like social norms, shared beliefs and worldviews, and traditions.

Why is this important? Well, firstly, each quadrant has its own methodologies, validity claims, and perspectives--all of which are important to understand and include in social change work. For example, the UL quadrant of self and experience has unique methodologies of reflection, phenomenology, and developmental psychology. The UR quadrant, on the other hand, has unique methodologies of the life sciences, like physics, chemistry, biology, as well as the behavioral sciences. The LR quadrant is where we find methodologies relating to the systems sciences, like ecology, political science, and economics. The LL quadrant we find methodologies relating to the socio-cultural domain, such as social psychology, cultural studies, anthropology, and participatory methodologies. Each of these domains influence the global issues we seek to address. Each cannot be reduced to the other, and each must be engaged based on their own particular validity claims and methodologies. (That is, we cannot be assessing the validity of systems in the LR quadrant with the validity claims from psychology, or vice versa.)

However, this does not mean everyone must become an interdisciplinary expert. Rather, that from whatever discipline we are most familiar and comfortable, we still need to factor in and acknowledge the influence of the other quadrants. Often, organizations create diverse teams to cover a broad expertise across all quadrants, while also maintaining a view of the whole picture.

The integral approach sees developmental stages

Working with environmental or social issues is working with the on-going process of change. Deep, fundamental shifts in our ways of thinking foster visible changes in society, such as new institutions, management plans, laws and economic systems.

But, new ways of viewing the world don't arise over night. Why and how do they arise? Integral Theory pulls together much of the developmental research that has studied that very question. What we find is that these emerging worldviews and values unfold in nested, developmental stages, moving towards the ability to hold multiple perspectives and thus a greater degree of care for others. Through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, this self-development actualizes the human potential within.

While this is firmed based on extensive and empirical research in developmental psychology, we can simply look into our own experiences to explore this: if you think back to your own process of change, you can trace the inner shifts that have occurred throughout your life.

A few key points regarding self-development that appear throughout the research are:

That the process of growth involves emerging stages of development that transcend and include lower stages;
That earlier stages are more fundamental and later stages more significant, yet all are important; and

Each emergent stage has greater complexity, awareness, and care than the former stage. Integral theory explains how fostering health in this "unfolding of complexity" is what is important, rather than trying to speed up the process of change. In fact, the latter can only happen once there is health in the existing developmental stage. For instance, nurturing a healthy expression of existing value systems is more important that trying to change those value-systems. Assisting with this healthy, full translation of the existing stage, can lay the emergent conditions for transformation to the next stage. But in either case, one must start with where people are at, helping to form a developmental pathway between the existing way of being to the emerging one.

Thus, to truly engage in "awareness raising", which is a part of eco-social change work, one must be able to meet other people where they are, both in terms of their value-systems and their ways of making meaning. Communication with a developmental view is more connected and effective precisely because it can relate with where people are coming from, their worldview, values, and meaning making. This approach has immense implications in project design, community development, campaign messaging, as well as in fostering meaningful dialogue between sectors.

Putting It All Together

Growth and change occurs differently in each quadrant. For example, in the UR quadrant, we need to know how the body's physiology changes over time and when it will have certain nutritional requirements at particular ages. In the developing world, this is crucially important, to ensure children are well nourished while they are at critical stage of physical development. In the UL quadrant, personal growth follows certain patterns as well that can be studied and included in social change work. Researchers have found clear stages of psychological development--from ego-centric, to socio-centric, to world-centric, to kosmos-centric--that give rise to different worldviews and awareness. Clearly, these two domains of experience change in very different ways, and it is important that we consider the differences in how we approach social change.

Similarly, social change in the collective quadrants again is dramatically unique. Culture seems to change via predominant mode of discourse--what people are talking about and how they are communicating is essential to what the shared beliefs and worldviews will be. Historically, we have witnessed an unfolding of worldviews from animistic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral, woven into being via social discourse. Systems too have followed their own change process. The socio-economic systems, for example, can be looked at historically, moving from hunting/gathering, to horticultural, to agrarian, to nation-state, to industrial, and to informational systems.

The Integral Approach suggests that finding long-lasting solutions to global issues will involve a deeper understanding and engagement in change processes in all four quadrants.

By seeing individuals and the collective as distinct but inter-relating wholes, it becomes easier to identify the root causes and possible solutions for problems that arise within organizations, groups and communities. Examples include communication break-down, management dysfunction and clashes between differing worldviews.

Integral theory can be applied in various ways in social change and sustainable development. An understanding of interiority and developmental unfolding in individuals and the group provides for more comprehensive project design, strategic planning and problem solving. For more, continue with integral applications.

About Drishti:

Drishti was founded in February 2003, with a vision for transformational environmental and social change. As we founded Drishti, we looked at the constellation of global issues that humanity faces and poised our work to address them. We saw that the issues were not exclusively addressed in just one thematic area nor by using one angle of approach. Rather, the complexity of issues seemed to require a more comprehensive approach. We have sought to explore such comprehensive approaches, one prominent approach being the Integral Framework. At that time, Integral Theory remained mainly a theory, yet we saw its extraordinary potential in sustainable development. Drishti became a vehicle to explore that potential through research, writing and community conversations.

Since then, aspects of an Integral Approach has been applied in numerous fields, such as health care, business, psychotherapy, education, and notably in sustainable development. Some of the organizations that have used Integral Approach in development work include the United Nations Development Programme’s HIV/AIDS Group, various NGOs in Latin America, and community groups worldwide. Please see the Resources page as well as Links to read about Drishti’s and other organization’s applied work with the Integral Approach in fostering sustainable development.
More Here.

Sentience, Chaos and Attraction

2011-01-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

Consciousness: Chaotic and Strangely Attractive

by Alan Combs

"Rather than discrete things and independent events, there are but ripples upon ripples upon waves upon waves in this universe, propagating in a seamless sea." - Ervin Laszlo

1. Introduction

There is evidently a strong human tendency to conceptualize reality in terms of objects. This may in part be due to the influence of language. For example when infants acquire names for things they immediately begin to form hard and fast object categories from which accurate predictions about real physical objects are made (Gelman & Markman, 1986). Members of each such category seem to acquire an underlying "essence." That the formation of firm linguistic- bound classifications occurs so early in life suggests that the tendency to form them is rooted in the biology of the brain itself. Evidently there has been an evolutionary advantage to seeing the world in terms of crisply defined objects. Such an advantage is not difficult to imagine if one thinks about the early history of our species. There are obvious benefits to living in a world which yields clear distinctions, for example, between lions and gazelle, or between ripe red apples and bitter green ones. Monkey's of course can do this too. But monkeys cannot distinguish similar but distinct types of flint tools, or variations in the appearance of grain that indicate resistance to blight- - and certainly cannot pass these on to offspring.

Thus the world presents itself in terms of objects and categories of objects. Processes and patterns of activity, on the other hand, are seen only as through a glass darkly. This is especially true where it comes to the processual aspects of our own inner lives. Emotion, memory, and thought are such processes, and can only awkwardly be construed as having fixed form, shape, or permanence. Consciousness itself is such a process, or at least those aspects or reflections of it that can be sensed. If one thinks of consciousness in terms of metaphors such as light or clear water, then it has no discernible substance other than that which is disclosed by it- - such as stones seen at the bottom of a brook, to use Sartre's analogy. A more process oriented image, however, would be that of a shaft of light falling across a vortex of airborne dust. The light itself is both emptiness and illumination, but the vortex of dust that gives it definition is awhirl with motion. In the following paragraphs I will try to show that consciousness is similarly awhirl with motion, both at the level of experience, and at the level of the neurological events which undergird experience.

2. States of Consciousness.

In the mid 1970s psychologist Charles Tart (1975, 1972) showed that consciousness can be usefully understood from a systems perspective. In particular he argued that ordinary waking consciousness, or "ordinary reality" as it has come to be called, can be seen as a discrete state of consciousness surrounded by a potentially large number of alternative or "altered" states, as suggested by William James' phrase:

Our normal waking consciousness...is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness. (James, 1902/1929, pp. 378)

Tart's basic notion is that a state of consciousness is comprised of a harmonious set of psychological functions. The latter include memory, cognition, sense of humor, sense of self, external perception (exteroception), perception of internal body states (interoception), and so on. Together they form a gestalt- like whole, or in other words a working system. Ordinary waking consciousness is one such system. Dream sleep is another- - though in fact several states may be accessible in dreams (Krippner, 1994; Tart, 1969; LaBarge, 1988). Others include an unknown number of ecstatic states that can erupt spontaneously into ordinary consciousness, plus states that are accessible through meditation, the shamanic trance, hypnosis, and myriad drug induced states, as well as ordinary non- dream sleep.

Tart conceptualized states of consciousness as discrete. At first glance this idea may seem questionable, but it is useful in contrasting different states, and in fact seems to have some empirical justification. For instance falling asleep is accompanied by a slow vertical eye roll which marks an abrupt transition of awareness away from exteroceptive stimulation and the outside world and into an internal state of reverie. One abruptly looses awareness of external stimulation such as light or sound (Dement, 1972). The onset of dream sleep is likewise abrupt. Drug intoxication, brought on, for example, by alcohol or marijuana, seems gradual, but often is heralded by a distinct moment when one first feels intoxicated.

Tart described several types of processes that stabilize a state of consciousness. One of the most important of these is loading stabilization, or in plain English keeping a person busy with activities that support the desired state. For certain ecstatic states this might include chanting, or the repetition of a prayer or mantrum, but in the case of ordinary reality it usually means staying productively busy. Anything from doing dishes to mowing lawns, paying bills, building houses, or writing books will do it. Such productive business is the passion of our civilization, and we tend to look poorly on anyone or anything that is not so.

Transitions between states of consciousness can be brought about by disrupting the stabilizing processes and bringing to bear positive patterning forces in the direction of the new desired state. For example, to go to sleep we must quit doing dishes, mowing lawns, and writing bills, and move to a dark and relatively quiet place where natural biological tendencies toward rest and sleep can have their play. The technologies of consciousness, found for example in yoga or shamanism, involve many patterning techniques designed both to disrupt ordinary consciousness and to move the practitioner toward extraordinary states (Combs, 1993, 1995).

To my mind Tart's ideas are of the first order, but can benefit from more recent advances in the sciences of complexity, which yield more dynamic and fluid conceptions of the nature of systems. For example, a state of consciousness can be reconceptualized as an attractor. Speaking informally, an attractor is a condition to which a system is drawn by its own nature. If a cup is placed slightly tilted on a table, it will roll about in a spiral till it comes to rest standing up. This latter condition is termed a static attractor, because it represents the static position to which the cup is disposed. More interesting are cyclic or fixed cycle attractors. The human heart, for instance, runs through its cycle many times each minute. The moon passes through its various phases each month. These, and many others, are instances of systems that naturally settle into predictable cyclic routines. Most interesting, however, are the class of attractors that are neither fixed nor precisely predictable. These are termed strange or chaotic attractors.

On close inspection the cyclic rhythm of the human heart is found not to be precise, like the motions of a clock, but only approximately so. It's global form is well known and easily recognized, but the precise action of an individual heart differs from beat to beat, thus defying exact prediction. Moreover, it is unlikely that the heart ever, in the strictest possible sense, repeats itself the same way twice. This situation of global familiarity but non- predictability, along with the idea that the system never exactly repeats itself, is exactly what defines a chaotic system, one whose action is described by a strange attractor. Though it is often difficult to completely satisfy these criteria in particular instances (Rapp, 1993), systems of this general type are found abundantly in nature, including biological systems such as the human brain (e.g., Basar, 1990; Pribram, 1994). Here I will refer to them as chaotic or chaos like.

3. States of Consciousness as Chaotic Attractors.

I want to suggest that a state of consciousness is a chaotic attractor, one that brings together the many elements that form it in a way that coalesces them into a unified pattern of activity. The tendency of an attractor to draw its various constituents into a coherent configuration can be seen in the tendency to "fall" into a state of consciousness such as dream or nondream sleep once we tip into its basin (to use systems terms). This tendency of the attractor to capture consciousness in a particular state goes beyond Tart's original patterning forces and represents an intrinsic dynamic of the system itself. When sleep begins to overtake consciousness we drift off swiftly, carried away into its attractor basin. The swiftness of the transition depends on the steepness of the basin's slope. If we have gone without sleep for a long time the passage may be quick, but if we are worried, or have had too much coffee, it may be slow and troubled.

Why view consciousness as a chaotic attractor? The answer is that consciousness as a total event is, as William James (1890/1981) pointed out a hundred years ago, a constantly changing process, clearly not static or even following a fixed cycle, but nevertheless one that has an identifiable global character, at least for each individual. Memories come and go, thoughts pass through the mind only to disappear and return again later, moods are continually changing, and alertness and energy levels vary from hour to hour. These are the elements of a kind of mental soup, or more accurately a kind of mental weather, with the equivalent to the latter's constantly fluctuating temperature, humidity, wind, barometric pressure, and so on.

It is not surprising that weather is chaotic. Indeed, the elements that comprise it, such as temperature, oscillate in an identifiable cycle from day to day, but cannot be predicted with precision. What is more, it is unlikely that temperature fluctuations ever follow exactly the same course on any two days. Much the same can be said about mental weather. It is formed of the interaction of elements such as moods, thoughts, memories, and so on. These are Tart's original psychological functions. For some, such as moods, there is already empirical evidence that they are chaotic (e.g., Combs, Winkler, & Daley, 1994; Sacks, 1973/1990; Winkler & Combs, 1993), while virtually all are consistent with the general description, above, of chaotic processes. As a group, their interaction, like the interaction of the elements of the weather, yield an exquisitely complex process fabric that we know as consciousness. This fabric is far too complicated to describe in detail, but efforts have been made to mathematically conceptualize it as a grand chaotic attractor. Chaos mathematician Ben Goertzel (1994) recently developed the broad conception of a mathematical expression, which he calls the cognitive equation, that represents the entire process structure of an individual's mental life.

Goertzel imagines this structure as operating on two levels, that of the mind and that of the brain. He observes that, "the brain, like other extremely complex systems, is unpredictable on the level of detail but roughly predictable on the level of structure. This means that the dynamics of its physical variables display a strange attractor with a complex structure of "wings" or "compartments" (p. 157). These wings or compartments are in effect small attractors that reside in the larger attractor of the overall neurological activity of the brain. They might, for example, be associated with individual states of consciousness. For the sake of clarity I will continue to speak of them as separate, understanding that they are always part of the larger event which is the total process structure of the brain.

Goertzel views mental activity as running on top of the brain process, creating the second level of the system. The mental level is somewhat less finely detailed, however, and more generalized than the neurological level of activity. "If physical level attractors are drawn in ball- point pen, process [mental] level attractors are in magic marker" (p. 158). Nevertheless, the same overall process structure is apparent at both levels.

Conceptualizing states of consciousness as chaotic attractors takes us a good way down the road toward understanding something about their internal dynamics. For one thing, many complex chaotic systems are self- organizing. For example, a living cell is composed of a rich and complex matrix of chemical cycles which self- organize in such a way as to regulate the overall activity of the cell. In 1974 biologists Maturana, Varela, and Uribe, carried this notion further, suggesting that the total ongoing product of this matrix of activity is no less than the cell itself. In other words the principle activity of a living cell, when all its complex metabolic activities are summed up, is the continuing creation of itself. The above authors termed this process autopoiesis, or self- creation. Living cells are autopoietic systems. So are ecologies, as it turns out, as are many other complex systems, such as the international economy, and even human societies (Laszlo, Cs·nyi, Combs, & Artigiani, in press).

I believe that consciousness, and in particular a state of consciousness, is also an autopoietic event (Combs, 1993, 1994, 1995). Like a living cell, it is made up of complex processes that interact in such a fashion as to create as a net result the state itself. It is not hard to see how this works. When we are depressed, for instance, we tend to selectively recall unhappy events (Bower, 1981), while these in their turn contribute to the mood of depression. On the other hand, a good mood facilitates happy memories, which support a positive disposition. Beyond this, the very context created by a particular state of consciousness conspires to support each of its own elements. Consider, for example, marijuana intoxication (Tart, 1971). A decline in short term memory contributes to an inability to sustain concentration for significant periods of time, while also supporting a style of cognition that relies more on intuition and imagination than discursive thought. This in turn fosters the style of inane yet imaginative humor so characteristic of the state.

It seems that this kind of self- regulating, essentially autopoietic activity, is seen at all levels of the system. For instance, beliefs rush to support each other even if they have to be invented on the spot, and even if they fail to form a logically coherent cloth. It is well known in social psychology that disproving a valued belief, say, that the Second Coming is at hand, does not eliminate it. Rather, it is modified, extended, and reissued with new force (e.g., Festinger, Riecken, & Schacter, 1956).

Interestingly, psychological stages of development, like states of consciousness, also appear to be autopoietic. Each is constructed and supported by a process fabric. In the case of Piaget's developmental epistemology, this fabric is woven of behavioral and mental schemata (Flavell, 1963; Gruber & Voneche, 1977). These wind together in a mutually supportive fashion. For instance the schema or concept of conservation, which specifies that matter does not appear or disappear out of nowhere, is supported by the schema of reversibility, the ability to perform mental operations in reverse. If a child is presented with the puzzling observation that a thin glass of water poured into a wide glass does not fill it to the level of the original, he or she can imagine the water poured back again into the tall glass and note that it's level is at the original height. The point here is simply that the mental processes which undergird consciousness, whether they be states of consciousness or developmental stages, seem to represent a single common regimen, that of an autopoietic process matrix.

4. The Edge of Chaos

The basic idea here is that consciousness comes in units, termed states, each woven of psychological processes, or functions, such as memory, emotion, cognition, one's sense of humor, one's sense of self, etc. Here, I want to momentarily consider these elements in a more formal fashion, as simply forming a self- organizing assembly of constituents that interact with each other in a rich variety of ways. European systems theorist George Kampis (1991) has pondered such systems in detail. He terms them component- systems, and argues that they produce new and creative combinations that cannot, even in principal, be predicted by computational procedures such as performed by computers. The reason for this fundamental creativity is that the interactions of the component parts of these systems (processes to be more accurate) tend during their ordinary activity to build novel new structures (processes) while at the same time destroying some of those already present. These new elements in turn interact with each other and with the previously existing ones to produce new components not foreseeable from the original constituents. The net result is a rolling autopoietic event in which old structures are destroyed and original new ones routinely come into existence.

It is not hard to imagine how this works in day to day reality. The thoughts, memories, and feelings of one moment combine to create the thoughts, memories, and feelings of the next moment, and so on for each moment of our lives. Thus, like Heracleides' river, our inner lives are constantly in flux, never the same twice. But wait a moment; this is precisely what one would expect of a chaotic system. In this regard, it turns out that Goertzel's (1994) notion of the cognitive equation, a chaotic attractor, has a great deal in common with Kampis' idea of a component- system. Indeed, Goertzel was both influenced and encouraged by Kampis' thinking in the development of his own work.

In an interesting twist on this whole line of thought, Goertzel considers the problem of how such a network of interacting processes could find the limited though real constancy that characterizes our inner lives. To this end he offers the "productivity hypothesis," according to which "within a high degree of approximation, every mental process X which is not a pattern in some other mental process, can be produced by applying some mental process Y to some mental process Z, where Y and Z are patterns in some other mental process" (p. 157). In other words, any mental process that stands alone can be produced by the interaction of other mental processes, themselves the products of still other mental processes. Thus, for example, particular ideas and beliefs are the products of the interaction of other ideas and beliefs, themselves dependent upon still other interactions. In a different example, a particular emotion may result from the interaction of certain memories with certain thoughts. Alternatively, the interaction of the emotion with the memories might create the thoughts. Whether the combination of the emotion and the thoughts will actually recreate the memory is perhaps more questionable, but there is considerable evidence that memory is much more the product of construction that would have been guessed a few decades ago (e.g., Loftus & Hoffman, 1989; Winograd, E. & Neisser, 1992).

Goertzel is a computationalist, and does not agree with Kampis that the creativity of such a system as the human mind cannot, in principal, be modelled by a computer program. The question of whether the properties of consciousness can be represented computationally is the source of considerable debate today (e.g., Churchland, 1984; Dennett, 1991; Penrose, 1994) but need not distract us at the moment. Here I want to return to Goertzel's notion that the cognitive equation, which represents the complex process fabric consciousness, is chaotic. The idea that the processes which configure consciousness are chaotic is broad, and does not mean that they exhibit noticeable chaotic properties at every moment. Indeed, they do not. Even a relatively simple chaotic function such as the Lorenz attractor does not necessarily appear chaotic on brief observation. More to the point, psychological processes (e.g., Combs, Winkler, & Daley, 1994; Combs; Combs, 1995) as well as the neurological events that undergird them (e.g., Basar, 1993; Pribram, 1994) seem to move back and forth between relatively chaotic patterns of activity and more cyclic or even static ones. For example, moods can oscillate in a regular and predictable rhythm over the course of the day. Such a pattern, however, could not last indefinitely without perturbations contributing to more chaotic periods of activity. Moods are an obvious example, but there is no reason not to suspect that functions such as memory, thought, dreams, and general arousal do not also exhibit periods of constant or rhythmatic activity, and other periods of more chaotic change. If this is correct, then the overall process fabric of consciousness would likewise be expected to exhibit periods of calm, periods of more or less regular oscillation, and pronounced of periods chaotic activity. The long view of such a regimen would be that of a very complex mathematical attractor such as suggested by the cognitive equation. A shorter view, however, would disclose a system moving in and out of chaos.

Such systems on the edge of chaos are not unknown in the sciences of complexity. They may in fact turn out to be common if not universal among self- regulating systems such as living cells, ecologies, and brains. Discussing the evolution of biological systems, Stewart Kauffman (1993) recently observed that "selection achieves and maintains complex systems poised on the boundary or edge between order and chaos. These systems are best able to coordinate complex tasks and evolve in a complex environment" (p.xv).

The ability of a system to move in and out of chaos gives it a creative advantage. It is capable of shifting from a steady or cyclic routine to one that generates novel emergent properties, whether those be original ideas or perceptions, new patterns of behavior, or novel emotional responses. Moreover, there is a tenacious resilience to a chaotic regimen that is absent in routinized behavior. This is seen in the excited dance of both prize fighters and neurons. We meet challenge effectively, not by assuming a fixed posture, but by moving in a dynamic cross- step that absorbs blows, counterpoises against shifting ground, and yields new and unexpected rejoinders. From a theoretical point of view, chaos protects a system from sticking in small grooves or attractors, and thus failing to find larger, more effective outcomes. For instance, a memory search can be thought of as a trip through neural "state space" in search of the correct memory attractor (Abraham, 1995; Freeman, 1991; Skarda & Freeman, 1987). If the system gets stuck in the attractor of a wrong solution, subsequent recall will be incorrect. What is needed is a process that keeps it from settling down too quickly in the first attractor basin that comes along. This process is chaos. One can easily think of it as operating in a similar fashion during the search for a solution to a mathematical or linguistic problem, or a quest for the right artistic expression. Chaos is the antidote to stasis and stagnation.

References

Abraham, F.D. (1995). Dynamics, bifurcations, self- organization, chaos, and mind. In R. Robertson and A. Combs (Eds.). Proceedings of The Society for Chaos Theory and the Life Sciences. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Basar E. (Ed.). (1990). Chaos in Brain Function. Berlin: Springer- Verlag.

Bower, G.H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129- 148.

Churchland, P.S. (1984). Matter and consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, MIT Press.

Combs, A. (1993). The evolution of consciousness: A theory of historical and personal transformation. World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution. 38, 43- 62.

Combs, A. (1994). Psychology, chaos, and the process nature of consciousness. In F. Abraham and A. Gilgen (Eds.). Chaos Theory in Psychology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Pub.

Combs, A. (1995). The radiance of being. Edinburgh, Scotland: Floris; 1996, St Paul, MN: Paragon House.

Combs, A., Winkler, M., & Daley, C. (1994). A chaotic systems analysis of circadian rhythms in feeling states. The Psychological Record, 44, 359- 368..

Dement, W.C. (1972). Some must watch while some must sleep: Exploring the world of sleep. New York: W.W. Norton.

Dennett, D.C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H.W., Jr., & Schacter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Flavell, J. H. (1963). The developmental psychology of Jean Piaget. New York: Van Nostrand.

Freeman, W.J. (February, 1991). The physiology of perception. Scientific American. 78- 85.

Gelman, S.A., & Markman, E.M. (1986). Categories and induction in young children. Cognition, 23, 183- 209.

Goertzel, B. (1994). Chaotic logic. New York: Plenum.

Gruber & Voneche (Eds.). (1977). The essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books.

James, W. (1890/1981). The principles of psychology. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

James, W. (1902/1929). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Modern Library.

Kampis, G. (1991). Self- modifying systems in biology and cognitive science. New York: Pergamon.

Kauffman, S.A. (1993). The origins of order. New York: Oxford University Press.

Krippner, S. (1994). Waking life, dream life, and the construction of reality. Anthropology of Consciousness, 5(3), 17- 23.

LaBarge, S. (1988). Lucid dreaming in western literature. In J. Gackenbach & S. LaBarge (Eds.). Conscious mind, sleeping brain. (pp.11- 26). New York: Plenum.

Laszlo, E., Cs·nyi, V., Combs, A. L., & Artigiani, R. (in press). The evolution of cognitive maps: New paradigms for the 21st century. London: Adamantine Press.

Loftus, E.F., & Hoffman, H.G. (1989). Misinformation and memory: The creation of new memories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 100- 104.

Maturana, H. R., Varela, F. J., & Uribe, R. (1974). Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and model. Biosystems, 5, 187- 196.

Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pribram, K.H. (Ed.). (1994). Origins: Brain and self organization. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Rapp, P. (1993). Chaos in the neurosciences: Cautionary tales from the frontier. Biologist, 40(2), 89- 94.

Sacks, O. (1973/1990). Awakenings. New York: Harper.

Skarda, , C.A., & Freeman, W.J. (1987). How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world. Behavioral and brain sciences, 10(2), 161- 195.

Tart, C.T. (1969). The high dream. In C. Tart (Ed.). Altered States of Consciousness. (pp. 171- 176). New York: Doubleday.

Tart, C.T. (1971). On being stoned. Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavioral Books.

Tart, C.T. (1972). States of consciousness and state- specific sciences. Science, 176, 1203- 1210.

Tart, C.T. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Winograd, E. & Neisser, U. (1992). Affect and accuracy in recall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Winkler, M., & Combs, A. (1993, July). A chaotic systems analysis of individual differences in affect. Paper presented at the 24th Interamerican Congress of Psychology, Santiago, Chile.

COPYRIGHT - ALAN COMBS - ORIGINAL SOURCE: HERE

Situated Activity and Identity Formation

2010-09-04T00:21:00.002-06:00

Situated Activity and Identity Formation

By C. Norman Alexander, Jr. and Mary Glenn Wiley

Social psychology has often seemed less an amalgamation of psychology and sociology than an awkward appendage of each field, pretending to a distinctive domain of common interest, but differing by disciplinary origin "in definition and in execution" (Stryker 1977:145). Thus, members of each branch differ in the topics researched, methods used, journals read, works cited, texts employed, and appraisals of contributions to knowledge in the area (Wilson and Schafer 1978). If this were merely a difference in focus, we should expect to find a heuristic complementarity of emphasis, with psychologists stressing intrapersonal aspects of problems that sociologists approached in terms of role related interactions. However, where there should be interface there is too frequently irrelevance.

In the area of situated action, where the two social-psychological traditions should merge, the problems and prospects for convergence within the discipline appear (Boutilier et al. 1980). At this analytic level, psychological processes become fully manifest in a distinctly social field and the actions of an individual influence others present. Similarly, the social realities of the environment infuse the activity of the individual who is affected by the presence of others. Thus, at the place where activity becomes a social process, we seek to explore the potential unity of the field.

Despite major differences of theory and method there is general subscription to Allport's definition of social psychology as ". ..an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others" (Allport 1968:3). Consideration of this statement leads us to question what it is about the presence of others, in fact or fantasy, that transforms organismic processes into social-psychological phenomena. We believe that an adequate answer to this question involves the fundamental conceptualization of the data with which the discipline deals.

We see the resolution of disciplinary disparities in the adoption of a relational conceptualization of social psychological phenomena. Rather than begin our investigative quests with units of analysis that prejudice the organization of the field into self-contained systems of selves and social structures that ensure boundary disputes, let us begin with the boundary itself. If we start with social acts as units of analysis, we avoid creating conflict between individual responses straining for expression against a repressive social fabric and normative demands requiring sanctioned implementation against resistant psychological forces. We propose that the defining properties of social acts are situated identities. Situated identities are conceived as the attributions that are made from salient perspectives about an actor's presence and performance in the immediate social context. In the following pages, we will explore the bases of this conceptualization, its elaboration into a formally testable model, and studies that embody research on its hypotheses.

Read More (PDF) @ Coe College

Modeling Cultural Evolution

2010-07-15T14:07:00.002-06:00

Why Modeling Cultural Evolution Is Still Such a Challenge

By Dan Sperber and Nicolas Claidie

The idea that cultural evolution exhibits variation, competition, and inheritance and therefore can be studied by adjusting the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is an attractive one. It has been argued by a number of authors (e.g., Campbell 1960; Monod 1970; Dawkins 1976; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991; Aunger 2002; Mesoudi et al. 2004) and pursued in a variety of ways, some (Dawkins and memeticists) staying close to the Darwinian model, others (e.g., Boyd, Richerson, and their collaborators) being more innovative. We agree that there are relevant analogies between biological and cultural evolution and, in particular, that cultural items do exhibit variation, competition, and cumulative modification.

On the other hand, we believe that a proper understanding of the mechanisms of cultural propagation drawing on the work of cognitive and social scientists (see Sperber and Hirschfeld 1999 for a review) contradicts the idea that culture exhibits inheritance in the strict sense needed for the theory of evolution by natural selection to apply straightforwardly to it. If so, it will take more than adjusting the Darwinian model to be faithful to the Darwinian inspiration.

Read More: Here

Evolution, Adaptation and Panglossia

2010-06-28T14:47:00.002-06:00

The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme

By Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin

An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in england and the united states during the past forty years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an organism into unitary "traits" and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; nonoptimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well.

We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental europe) that organisms must be analyzed as integrated wholes, with baupläne so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development, and general architecture that the constraints themselves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of nonadaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features (allometry, pleiotropy, material compensation, mechanically forced correlation), the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of nonadaptive structures. We support darwin's own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.

Read the Entire Paper here: www.aaas.org

Some Recent ChangeWork Literature

2010-06-24T00:30:00.001-06:00

Experiments in Consilience: Integrating Social and Scientific Responses to Save Endangered Species – A book, co-authored by Frances Westley, describes the work of the Biodiversity Research Network. Members of this network examine the ecology and population dynamics of key species in particular ecosystems in order to understand the impact of human populations, and to develop tools and processes for involving a greater variety of stakeholders in conservation efforts.

A Change Would Do You Good: An Experimental Study on How to Overcome Coordination Failure in Organizations (PDF) – This paper, co-authored by David Cooper of Case Western Reserve University, looks at how the failure to organize can cause an organization to become trapped in unsatisfactory situations.

The Extended Mind

2010-06-04T16:20:00.000-06:00

The Extended Mind
By Andy Clark & David Chalmers

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes...

While some mental states, such as experiences, may be determined internally, there are other cases in which external factors make a significant contribution. In particular, we will argue that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.

First, consider a normal case of belief embedded in memory. Inga hears from a friend that there is an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment and recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, so she walks to 53rd Street and goes into the museum. It seems clear that Inga believes that the museum is on 53rd Street, and that she believed this even before she consulted her memory. It was not previously an occurrent belief, but then neither are most of our beliefs. The belief was sitting somewhere in memory, waiting to be accessed.

Read More: Here

Organicism and Integral theory

2010-06-01T13:40:00.004-06:00

Organicism
By Giorgio Piacenza Cabrera

Abstract: This paper presents Archie J. Bahm’s “Organicism” as a Second Tier Metatheory based upon the analysis of intuited polarity . It shows that AQAL (or Integral Metatheory) can benefit from a more deductive (and Metaphysical) approach that relates with the logical-relational aspects inhering at the core of Integral concepts such as “hierarchy” “inclusiveness” and the central “holon,” aspects whose continued development were somewhat forgotten due to AQAL’s current emphasis on experientially verifiable external patterns.

Organicism complements Integral Theory and has fundamental divisions mirroring Ken Wilber’s quadratic holon aspects. Interestingly, unlike Wilber discovering universal holon patterns through observation of piles of answers of methods and theories visibly displayed before him during a brainstorming retreat, the a priori rational patterns in Organicism were discovered mostly by analytic exercise through the method of polar analysis. In this sense we can affirm that Organicism shows that deduction can indeed complement induction in the creation of Integral Theories (which are also theories of theories or metatheories). In my view, this has important consequences in relation to giving priority to the work of uncovering Exterior-based patterns through Integral Methodological Pluralism vs. giving priority to pattern forming essences that are prior to exteriority but can be disclosed by the use of reason. What is certain for me is that the patterns coincide and complement each other and this in itself is important to explore and inspect much further.

In another paper (“Integral Quadrants in History”) I show that some modern era individuals and -quite possible- a pre-hispanic culture also arrived to similar (and complementary) discoveries in relation to the quadratic aspects which seem to be discoverable through keen dialectic intellectual processes which are also available to mystery, deduction and reflection.

Organicim is a 2nd Tier philosophy developed before the early 1950’s by the late emeritus professor Archie J. Bahm. It makes use of the experienced, dynamic, polar relations of existence which are mapped along 2 axes defined by 4 extreme polar values. The fact that polar relations come naturally to the intuitive mind and that, thereafter, these can be carefully analyzed eventually leading us the discovery of patterns that complement Integral Theory’s quadrants, needs also to be observed.

As I understand and extrapolate from Organicim, the origin of holons is tied with the dynamic of complementary poles and two of any complementary pair gives rise to 4 extreme polar values basically corresponding to Integral Theory’s “Four Corners of the Kosmos.” These 4 extreme polar values (called by Archie J. Bahm extreme one pole-ism, extreme other pole-ism, extreme aspectism and extreme duality) express 4 basic polar and holon-associated relations which match AQAL’s “Interior” “Exterior” “Individual” and Collective” observed dimensions of existence. The ultimate result is a conceptual method for complexly dealing with complex existence.

I think that, essentially, Bahm’s Organicism was developed through a thorough logical analysis of the intuited polarities that become apparent when reflecting upon experience. In a sense we could call Organicism a Theory that came about through a priori deduction. In contrast, -if I understood Ken Wilber’s explanation adequately- the quadratic aspects of AQAL Theory were discovered by observing already formed patterns that grouped various theories. In other words, generally speaking, AQAL (and more in relation to quadrants) was discovered more through an a posteriori observation of the facts or through induction. Since Organicism is based on a more thorough logical analysis that begins with the inextricable relations of fundamental polarities, it seems to complement the pattern-recognition procedures involving AQAL Theory.

Please note the theoretical mirroring effect: In Organicism, thinkers using static categories of polar analysis disclose existence as a PROCESS. That is, through logic, they find the inherent dynamics of existence. On the other hand, in Integral Theory, thinkers already embedded in inductive participatory-observational processes disclose already-manifested stable or STATIC PATTERNS (like quadrants and stages) of existence. In other words in Organicism, static analysis discloses process and in Integral Theory dynamic observation discloses static patterns. Opposite methods disclose complementary findings shedding light on the age-old symmetrical importance of both logic and empirism.

I think that the deductive method followed in Organicism could lend itself to predictive theory building and should be seriously studied in relation to the development of Integral Theories.

When Archie J. Bahm studied (with his thorough “both-and” logic) the pair of metaphysically intuited complementary polar opposites of “SPIRIT” and “MATTER” he found that 8 of the main metaphysical theories or explanations humanity had found to explain the nature of reality, in fact 8 metaphysical assumptions underlying many other religious or philosophical systems, were -by logical necessity- mutually indispensable within a diagram of polar values. He also found that Organicism itself could be visualized as the central point at the crossing of the two axes that ensued. Moreover, he found that Organicism’s central tenet with respect to these other major theories was that their posits or affirmations about the nature of reality were all correct (and not just mutually exclusive in an either-or sense) but that their mutual denial of each other’s posits was incorrect. This fact also makes Organicism a Second Tier Metatheory that includes and transcends previous theories about the nature of reality while rendering logically invalid their exclusivist claims for truth and denials of each other’s affirmations. This detail is obviously also quite in agreement with some of the tenets held by AQAL Metatheory.

I think that there also may or may not be a fruitful line of inquiry related to all this in that perhaps by also considering AQAL’s 4 quadrant defining dimensions as complementary opposites, the possibility of developing a deeper understanding of inter quadratic relations may also be possible. For instance, what are the logical relations between the Individual and Collective dimensions or between the Self and Other or Interior and Exterior dimensions using a “both-and” Organicistic logic? Could we also apply this analysis to inter quadratic relations or to the relations between quadrants which are formed by combining the four dimensions in pairs? Will we logically deduce something other than the simultaneous co-arising of contents inhabiting the four quadratic expressions of holons or occasions?

Although (perhaps due to its inductive origin and to Wilber’s understandable preference to develop a theory that survives the modern and post modern critiques) AQAL is supposed to be metaphysically minimalist, various kinds of metaphysical polar categories were considered by Archie J. Bahm. It’s obvious that Bahm had in mind a traditional and conceptually deeper philosophical understanding of metaphysics. Some of the traditional polar categories of existence that were considered other than Spirit-Matter were, Quality-Quantity, Permanence-Change, Actual-Potential, Cause-Effect, Agent-Patient, Immanence-Transcendence, Substance-Function, Actual-Potential and Whole-Parts. In fact, I think that these and other traditional “metaphysical” categories of existence are experientially unavoidable in what contingent reality discloses through us at whatever altitude or “Kosmic Address” we may individually or collectively be and they need to be carefully included within AQAL Theory as they also are compatible with the core concept of holons and do not necessarily translate into wild, other worldly “new age” speculations, lacking rigorous logical consideration and/or communally verified experience after precisely practiced injunctions. Likewise, I think that holons are not just defined by the whole-part complementary polarity but by all metaphysical complementary polarities of existence. This is because holons also represent all occasions or events that arise in the partially complete world of manifest existence. What seems to matter is the inherent open-ended logic of polar relations found in complementary polarities, a logic whose function can also be empirically observed as we disclose what appears as external in our world of experience. This is something that –according to experience- may translate (at least) into the 20 tenets or beyond.

With the previously convoluted sentence I’m trying to give a sense that what we have come to call “holons” can both be seen as objective, ontological structural elements and as subjective, a priori epistemological elements pre dualistically united before distinctions are made through relative experiences. With Organicism we can see that there’s a logic behind conceptual and observable part-wholes (and other complementary opposites of existence) and then (through the careful observation of patterns in the existing world) we can verify a correspondence with our logical intuitions. Through logical processes in Organicism we can verify that epistemological logical-deductive necessity meets ontology. Through participatory processes emphasized in AQAL (in relation to our levels of development, injunctions and other AQAL accepted, reality-disclosure prisms) we find holonic patterns that match what can also be deduced. Ontology meets epistemology, a posterior meets a priori.

Organicism shows that the deduced relations between the essential polarities that generate its two-axes diagrams logically include mutual exclusion or independence of poles (“either-or” logic is still required and partially represented), but also mutual dependence or interdependence, interpenetration and, ultimately, also mutual immanence. The latter kind of relation was included by Archie J. Bahm nearing the end of his career after he consulted Oriental experts on the alleged relation between the YIN/YAN polarities in Taoist thinking, a thinking that had inspired his “either-or” logical approach capable of including and transcending the classical Western “either-or” (strong excluded middle) one. I consider mutual immanence to be at the limits of our human logical abilities to make distinctions and discern useful dialogical relations, a limiting situation in which non duality and duality meet. Interestingly, we must also understand that this partially cognizable limit in understanding is found not only within the relation between the principles of Yin and Yan but in every relation generated by complementary poles. Within the realm of a more generous or wilder speculation we could suppose that our perception of the mutual immanence of complementary poles reflects a level or Ground from which Spirit directly controls the unfoldment of what to us appears as duality-based, mutually dependent occasions.

Whether, useful inter quadratic relations can also be discovered by using Organicistic logical procedures remains to be discovered. In other words, these relations may or may not strengthen the sought after coherence of the parts that could make AQAL a more or less robust, applicable and predictive theory of everything. On the other hand the robustness of an all-inclusive Metatheory that is applicable to every possible kind of occasion (including mental objects in 1st and 2nd Person experience) may not necessarily be modeled after physical theories that rely upon externally unchanging or stable, observable patterns.

A Brief Description of Organicism

When there are two complementary opposites, four extreme polar values are logically generated. The 4 extreme polar values (called by Archie J. Bahm extreme one pole-ism, extreme other pole-ism, extreme aspectism and extreme duality) express 4 basic polar and holon-associated relations which correspond or are closely associated to AQAL’s “Interior” “Exterior” “Individual” and Collective” observed dimensions of existence. The ultimate result is a conceptual method for complexly dealing with complex existence.

In AQAL Meta Theory, non dual “Spirit” -even if ultimately indefinable- is understood to include and transcend the Kosmic quadrants of holons/occasions and their contents. In ORGANICISM, a “both-and” logic derived from a Taoist Chinese attitude of practical acceptance serves to analytically derive 4 extreme polar positions or values from 2 complementary polar opposites. These 4 extreme polar values define the extreme of 2 axes and are mutually involved along them. The “both-and” logic allows a more complete or complex use of the “Identity Principle” (A=A) in a way in which strong excluded middle exclusivism becomes a required but particular case. Although the use of the Identity Principle (or the understanding that what is is) cannot be avoided if we are to reason with conceptual coherence and clarity and this Principle or understanding has been adequately used in Indian thought to demonstrate both the inability to differentiate between form and emptiness and to demonstrate the impossibility of describing the Absolute in terms of conceptual-relative or contingent understanding, Archie J. Bahm used it to integrate age-old metaphysical categories of experienced existence, very much following a naturalist -and apparently- non dual acceptance of existence inspired by the Yin/Yan interplay and Taoism.

By studying Bahm’s writings we discover that there’s extreme care to take into consideration all the “senses” in which a complementary polar relation can unfold. For instance, he recognizes that there will always be a sense in which the poles will be independent of each other even when they require of each other to define each other. Thus, rather than succumbing to a simplistic, all encompassing “either-or” reasoning he discovers a complex series of “organic” logical relations that lie at the heart of what apparently originates reality. Through this reasoning -for example- he doesn’t favor the whole or the part, one pole or another but points out that the very attitude or way of thinking Organicistically about complex polar relations becomes a philosophy that incorporates the truths of previous philosophies that can be placed along a polar position preference along a diagram of logical polar positions.

In his 1953 Second Diagram (First and Second Forms), Bahm also showed 4 other intermediate positions placed between the 4 extreme ones, totaling 8. Although these 8 basic positions are individual, diagrammed along axial lines and do not form areas arising as a result of combining 2 dimensions of holonic expression, I still have a non elucidated sense that they do relate with the 8 “zones” of AQAL associated with its Integral Methodological Pluralism.

Remarkably, Bahm’s Second Diagram can also model 8 fundamental, but formerly incompatible, metaphysical positions regarding the nature of reality and Organicism acts as a 9th, centrally located and dynamically coordinating, Second Tier, meta-metaphysical theory. Its meta-logical pattern (using a dialectical and sometimes rigid/sometimes flexible excluded middle) accepts as necessarily true all the essential affirmations about reality specified by these 8 metaphysical theories. It also rejects their exclusivist negations of each other’s affirmations. For this reason, the possibility of an inclusive, anti reductionistic, 2nd Tier World Philosophy is born. In fact, Archie J. Bahm also was keenly involved as a professor of Comparative Religious Studies and through philosophical dialogues promoted the creation of a World Philosophy. He wrote The Philosopher’s World Model and –after studying ancient texts during a sabbatical- also a unique, more humanly amenable redefinition of the original teachings of the Buddha (Philosophy of the Buddha, 1958).

Now, what more can we say about this continuously emphasized “both-and” logic? I believe that this logic is ultimately useful in finding non duality within a philosophy that values existence as experienced. It is based on the idea that -when interpreting experience with a clear logic that considers all possibilities- every occasion or holon is both A and not A . Quoting some of Archie J. Bahm’s writings in: Organicism: Origin and Development, 1996:

“The presupposition asserted in Principia Mathematica that ‘Nothing is A and not-A’ is regarded as false in organic logic. But the truth that the assertion is false is included in organic logic, and thus all that is involved in the assertion is included also.”

“Those who state ‘Nothing is both A and not-A” are making a statement including both A and not-A. Since the statement is itself something including both A and not-A, its assertions that nothing is both A and not-A is self contradictory.”

“The inference that Suchness (ordinary experience) is non-different from Sunya (ultimate reality, which is pure indifference) is valid in organic logic as it is in Buddhist logic. But the assumption that ultimate reality is pure indifference described in such a way that ‘It neither is A (any definite characteristic), nor non-A (any or all other definite characteristics), nor both AS and non-A, non neither A nor non-A’ is regarded as false in organic logic. Organic logic includes concerns about false assumptions and invalid inferences to the extent that there are truths about them that must be included among all of truths.”

“Organic logic includes the claim that every existence as experienced, when interpreted, can be observed to be ‘both A and not-A,’ …why? ‘And’ involves ‘not.’ If ‘and is a universal category of interpretation, then ‘not’ is also a universal category. Although ‘both-and’ and ‘not-both’ are interpreted by some as contradictory opposites, they are interpreted in organic logic as complementary opposites. Whenever two things exists, ie., when both the one exists and the other exists, each is not the other. The one is not the other and the other is not the one. Thus, the meaning of ‘and’ minimally involves two ‘nots.’ Although ‘and’ does not mean ‘not’ and ‘not’ does not mean ‘and,’ nevertheless, the meaning of each involves the meaning of the other.”

“When ‘and’ and ‘not’ are recognized as complementary opposites, one can say with confidence, when adequately interpreting existence as experienced, that ‘Each and every thing is both A and not A.”

I think that AQAL and other integral metatheories that seem to spring from the conceptual and intuitive tensions found in complexifying working models dealing with issues of duality and non duality could also greatly benefit from a deeper understanding of what has already been conceptualized regarding the nature of polarity. I think that to understand holons we need to understand polarity and polar relations. Since the diversification and multiplication of holons seems to stem from the ever incomplete, dual nature of polarity and the tendency to uncover integrating (observed or deduced) patterns seems to be possible due to a non dual unity also underlying the nature of polarity, I think it behooves us Metatheorists to get a foothold on these issues. I will just briefly state now that, within Organicism it’s been known that polarity involves at least three categories and their subcategories.

In Polarity, Organicity Dialectic, (1970), Archie J. Bahm develops these ideas about polarity which include the following:

1. OPPOSITENESS
2. COMPLEMENTARITY
3. TENSION

Position Supplementarity Tendency
Negation Interdependence Extra Tension
Duality Dimension Contension
Reciprocity Dimensional Tension
Inter Level Tension
Polari Tension
Rever Tension

So what else is Organicism? I think that Organicism occupies a conceptual position somewhat between Shankara’s transcendentalist interpretation of existence as Maya, Nagarjuna’s connecting of ordinary experience with formless Sunya and the emphasis on exclusivist “either-or” clarity found in most of Western’s logic use of a strong “Excluded Middle.” Organicistic logic offers an in-between, rational tool flanked by a hint of undefined transcendence on the one hand and concreteness on the other, all the while constantly showing us how to reconcile the polar paradoxes of existence. Organicism and its Taoist-inspired logic assisting our rational understanding may also help us to leap into a transrational intuition based upon the simple acceptance of being as is.

Organicism could become an eye-opening, rational way of complexly thinking about duality manifesting in existence, preparing some to intuit the non dual Ground which appears to be connected with the essential and less causally describable ground of polar mutual immanence. For post modernists still over-relying in naïve “either-or” Western logical clarity to discredit both tradition and modernism, Organicism could offer an eye-opening “Samadhi” or mind-stopping experience comparable to when mystical Westerners also come to abandon extreme “either-or” polar contrasts and open up to utterly surrender with faith in an Absolute Other.

While either-or logic is a great tool for producing practical results by assisting us to manipulate the partialness of existence, “both-and” Organicistic logic may do a better job of linking rational and transrational thought from the vantage point of a more open-minded consciousness which is still embedded in polar experience.

According to A.J. Bahm, Westerners ideally tend to emphasize willfulness, Indians ideally tend to emphasize willessness and the Chinese ideally tend to emphasize willingness. I think that these general attitudes also led to emphasize “either-or” “neither-nor” and “both-and” logics respectively. I also think that each kind of logic is valid, that each supplements what the others don’t provide and that an Integral Meta Theory should clearly differentiate and flexibly include them all as needed. Also, as previously hinted, I think that the so called “Identity Principle” (or the fundamental rational understanding that which is is) is both universal and transcendental and specific and concrete enough to equally support the three logics. In particular, due to Ken Wilber’s spiritual experiences better described by Vedanta and Madhyamaka (doctrines associated with the so called “Four Cornered Negation”) we can see that AQAL Metatheory makes a strong use of this particular way of utilizing what the Identity Principle allows. This preference particularly shows up in what has been criticized as Wilber’s “anti metaphysical” stance. To be fair I must say that I also understand that Wilber’s emphasis on critical thinking and discernment does makes use of “either-or” logic and that many elements related to level inclusiveness and transcendence in AQAL make use of “both-and” logic. In fact, no kind of integral theory would probably be possible without some degree of “both-and” logic. Maybe these three logics (allowed not just by a fundamental principle of rational understanding but by what Parmenides would have probably considered as BEING itself) can be integrated under a META LOGICAL PATTERN.

So let’s us take a brief look at these three logics which I believe are all necessary for integral theories.

Either-or logic is associated with worldly, efficient causal precision and with exclusively rejecting or accepting transcendence/God/Spirit in order to find either that God exists independently outside of the world (as the Christian God has been emphasized) or that the world (that is the physical world as experienced by the physical senses) is the primary or only reality. It uses the Principle of Identity in a way that favors clear, Excluded Middle distinctions between concepts, emphasizing external relations between parts. “Either-or” can be a logic of existence and of Being but –apparently- in a restrictive or highly focused sense. An “ideal” Westerner may reach non dual awareness by surrendering his or her inquiring mind and whole being to God understood as a logically necessary sacred Other, a being outside of contingency that can spiritually suffuse him or her. Spirit and Matter or also Spirit and Nature are normally conceived as separate. I believe that this logic promotes 3rd person relations with a physical reality or 2nd person relations with a 2nd person Sacred Other.

Neither-nor logic (The Indian Four-Cornered Negation) is about transcending and then integrating into distinctionlesness. In Nagarjuna the world is seen as non other than distinctionless “Sunya” and in Shankara the world is seen as an illusion of also distinctionless Nirguna Brahman. The Principle of Identity is still used here to logically reject all distinctions about Ultimate Reality and to show how futile it is to describe that which is non conditioned with incomplete and mutually dependent mental concepts. Direct, intuitive “experience” of Sunya or Brahman is seen as the way to Ultimate Reality. Spirit and Matter are conceived either as illusory or as real entities of a common Ground for which all conceptual distinctions are abandoned. In terms of polarity studies this “common ground” would probably be akin to the common dimension that relates two complementary opposite poles and this is why Vedanta occupies a specific polar value in Organicism’s diagram depicting the Spirit-Matter polarity. I believe that this logic promotes 1st person relations either with an unqualifiable reality that transcends the world of form or a 1st person relation with an unqualifiable reality indistinguishable from the world of form.

Both-and logic is associated with engaging the world of existence as it is and can also be associated with complexly understanding this world as it holonically appears to us. It is a promising way to augment our understanding of the complex, polar and quadratic/kosmic expressions of Spirit. I think that Bahm’s concept of “Organic Unity” and “Mutual Immanence” (at the heart of Organicism) include and transcend the polarities and can serve as a vision-logical conceptual basis to eventually reach a transrational disclosure of non duality. Thus Sunya-Suchness may eventually be intuited as we imbibe with Taoist naturalness how all of relative reality unfolds in our manifest experience. I believe that this logic promotes 2nd person (we) relations with anything experienced.
When Archie J. Bahm -out of logical necessity- further complexified his diagram of polar positions coming up with 12 positions instead of the original 8 (I’m not going to delve into this level of complexity in this particular article), he claimed the following:

“Organicism holds that polarity consists in something that is not wholly describable but such that there is in it some basis for the positive claims made by each of the twelve preceding theories. Organicism accepts the positive affirmations of the 12 positions (or theories) and rejects their denials of each other’s affirmations. Organicism as an evolving theory about theories of polarity states that EXPERIENCE as EXPERIENCED presents its apparently essential conditions as POLAR OPPOSITES. (A.J. Bahm, Organicism: Origin and Development, 1996).”

From that statement I surmise that Archie Bahm did not pretend to develop a philosophy that transcended the appearance of those essential conditions (the polar opposites). Nonetheless, since Organicism stemmed from a major logic (the” both-and” logic) allowed by the Identity Principle the non duality manifested in its self consistent, organic strength also interestingly allowed and required a philosophy such as Vedanta to occupy one of its diagrammatic positions. In other words, it seemed as if a naturalistic philosophy had found a way to logically incorporate or to be perfectly compatible with a transcendental philosophy.

In a shrinking world in which we need to find more commonalities than disagreements in order to live with greater respect for each other, the fact that -conceptually speaking- Organicism validates 8 important metaphysical posits that inform many 1st Tier faiths and philosophies cannot be underestimated. It’s true (as Ken Wilber would probably say) that only those capable of “orange level” or higher modes of thinking and being in the world may be capable of appreciating the importance that what had for long seemed to be logically incompatible fundamental theories about reality now can be understood as equally valid and necessary. Nevertheless, I think that this is one of the important latent contributions that Organicism offers towards greater understanding among peoples of different ideological persuasions. Perhaps even some day a benign World Federation will use this possibility.

Crucial concepts behind allegedly irreconcilable philosophies are all validated. By applying Organic Logic to the Spirit-Matter complementary polar category we find that the following 8 fundamental assumptions about the Nature of Reality combine with 8 essential theories or diagrammed positions about polarity. Organicism, (finding that each assumption is logically necessary for consistency) occupies a 9th, 2nd Tier, central position that transcends, includes and coordinates them all under a “higher” perspective.

1) Spiritualism (in One Pole-ism): Only Spirit exists.
2) Materialism (in Other Pole-ism): Only Matter exists.
3) Emanationism (in Modified One Pole-ism): Matter depends upon Spirit.
4) Emergentism (in Modified Other Pole-ism): Spirit depends upon matter.
5) Advaita Vedantism, (in Extreme Aspectism): Neither Spirit nor Matter exist but are illusory aspects of their common dimension.
6) Neutral Monism (in Modified Aspectism): Spirit and Matter are two dependent attributes or aspects of an underlying neutral substance.
7) Boodin’s Creationism (in Modified Dualism): Although claiming independence for Spirit (God) and Matter it also recognizes the dependence of each upon the other in all creative processes. (I recognize that this is not identical with classical Christian metaphysics in which God is understood as completely transcendental and only immanent as unaffected Spirit but nonetheless Modified Dualism may be more compatible with a kind of Panentheistic point of view which –after all- may not contradict doctrinal fundamentals. In this view God may participate in the Kosmos also through an illusory extension of himself and not only as immanent Absolute Spirit).
8) Dualism (in Extreme Dualism): Spirit and Matter both exist but in complete independence of each other and there’s nothing upon which they depend.

Based on inclusive and exclusive, but mutually involved polar relations found in existence as experienced and disclosed to reason, Organicism can offer a tentative understanding about the nature of reality. For example:

“Organicism finds itself between creationism and neutral monism in holding (1) that there is a sense in which spirit and matter genuinely exist and (2) that that each functions also as an aspect of something which underlies both. Not only do wholes and parts exist interdependently, but that which is both whole and parts exists. In sum, spirit and matter both exists and that which is both spiritual and material exists. Spirit and matter are partly independent of each other and partly dependent upon each other, and that which is both spiritual and material is partly independent of and partly dependent upon spirit and matter. Whatever is both spiritual and material can be reduced neither to the spiritual nor to the material. Spirit cannot be reduced to matter, matter cannot be reduced to spirit, and neither spirit nor matter can be reduced to that which is both spiritual and material.” (A.J. Bahm).

“Spiritualism is correct in claiming that spirit exists but mistaken in denying that matter exists. Materialism is correct in believing that matter exists but incorrect in claiming that spirit does not exist. Emanationism is right in saying that matter depends on Spirit, but wrong when it says that spirit does not depend upon matter. Emergentism is true when it says that spirit depends upon matter, but false in its presupposing that matter may be completely independent of spirit. Vedantists and Neutral Monists truthfully claim that spirit and matter are aspects of something underlying both, but falsely deny that spirit and matter have no independence whatsoever. Dualists and creationists rightfully hold that spirit and matter both exist, somewhat independently, but they are mistaken to the extent that they claim complete independence of matter and spirit from each other and from something that underlies or includes both.” (A.J. Bahm)

Some of the dialectical-structural aspects considered within Organicism; aspects which I believe are implicated in how holons propagate are:

THESIS: A POSIT which is or has being, agency and patiency. Each occasion or “eventity” is a thesis.”
ANTITHESIS: A NEGATION or being an opposing thesis.
Multi Antitheses: Possible for inapposite opposites, each thesis is not any other thesis in existence.
SYNTHESIS: Togetherness of 2 or more Theses.

Homothesis: What two antitheses have in common.
Henothesis: 2 antitheses + their homothesis acting as a new thesis.

Partithesis: Any thesis that functions as part of a whole.
Holothesis: Any thesis that functions as a whole of parts.

Analytic Dialectic: The emergence of two or more theses (Analytheses) functioning as a consequence of differentiation of parts within a larger whole.
Synthetic Dialectic: The emergence of a new thesis as the synthesis of two theses
functioning as antitheses.
Organitic Dialectic: The joint emergence of a new synthesis and of two or more parts or Analytheses

Self-Reincorporation: The endurance of a thesis by means of self-extension receiving the effects it has caused interacting with other selves. It’s the incorporation of otherness (either horizontally or vertically) allowing a thesis to grow.

Negation: Allows plurality and experience and is prior to being positive for when something comes into existence it negates all other things which already exist. Each thing exists as a negation of anything else that is different.

Coarchy: The mutual conditioning and cooperation of theses on the same level.
Lowerarchy: The conditioning of theses of higher levels by those of lower levels.
Organarchy: The mutual conditioning of all theses in all levels by each other.

(Source: Polarity, Dialectic, Organicity by A.J. Bahm, 1970)

Regarding the whole–part relation which is so fundamental to the concept of holons and of the structuring and recognition of reality in general Archie Bahm wrote:

“Existence is such that there is a sense in which it exists only as wholes , a sense in which it exists only as parts, a sense in which it exists more as wholes than as parts, a sense in which it exists more as parts than as wholes, a sense in which it exists as having wholes and parts which are completely different from each other, a sense in which it exists as having wholes and parts more different from than like each other, a sense in which it exists as having wholes and parts more alike than different from each other, a sense in which it exists as consisting exactly equally of wholes and parts, a sense in which it exists as consisting of wholes and parts which are exactly equally alike and different, a sense in which it exists as consisting unequally of wholes and parts, and a sense in which it exists as consisting of wholes and parts which are unequally alike and different (From A. J. Bahm’s Polarity, Dialectic, Organicity, 1970).

In a sense, we can affirm that Organicism relies on and affirms relative existence. As previously suggested, it probably offers a third logical path to non dual awareness through the acceptance or embrace of EXISTENCE. According to Archie J. Bahm:

“Organicism regards negation as a category of existence. The only way to negate all negation is to negate all existence, but Organicism claims existence cannot be entirely negated. Non existence does not exist….
Organicism affirms all negation except the negation of existence which would include the negation of all negation… Although more sympathetic to the views of Nagarjuna, Organicism regards Nagarjuna’s negation of the negation of all negation (assertion the Suchness is not non Sunya) as unduly prolix as well as false. Differences do exist. Differences are experienced….The organic is closer to Lao Tzu’s Tao, which is always Yan and Yin, than to even the Suchness of Nagarjuna….Organicism sees existence and experience as always incomplete, always partially graspable by thought, but always such that there can be more thinking about it, i.e. more differences to discover along with each new thing, but also more similarities. Negation can be negated only by what is possible. Hence, there can be no complete negation of negation.” (From A. J. Bahm’s Polarity, Dialectic, Organicity, 1970).

A Brief Discussion of Theoretical Overlappings

Aspects of Wilber stage 4 Integral Theory seems to clearly overlap with Archie J. Bahm’s Organicism. In the “Combined Diagram of Organicism’s Extreme Polar Values and AQAL’s Four Dimensions of Holons” (see diagram below) we can see that AQAL’s Individual Dimension and Aspectism in Organicism seems to correspond. Individuality, oneness or non division seems to correspond with the Organicistic polar position or value interpretation of reality as an aspect of one shared or common dimension between the poles. Finally, the AQAL dimension of the Collective manifestation or expression of holons corresponds with the value of Dualism (which I see as the origin of multiplicity) in Organicism.

Interiority seems to correspond with Organicism’s polar position or value called “One Pole-ism,” (meaning that only one pole is real). This seems to be a more subjective and uncertain interpretation but if all we can truly be sure is our own meaningful Interior experiences, that which we reject and consider foreign and non alive (the Exterior, physical, non living dimension) would correspond in Organicism to what is called “Other Pole-ism.

Although in relation to existence, occasions or holons, all Organicistic position-values and Integral Theory dimensions seem to be of equal importance and to arise simultaneously, I think that –from Spirit’s perspective, a perspective that seems to have been generally intuited by credible mystics- that which is Interior and undivided is a more fundamental and prior manifestation. If conceptual approximations used to describe Spirit tend to go back to a sense of undivided, absolute subjectivity and carefully chosen conceptual approximations can really correspond to genuine and commonly validated experiences, there might be a good reason to think that- in spite of appearances of equal value and simultaneity-that which is Interior and Undivided is prior.

It’s a bit uncanny how the ideas of different seminal authors converge in relation to Integral Theories: Wilber’s interest in promoting a “World Federation” resembles Bahm’s interest in promoting a “World Philosophy.” Both are/were also interested in defining a more amenable form of Buddhism and in acknowledging the basic truths of all major religions. Both Bahm and Wilber also refer(ed) to the teachings of Vedanta regularly. Both knew about and benefited from Arthur Koestler’s “holons” and wrote about these.

There are many other affinities with AQAL Metatheory, especially in the crucial stage this Metatheory was back by the mid 1990’s when the idea of the “Four Corners of the Kosmos” was realized by Ken Wilber in a flash of insight but apparently after much effort. For instance:

Second Tier Awareness: According to Bahm, Organicism promotes a “quantum leap system gestalt” in human awareness. This idea is analogous to the idea of reaching a state of “Vision Logic” or to the idea that AQAL promotes a psychoactive evolutionary response. According to Bahm, a form of “Luxuriant individualism” and “complex acculturation” is required for the proposed “gestalt.” (A.J. Bahm’s, The Philosopher’s World Model,1979).

Holons have transfinite, multihierarchical levels with no upper or bottom limit. Organicism recognizes that wholeness includes each whole and its parts while also organically and processually functioning as part of other wholes. (A.J. Bahm’s Organicism: Origin and Development, 1996).

AQAL’s interior-exterior- and individual-collective dimensions essentially correspond to Organicism’s 4 extreme polar positions, generating 8 and (in further analytical stages) 12 other polar positions. Organicism’s polar positions (found through deduction) are placed along 2 axes. AQAL’s areas (mostly found through a process of induction) are placed in areas defined between axes.

The need for a transcendental metaphysics sustaining the manifest Universe is downplayed. In Organicism, self creative processes in the Universe or in existence itself don’t require transcendental, eternal forms as is the case in Whitehead’s “Philosophy of Organism.” Archie J. Bahm’s Organicism posits that the Universe is a self-creating process in which transcendental, eternal forms are not considered as necessary for existence or as subsisting without process. This understanding is reached as a result of the logical consistency and sufficiency found after analyzing the polar categories of existence with a “both-and” logic.

Metaphysical minimalism: In its own way, Organicism is minimalist by provisionally positing at least 20 indispensable polar categories of existence. All Being -including transcendental Being- is understandable through a common logic that discloses existence (or Kosmos) as experienced. Whether there are realms that transcend what is commonly experienced is not explored.

Anti reductionism: Organicism is based upon a logic which, in turn, is based upon the organic union of opposites. Integral Theory uses also a “both-and” logic for inter-level comparisons and -like Organicism- harbors notions of complex, multidimensional holarchical transcendence and inclusion.

A Participatory God: If Organicism were to accept the idea of a supreme God, it would probably be in a way in which God `would also change and evolve with its changing and evolving sub wholes and parts. God would probably be understood as the totality of wholes and parts.

Integral: “Whenever an issue arises regarding two posits functioning as complementary opposites, care should be taken not to exclude any relevant truths or senses.” (A.J. Bahm’s,The Philosopher’s World Mode, 1979). As in AQAL or Integral Metatheory, truths are not excluded but integrated in an overarching way.

Meta pattern: Organicism’s logical pattern of patterns which organically combines 8 or 12 polar values or positions is used to understand complex systemic, hierarchical and multi dimensional whole-part relations generated by the polar nature of existence. AQAL also discloses a meta pattern that connects multiple hierarchical aspects of existence. Organicism’s meta pattern appears to be self constructing open-ended and self reinforcing, not requiring anything external to itself, only a both-and logic and polarity. The nature of polarity is not explained, only its processes discovered. AQAL’s meta pattern seems to be self reinforcing and open but to an unqualifiable Source or Ground.

A Brief Description of Ken Wilber’s AQAL Metatheory

AQAL Metatheory aims to incorporate all fundamental aspects of reality. These fundamental aspects are thought of as quadrants of (holons and reality) expression, levels of development, lines of development, always available states (this concept normally refers to states of consciousness but also applies to states in culture and nature) and typologies or particular characteristics of expression. It is also a Metatheory that offers a method (called Integral Methodological Pluralism or IMP for short) for incorporating all valid knowledge. This method is clearly influenced by the demands of evidence of modernism and contextual, cultural, relativist criticisms of post modernism. Thus IMP requires an AQAL-Integral researcher to follow the specific injunctions required by clearly distinct kinds of knowledge corresponding to the “insides and outsides” of any of the four quadratic modes of expression under a prescription said to apply to obtain all acceptable and valid knowledge (in all aspects of reality). This is the formula of Injunction or Method, followed by Experience or Disclosure and the Collective Validation of those that adequately followed the adequate injunctions.

AQAL Metatheory has also incorporated the idea that there’s physical, cultural, systemic and personal psychological evolution promoted by a non dual Spirit that somehow provides a telos or evolutionary direction of transcendence and embrace. AQAL Metatheory aims to include the crucial discoveries of individuals and cultures in all stages of development and to serve as a guiding model facilitating socio-cultural transformation as well as personal transformation. AQAL Metatheory is supposed to be a 3rd person description that –by virtue of being a representation of the patterns in which the Kosmos unfolds in the aspects of self, culture and nature-is also considered as “psychoactive” theory capable of accelerating the awakening of a “2nd Tier” or Metatheoretical, highly inclusive way of being in the world and understanding beyond the province of partially true but mutually excluding preferences.

AQAL Metatheory is also called “Integral Theory” because all the main aspects of reality are allegedly integrated under a set of principles that were inspired by Arthur Koestler’s idea of “holons.” The idea is that reality consists of wholes which are also parts, partially complete and partially incomplete, manifesting tendencies such as self preservation, self transcendence, greater differentiation, greater inclusion, heterarchy and hierarchy. In fact, the basic four quadratic expressions of holons (individual interiority, cultural or shared norms interiority, observable expression and systemic observable expression), all seem to derive from their very dualistic or polar nature while seeking completion in their –alleged- non dual Ground of Being. Lines of development, stages of development, always available states and typologies, all seem to integrally unfold within the four main quadratic divisions or expressions of reality. Also, the recognition and inclusion of these aspects in the model was heavily influenced by taking into consideration the finding of mystics like St Therese, and many developmental psychologists-researchers like James Mark Baldwin, Clare Graves, Abraham Maslow and Robert Kegan.

The formation of AQAL Metatheory has also been greatly influenced by the writing of Western philosophers like Plotinus, Hegel and Whitehead and of Eastern philosophers like Shankara, Sri Aurobindo and Nagarjuna. We can also say that it came about as part of a cultural developmental search in the United States of America in which a tradition of East-West studies combined with the emergence of countercultural movements (such as the Human Potential Movement), the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologies and the influence of Systems Theory.

I must mention that a key influence on the metatheory was also the persistent recognition of an ontological Chain of Being as a unifying general scheme shared by many pre modern, pre scientific cultures. Nowadays, in the more current versions of the metatheory, it is not clear how much of pre existing ontological realities are acknowledged due to an effort to adapt AQAL to the demands of modernity and post modernity. On the one hand, the existence of three basic realms (gross physical, subtle and causal) are posited (each with their four quadratic aspects) but, on the other hand, nothing is said to exist until it has been disclosed with an adequate “kosmic address’ (which includes method and level of personal development).

I will reduce the complexity of the AQAL model to the following two diagrams that depict the Four Quadrants with lines of development and the Four Quadrants with their inside and outside methodological zones:

A Brief Sidebar

Besides comparing Organicism with AQAL Metatheory, we may also compare it with other metatheories and some similarities also seem to hold. For instance, thanks to Steven E. Wallis PhD, I became aware of Stephen Pepper’s “Roots Metaphors” Metatheory and noticed (in a diagram presented online in http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Handouts/Pepper.htm) that his “Formism,” “Contextualism,” “Mechanism” and “Organicism” root metaphors (each said to possibly support major philosophical theories) could be diagramed in four quadrants. Is there a reason to believe that integral metatheories are generally compatible with diagrams containing two axes and/or four quadrants? At any rate, I don’t know whether we can derive Pepper’s four metaphors from a complementary polarity but it basically seems that Mechanism roughly corresponds to AQAL’s UR quadrant, Contextualism to AQAL’s LL quadrant, Organicism to AQAL’s LR quadrant and, perhaps, Formism with the UL quadrant if we see it as related with the mental recognition of rational laws.

A Brief Discussion on Theoretical Contrasts

Although there are concepts about holons and holarchies, not being a psychologist A.J. Bahm didn’t apparently develop the concepts of states, types or those of psychological, cultural and systemic levels. Also, unlike AQAL Metatheory, Organicism doesn’t posit the existence of non physical realms. Nonetheless, it doesn’t necessarily preclude them either. If the categories of existence disclosed by experience were a guideline for Archie J. Bahm and he had been aware of adequate evidence of other realms disclosed by commonly available experiences, he may have agreed about expanding his model.

As said before in a different manner, while AQAL’s Integral Methodological Pluralism serves to disclose partial knowledge of dynamic (evolving-devolving) holonic contents expressing in fixed patterns (i.e. in the 4 quadrants and revealed in IMP’s 8 “disclosure” zones), Organicism discloses the dynamical relations among static, but conceptually necessary polar positions. There’s an interplay here that needs even further elucidation. IMP is modeled using bi-dimensional quadrants forming spaces of holonic expression and Organicism is modeled using polar values equally distributed along one-dimensional axes. While AQAL’s IMP appears to be more participatory or to depend more on an individual’s or a group’s levels of development, Organicism appears to be more like 3rd person logical practice although still dependent on an open-minded and thorough application of logical possibilities.

There’s an interesting difference. With AQAL we may say that some of the world’s main metaphysical theories are more inclusive than others but with Organicism we may see that they all stand on an equal footing. For instance, under Organicism, Materialism is not less “evolved” or inclusive than Spiritualism-Idealism or than Vedantism. Many of the main metaphysical theories (Spiritualism or Idealism, Emanationism, Emergentism, Materialism in one axis and Vedantism, Neutral Monism, Creationism, Dualism in the other axis) are chosen to correspond a logical polar position and, as said before, are all equally necessary (actually mutually necessary from an Organicistic point of view). Each is a solution to what the Spirit-Matter polarity requires. Thus, from an Organicistic perspective even Vedanta can be considered a partial 1st Tier perspective.

A Brief Conclusion and Suggestions

The fact that Organicism was developed as a metatheoretical, deduced construct capable of integrating the validity of various theories about the nature of reality and the fact that the construct itself shows interesting parallels with some fundamental aspects of AQAL Metatheory seems to show that a priori thinking about generally intuited aspects of experience and not just observing and recognizing the patterns given to experience is still a fundamentally valid method appropriate to disclose reality. I think that within the efforts of orthodox AQAL Metatheorists not enough has been said about serious conceptual practices that can be considered theoretically valid and withstand the test of modernity and post modernity. Thus I think that orthodox AQAL Integralists and also those trying to develop valid integral metatheories unorthodoxly should consider revising the importance of a knowledge that can be obtained through a priori means. The kind of metaphysics practiced by Archie J. Bahm as he was developing Organicism is definitely not an “airy fairy” or wildly speculative affair. It instead demonstrates the power of critical thinking, logic and reason to create theories that complement others that rely much more on pattern recognition through experiential means. As previously stated, this may serve to complement what AQAL Metatheory offers and even to adequately deepen the practice of theorizing to even antedate or predict what might be later validated by experience.

Perhaps when the original metaphorical Greek meaning of “Theory” (Theoria) as the transfixed observation of a spectacle displayed in a raised theatre (the unfolding Kosmos?) is finally considered as important for personal transformation as are the gradually disclosing patterns which unfold while participating in the theatre’s play, we will begin to Integrate ourselves with what is epistemologically latent and available to reason and ontologically latent and available for disclosing experiences. Perhaps then, the understanding attitude of integral theorists will be ripe and ready to bear a mature fruit within a higher level of inclusivity.

I suggest that, in order to strengthen an integral metatheory such as AQAL, we may have to return to old and valid intuitions as Archie J. Bahm did when he was in the process of developing “Organicism.” I believe that, as integral theorists, we need to deepen and transcend the best insights previously achieved by seminal thinkers in the study of classical metaphysics. I insist that here’s a great need to re-consider and re-integrate deductive, a priori methods with greater emphasis. I think that we need to go back to the old philosophical sources and to think more boldly but also critically on issues that were never clearly settled.

The search for “robustness” in a metatheory or of its mutually independent but necessary and connected parts in association to explaining or predicting a phenomenon may have to focus on occasions as holons first in a non reductionistic way that also connects to the specifics in each of the quadrants or zones of holonic expression. This may require not to model the search for this robustness on theories that focus on the solidly established patterns or “laws” of the physical dimension of existence. I think that integrating meta patterns ought to include the greater degrees of freedom found in the individual and cultural interiorities of meaningful experience.

I suggest that a step forward to integrate the exteriorities with the interiorities within an overarching integral framework with greater explanatory and predictive power could be to explore generally less known metaphysical concepts such as “pure act” and “passive potency” in relation to the “Mind-Body Problem” or to the problem of how may ontologically distinct realms relate within an Upper Right (Gross, Subtle and Causal) quadratic expression and Lower Right (Gross, Subtle and Causal) quadratic expression, in interacting association with the qualitative Upper Left and Lower Left interiority quadratic expressions. Perhaps the application of polarity dialectics and Organicism may assist in reaching for the theoretical intuitions after conceptually exploring previously unexplored pairs of intuited metaphysical complementary polar opposites in relation to these issues.

REFERENCES

Metaphysics: An Introduction, Archie J. Bahm, World Books, 1974.
Organicism: Origin and Development, Archie J. Bahm, World Books, 1996.

Polarity, Dialectic and Organicity, Archie J. Bahm, World Books, 1970.

The Philosopher’s World Model, Archie J. Bahm, Greenwood Press, 1979.
A Theory of Everything: An Integrating Vision of Business Politics, Science and Spirituality, Ken Wilber, Shambhala, 2000.

Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy, Ken Wilber, Shambhala, 2000.

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Ken Wilber, Shambhala, 1995.

“Root Metaphors and World Hypothesis.” Diagram based on Stephen Pepper’s World Hypothesis: a Study in Evidence. Was retrieved from the world wide web from: http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Handouts/Pepper.htm on August 4, 2009.

Boundaries and Integral MetaTheory

2010-05-28T16:23:00.002-06:00

Boundaries and No Boundaries
By Mark Edwards

Defining boundaries are essential for the development of any person or any field of human endeavour. There is no exterior place and no interior state that does not have boundaries. As a parent, I know the crucial importance of setting and observing boundaries in bringing up my children. I also know that the first thing to do in setting a boundary is not to lay it out straight away, but to work out what to do when, not if, those boundaries are crossed.

Science too has its boundaries and it is an essential aspect of creating any conceptual system that domains, key terms and constructs be delineated and defined. Defining boundaries in the creation of metatheories can be a tricky business but this makes it even more important to do so. Because metatheories often cover a lot of territory the task of setting the domain of that metatheory can often take a back seat to the issue of integrating lots and lots of stuff. The big picture building aspect of constructing the meta- can subsume the more humble task of seeing where the limits to these ideas may be. At the most basic level the science of metatheorising needs to be very aware of the central importance of boundary setting so that it can remain humble in its work.

Humility is important in science because humility allows for doubt to arise. Humility allows for questioning to emerge in the face of mystery rather than answering when we may not have all the answers. We set boundaries out of the recognition of our limitations and the need to communicate those limits to others.

When integral metatheorising does not set the limits to its knowledge, when it does not define the domain of its expertise, when it does not describe the contours that mark out its place in the world of knowledge and ideas then it is no longer a science. It is an exercise in aggrandisement, of self exaltation and ultimately, if no boundaries are ever acknowledged of delusion.

Source: http://www.integral-studies.org/node/103

An Integral Response to Climate Change

2010-05-28T00:31:00.001-06:00

Responding to Climate Change: The Need for an Integral Approach

By Karen O’Brien

Climate change is now recognized as one of the most challenging and complex problems facing humanity—the problem is real, the stakes are high, and there is no single “solution.” No measure will be met with the instant gratifi cation that is often expected by people in modern, high-energy consumption societies. We are already committed to changes based on past emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and it is the future that is being decided (Parry et al., 2008a). Actions taken over the next decade will have an enormous influence on the rate and magnitude of climate change that will take place over the next centuries, and both adaptation and mitigation are seen as necessary responses (Parry et al. 2008b; Schellnhuber, 2008).

The consequences of increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and a rise in sea level will affect all aspects of the Earth system, from phytoplankton in the sea to mountain glaciers in the Himalayas (IPCC 2007a, 2007b). Social-ecological systems will undergo transformations that test their resilience, and many species are expected to disappear as the result of changes to habitats and food supplies (Steffen et al., 2004). Ecosystem services will be altered, i.e., the provisioning of food and water, the regulation and control of disease, and pollination processes, to name a few (MA, 2006).

The challenges faced by humans at the turn of the 21st century—poverty, disease, conflict, environmental degradation, and so on—may be exacerbated by climate change. In short, the implications of climate change are serious. Climate change can be considered as the biggest environmental threat in human history, and as the defining human development challenge for the 21st century (IPCC, 2007b; UNDP, 2007; Stern, 2007).

Yet climate change is not simply an environmental problem that can be addressed by regulating greenhouse gas emissions. It is about human development, social justice, equity, and human rights (Adger et al., 2006). It is about human security and the capacity of individuals and communities to respond to threats to their social, environmental, and human rights (Barnett et al., 2008). As the United Nations Development Programme puts it, “It is about people developing the capabilities that empower them to make choices and to lead lives that they value” (UNDP, 2007, p. 7). Climate change is closely related to how humans perceive themselves in the world and how they confront change. In fact, although it is certainly about the climate, at another level it is about how humans both create and respond to change.

In this article I discuss why an integral approach is not only necessary for addressing climate change, but urgent. I argue that an emphasis on understanding climate change from a an objective, systems perspective has downplayed the importance of subjective, interior dimensions of climate change, when in fact the integration of both aspects is needed. I then present six reasons why an integral approach can be considered both useful and necessary for responding to climate change. Finally, I consider what integral theory might offer to current policy debates about one of the world’s climate change “hot spots”—the Arctic region.

Read More (PDF): Here

Integral Pluralism and Pattern Dynamics

2010-05-27T22:48:00.003-06:00

Integral Pluralism and PatternDynamics™
By Tim Winton

I’ve just had an initial read of Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’s (2010) most recent article, “An Ontology of Climate Change”, due out in the next (Spring 2010) edition of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. I say initial read because I’m going to have to go over this more than a few times to take it all in. My blog post here is largely the process of unpacking Sean’s article, coming to terms with its implications for the field of Integral Theory and Praxis, and working through the relationship of my own work in Integral Theory and Integral Sustainability to the emergent space he has opened up.

There are some big theoretical moves enacted in this article- not the least of which is to bring the idea of “enactment” itself front and centre in integral discourse. To enact enactment, as it were. Sean also makes explicit, the hereto only weakly implied idea of Integral Ontological Pluralism (IOP) and connects it to the only slightly more strongly implied concept on Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP) through the only fully explicit pluralism currently widely articulated in Integral Theory, Integral Methodological Pluralism (IMP). This is the familiar—at least to Integral Ecology geeks like me—who (epistemology) is enacting, how (methodology) are they enacting, and what (ontology) are they enacting format from Sean and Michael Zimmerman’s (2009) recent book, “Integral Ecology”.

Sean introduces this triad of pluralisms as explicitly included in “Integral Pluralism”, and with that signifier brings forth a meta-perspective on Integral itself. This is big move number one: in fact this is huge and, I think, hugely exciting— not just for its chutzpah (and I mean that in a most integral sense of the word)—but also for its practical usefulness in meeting the challenges of a complex world. Sean illustrates this through a chart showing how Integral Pluralism allows us to identify the multiple (but overlapping) objects called “climate change”.

Ontological pluralism brings to awareness the fact that when we are talking about climate change, we are not all of us talking about the same thing, even if we are not entirely talking about different things. That’s the “overlapping” bit- not just one thing, but not so many or so completely unrelated to an underlying “reality” that they are completely fragmented. I should say here that Sean does not limit Integral Pluralism to the above-mentioned three pluralisms, and this opens up a host of other possibilities for inclusion within the purview of an Integral meta-perspective. For instance, by the end of the article Sean has added Integral Theoretical Pluralism to the mix.

Now, along with multiple perspectives and multiple methodologies we recognize multiple ontologies, allowing us to multiply Integral comprehensiveness and inclusion by some number of factors. And, through that increased comprehensiveness, enact a more sophisticated view and response to the challenges we face. Sean uses some illuminating graphics to demonstrate Modern, Postmodern and Integral approaches to ontology that I found particularly interesting- especially in their relationship to my own graphically intense Integral offering called PatternDynamics™. (See Appendix 1) Before we get to that though, we need to check out big move number two, Integral Enactment Theory.

Read More @ The Integral Ecology Center

Self as Unitas Multiplex

2010-05-27T16:15:00.001-06:00

Unitas Multiplex, Purposiveness, Individuality: Contrasting Stern's Conception of the Person with Gergen's Saturated Self

By Karl-Heinz Renner and Lothar Laux

Kenneth Gergen's (1991) `saturated self is contrasted using William Stern's (1923) conception of the person, which is based upon three primary characteristics: unitas multiplex, purposiveness, individuality. Gergen emphazises the multiplicity of the self, but neglects to treat the problem of unity. On the contrary, Stem's unitas multiplex, which means unity in diversity through purposiveness, offers a solution to this problem. While Gergen criticizes individuality as individualism, Stern highlights individuality as a `world of its own', which is created by every person through productive self-development. Purposiveness, the most central category of the person, is related to the postmodern experience of goal conflicts. Finally, there is discussion of the validity of Stem's conception of the person in postmodern living conditions.

Source: Theory & Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 6, 831-846 (2000)

A Critical Look at Critical (Neo)Personalism: Unitas multiplex and the ‘Person’ Concept

By Michael A. Tissawa

This essay evaluates critically William Stern's (Stern, W. (2010). Psychology and personalism) unitas multiplex and definition of ‘person.’ Discussion of the former is restricted to the lowest psychological levels and evaluation is conducted in light of interpretive options open to the ‘targets’ of Stern's current adherents, termed ‘neopersonalists.’ It is concluded that to avoid the charge of ‘individualism,’ neopersonalist expositions of the unitas multiplex should be geared toward the strong possibility that their targets will read it as a person-ontology. Evaluation then turns to Stern's definition of ‘person,’ which is compared with elements of Hacker's (Hacker, P. (2007) analysis of the same concept.

Results suggest that while Stern's definition applies to ‘animal’ and ‘human being,’ it does not apply to ‘person’. A more coherent conceptual framework for neopersonalism thus is suggested. A ‘can-do teleontology’ maintains emphasis on the person's potentialities and inherent goal-oriented and goal-striving nature, avoids reduction of the person concept, relates the person to others by necessity, and is amenable to Stern's definition of ‘personality.’

Article Outline

1. A critical look at critical personalism

2. Interpretive options in reading the unitas multiplex - Methodological heuristic or person-ontology? Phenomenal experience and the acts; Introspection and the threat of ‘individualism’

3. The ‘person’ concept - ‘Human being’ and ‘person’; ‘Person’ and ‘personality’ as a developmental concepts; Concluding implications: framework for a ‘can-do teleontology’ of the person.

Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 28, Issue 2, August 2010, Pages 159-167

Presitige, Primate Status and Cultural Innovation

2010-05-26T11:08:00.002-06:00

Prestigious Chimps and the Emergence of Cultural Innovation

by Eric Michael Johnson

In societies around the globe certain influential figures, to use the concept of anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, benefit from "cultural capital" because of their social prestige in a given society. This results in others being more likely to adopt any unique cultural traits that they invent. After all, if someone who is widely admired and successful adopts a new way of doing things, perhaps following their lead could make you admired and successful too?

Now, a new study in PLoS ONE by Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin E. Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, and Frans de Waal suggests that prestige is an important factor in other primates as well. By employing a simple behavioral experiment these researchers demonstrated that chimpanzees, when given a choice between two nearly identical tasks, will choose the one they previously witnessed a high-ranking member of the troop perform.

It has long been assumed that humans are the only species in which prestige has an influence on the behavior of others in a social group. To cite just one example, anthropologist Francisco Gil-White and economist Joe Henrich wrote in their 2001 paper "The Evolution of Prestige" (pdf) that:

'Humans appear to be the only species with prestige status. The reason why, we argue, is culture.'

This argument, of course, breaks down once it's granted that nonhuman primates also possess culture. As I wrote earlier in my post 'Cultural Transmission in Chimpanzees' (also see here for bonobos) not only is culture a common feature in our evolutionary cousins, the number of cultural traits are more frequent in some societies than others.

Read More Here: The Primate Diaries

The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology

2010-05-25T09:11:00.006-06:00

The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology

By Jonathan Haidt

Abstract: People are both selfish and morally motivated. Morality is both universal and culturally variable. Such apparent contradictions are dissolving as research from many disciplines converges on a few shared principles, including the importance of moral intuitions, the socially functional (rather than truth-seeking) nature of moral thinking, and the coevolution of moral minds with cultural practices and institutions that create diverse moral communities. I propose a fourth principle to guide future research: Morality is about more than harm and fairness. More research is needed on the collective and religious parts of the moral domain, such as loyalty, authority, and spiritual purity.

Citation: Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316, 998-1002.

Source: Here

Marijuana and Divergent Thinking

2010-03-11T22:47:00.001-07:00

Marijuana and Divergent Thinking

by Jonah Lehrer

In response to my post on the effects of mood on cognition, which also referenced the possibilities of self-medicating ourselves into the ideal mood, Andrew Sullivan offered up the following anecdote:

I was talking with a fine artist the other day and he was telling me how blocked he was on a piece, and how he then smoked some pot and everything came together.

It unleashed what he wanted to express, by suppressing the analytic portion of his mind that was inhibiting him. I know this is the bleeding obvious to anyone who has a brain and an ounce of human experience but it is a truth we are somehow circumscribed from uttering in public.

There's a reason why jazz would be impossible without weed.

A new paper published in Psychiatry Research sheds some light on this phenomenon, or why smoking weed seems to unleash a stream of loose associations. The study looked at a phenomenon called semantic priming, in which the activation of one word allows us to react more quickly to related words. For instance, the word "dog" might lead to decreased reaction times for "wolf," "pet" and "Lassie," but won't alter how quickly we react to "chair".

Interestingly, marijuana seems to induce a state of hyper-priming, in which the reach of semantic priming extends outwards to distantly related concepts. As a result, we hear "dog" and think of nouns that, in more sober circumstances, would seem to have nothing in common.

Read More: Here

Mead on the Social Self

2010-03-08T22:58:00.002-07:00

The Social Self

By George Herbert Mead

[This paper was first read at the Annual Meeting of the Western Philosophical Association, March, 1913 - and published in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 10, 374-380]

Recognizing that the self can not appear in consciousness as an "I," that it is always an object, i.e., a "me," I wish to suggest an answer to the question, What is involved in the self being an object? The first answer may be that an object involves a subject. Stated in other words, that a "me" is inconceivable without an "I. " And to this reply must be made that such an "I" is a presupposition, but never a presentation of conscious experience, for the moment it is presented it has passed into the objective case, presuming, if you like, an "I" that observes -- but an "I" that can disclose himself only by ceasing to be the subject for whom the object "me" exists. It is, of course, not the Hegelism of a self that becomes another to himself in which I am interested, but the nature of the self as revealed by introspection and subject to our factual analysis. This analysis does reveal, then, in a memory process an attitude of observing oneself in which both the observer and the observed appear. To be concrete, one remembers asking himself how he could undertake to do this, that, or the other, chiding himself for his shortcomings or pluming himself upon his achievements. Thus, in the re-integrated self of the moment passed, one finds both a subject and an object, but it is a subject that is now an object of observation, and has the same nature as the object self whom we present as in intercourse with those about us. In quite the same fashion we remember the questions, admonitions, and approvals addressed to our fellows. But the subject attitude which we instinctively take can be presented only as something experienced -- as we can be conscious of our acts only through the sensory processes set up after the act has begun.

The contents of this presented subject, who thus has become an object in being presented, but which still distinguish him as the subject of the passed experience from the "me" whom he addressed, are those images which initiated the conversation and the motor sensations which accompany the expression, plus the organic sensations and the response of the whole system to the activity initiated. In a word, just those contents which go to make up the self which is distinguished from the others whom he addresses. The self appearing as "I" is the memory image self who acted toward himself and is the same self who acts toward other selves.

On the other hand, the stuff that goes to make up the "me" whom the "I" addresses and whom he observes, is the experience which is induced by this action of the "I." If the "I" speaks, the "me" hears. If the "I" strikes, the "me" feels the blow. Here again the "me" consciousness is of the same character as that which arises from the action of the other upon him. That is, it is only as the individual finds himself acting with reference to himself as he acts towards others, that he becomes a subject to himself rather than an object, and only as he is affected by his own social conduct in the manner in which he is affected by that of others, that he becomes an object to his own social conduct.

The differences in our memory presentations of the "I" and the "me" are those of the memory images of the initiated social conduct and those of the sensory responses thereto.

It is needless, in view of the analysis of Baldwin, of Royce and of Cooley and many others, to do more than indicate that these reactions arise earlier in our social conduct with others than in introspective self-consciousness, i.e., that the infant consciously calls the attention of others before he calls his own attention by affecting himself and that he is consciously affected by others before he is conscious of being affected by himself.

The "I" of introspection is the self which enters into social relations with other selves. It is not the "I" that is implied in the fact that one presents himself as a "me. " And the "me" of introspection is the same "me" that is the object of the social conduct of others. One presents himself as acting toward others -- in this presentation he is presented in indirect discourse as the subject of the action and is still an object, -- and the subject of this presentation can never appear immediately in conscious experience. It is the same self who is presented as observing himself, and he affects himself just in so far and only in so far as he can address himself by the means of social stimulation which affect others. The "me" whom he addresses is the "me," therefore, that is similarly affected by the social conduct of those about him.

This statement of the introspective situation, however, seems to overlook a more or less constant feature of our consciousness, and that is that running current of awareness of what we do which is distinguishable from the consciousness of the field of stimulation, whether that field be without or within. It is this "awareness" which has led many to assume that it is the nature of the self to be conscious both of subject and of object -- to be subject of action toward an object world and at the same time to be directly conscious of this subject as subject, -- "Thinking its non-existence along with whatever else it thinks." Now, as Professor James pointed out, this consciousness is more logically conceived of as sciousness -- the thinker being an implication rather than a content, while the "me" is but a bit of object content within the stream of sciousness. However, this logical statement does not do justice to the findings of consciousness. Besides the actual stimulations and responses and the memory images of these, within which lie perforce the organic sensations and responses which make up the "me," there accompanies a large part of our conscious experience, indeed all that we call self-conscious, an inner response to what we may be doing, saying, or thinking. At the back of our heads we are a large part of the time more or less clearly conscious of our own replies to the remarks made to others, of innervations which would lead to attitudes and gestures answering our gestures and attitudes towards others.

The observer who accompanies all our self-conscious conduct is then not the actual "I" who is responsible for the conduct in propria persona -- he is rather the response which one makes to his own conduct. The confusion of this response of ours, following upon our social stimulations of others with the implied subject of our action, is the psychological ground for the assumption that the self can be directly conscious of itself as acting and acted upon. The actual situation is this: The self acts with reference to others and is immediately conscious of the objects about it. In memory it also redintegrates the self acting as well as the others acted upon. But besides these contents, the action with reference to the others calls out responses in the individual himself -- there is then another "me" criticizing approving, and suggesting, and consciously planning, i.e., the reflective self.

It is not to all our conduct toward the objective world that we thus respond. Where we are intensely preoccupied with the objective world, this accompanying awareness disappears. We have to recall the experience to become aware that we have been involved as selves, to produce the self-consciousness which is a constituent part of a large part of our experience. As I have indicated elsewhere, the mechanism for this reply to our own social stimulation of others follows as a natural result from the fact that the very sounds, gestures, especially vocal gestures, which man makes in addressing others, call out or tend to call out responses from himself. He can not hear himself speak without assuming in a measure the attitude which he would have assumed if he had been addressed in the same words by others.

The self which consciously stands over against other selves thus becomes an object, an other to himself, through the very fact that he hears himself talk, and replies. The mechanism of introspection is therefore given in the social attitude which man necessarily assumes toward himself, and the mechanism of thought, in so far as thought uses symbols which are used in social intercourse, is but an inner conversation.

Now it is just this combination of the remembered self which acts and exists over against other selves with the inner response to his action which is essential to the self-conscious ego -- the self in the full meaning of the term -- although neither phase of self-consciousness, in so far as it appears as an object of our experience, is a subject.

It is also to be noted that this response to the social conduct of the self may be in the role of another -- we present his arguments in imagination and do it with his intonations and gestures and event perhaps with his facial expression. In this way we play the rôles of all our group; indeed, it is only in so far as we do this that they become part of our social environment -- to be aware of another self as ' a self implies that we have played his role or that of another with whose type we identify him for purposes of intercourse. The inner response to our reaction to others is therefore as varied as is our social environment. Not that we assume the roles of others toward ourselves because we are subject to a mere imitative instinct, but because in responding to ourselves we are in the nature of the case taking the attitude of another than the self that is directly acting, and into this reaction there naturally flows the memory images of the responses of those about us, the memory images of those responses of others which were in answer to like actions. Thus the child can think about his conduct as good or bad only as he reacts to his own acts in the remembered words of his parents. Until this process has been developed into the abstract process of thought, self-consciousness remains dramatic, and the self which is a fusion of the remembered actor and this accompanying chorus is somewhat loosely organized and very clearly social. Later the inner stage changes into the forum and workshop of thought. The features and intonations of the dramatis personae fade out and the emphasis falls upon the meaning of the inner speech, the imagery becomes merely the barely necessary cues. But the mechanism remains social, and at any moment the process may become personal.

It is fair to say that the modern western world has lately done much of its thinking in the form of the novel, while earlier the drama was a more effective but equally social mechanism of self-consciousness. And, in passing, I may refer to that need of filling out the bare spokesman of abstract thought, which even the most abstruse thinker feels, in seeking his audience. The import of this for religious self-consciousness is obvious.

There is one further implication of this nature of the self to which I wish to call attention. It is the manner of its reconstruction. I wish especially to refer to it, because the point is of importance in the psychology of ethics.

As a mere organization of habit the self is not self-conscious. It is this self which we refer to as character. When, however, an essential problem appears, there is some disintegration in this organization, and different tendencies appear in reflective thought as different voices in conflict with each other. In a sense the old self has disintegrated, and out of the moral process a new self arises. The specific question I wish to ask is whether the new self appears together with the new object or end. There is of course a reciprocal relation between the self and its object, the one implies the other and the interests and evaluations of the self answer exactly to content and values of the object. On the other hand, the consciousness of the new object, its values and meaning, seems to come earlier to consciousness than the new self that answers to the new object.

The man who has come to realize a new human value is more immediately aware of the new object in his conduct than of himself and his manner of reaction to it. This is due to the fact to which reference has already been made, that direct attention goes first to the object. When the self becomes an object, it appears in memory, and the attitude which it implied has already been taken. In fact, to distract attention from the object to the self implies just that lack of objectivity which we criticize not only in the moral agent, but in the scientist.

Assuming as I do the essentially social character of the ethical end, we find in moral reflection a conflict in which certain values find a spokesman in the old self or a dominant part of the old self, while other values answering to other tendencies and impulses arise in opposition and find other spokesmen to present their cases. To leave the field to the values represented by the old self is exactly what we term selfishness. The justification for the term is found in the habitual character of conduct with reference to these values. Attention is not claimed by the object and shifts to the subjective field where the affective responses are identified with the old self. The result is that we state the other conflicting ends in subjective terms of other selves and the moral problem seems to take on the form of the sacrifice either of the self or of the others.

Where, however, the problem is objectively considered, although the conflict is a social one, it should not resolve itself into a struggle between selves, but into such a reconstruction of the situation that different and enlarged and more adequate personalities may emerge. A tension should be centered on the objective social field.

In the reflective analysis, the old self should enter upon the same terms with the selves whose roles are assumed, and the test of the reconstruction is found in the fact that all the personal interests are adequately recognized in a new social situation. The new self that answers to this new situation can appear in consciousness only after this new situation has been realized and accepted. The new self can not enter into the field as the determining factor because he is consciously present only after the new end has been formulated and accepted. The old self may enter only as an element over against the other personal interests involved. If he is the dominant factor it must be in defiance of the other selves whose interests are at stake. As the old self he is defined by his conflict with the others that assert themselves in his reflective analysis.

Solution is reached by the construction of a new world harmonizing the conflicting interests into which enters the new self.

The process is in its logic identical with the abandonment of the old theory with which the scientist has identified himself, his refusal to grant this old attitude any further weight than may be given to the other conflicting observations and hypotheses. Only when a successful hypothesis, which overcomes the conflicts, has been formulated and accepted, may the scientist again identify himself with this hypothesis as his own, and maintain it contra mundum. He may not state the scientific problem and solution in terms of his old personality. He may name his new hypothesis after himself and realize his enlarged scientific personality in its triumph.

The fundamental difference between the scientific and moral solution of a problem lies in the fact that the moral problem deals with concrete personal interests, in which the whole self is reconstructed in its relation to the other selves whose relations are essential to its personality.

The growth of the self arises out of a partial disintegration, -- the appearance of the different interests in the forum of reflection, the reconstruction of the social world, and the consequent appearance of the new self that answers to the new object.

Sapolsky on the Uniqueness of Human Beings

2010-03-07T23:48:00.003-07:00

Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky is one of the world’s leading experts in the biology of stress and coping. Sapolsky’s research crosses over into primatology and investigates the deep origins and function of stress and its effects on individual well-being. He is the author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and many other popular books on biology and the human predicament.

Below is a video of Sapolsky giving a presentation to a graduating class at Stanford University on stress and “the uniqueness of humans”:

The Social and Biological Roots of Morality

2010-02-19T16:48:00.004-07:00

The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment

By Jonathan Haidt

Abstract: Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. Four reasons are given for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it de-emphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals, emphasizing instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as anthropology and primatology.

Citation: Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834

Source:

http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.emotionaldog.manuscript.pdf

Embodiment and Relativity

2010-02-03T14:44:00.003-07:00

Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally

By Natalie Angier

The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.

“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”

The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.

You say you’re looking forward to the future? Here, Ma, watch me pitch forward!

Read More: Here

Coping with Climate Change

2010-01-26T12:14:00.004-07:00

A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change

By Elinor Ostrom

Abstract: This paper proposes an alternative approach to addressing the complex problems of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The author, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, argues that single policies adopted only at a global scale are unlikely to generate sufficient trust among citizens and firms so that collective action can take place in a comprehensive and transparent manner that will effectively reduce global warming. Furthermore, simply recommending a single governmental unit to solve global collective action problems is inherently weak because of freerider problems. For example, the Carbon Development Mechanism (CDM) can be ‘gamed’ in ways that hike up prices of natural resources and in some cases can lead to further natural resource exploitation. Some flaws are also noticeable in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) program. Both the CDM and REDD are vulnerable to the free-rider problem.

As an alternative, the paper proposes a polycentric approach at various levels with active oversight of local, regional, and national stakeholders. Efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions are a classic collective action problem that is best addressed at multiple scales and levels. Given the slowness and conflict involved in achieving a global solution to climate change, recognizing the potential for building a more effective way of reducing green house gas emissions at multiple levels is an important step forward.

A polycentric approach has the main advantage of encouraging experimental efforts at multiple levels, leading to the development of methods for assessing the benefits and costs of particular strategies adopted in one type of ecosystem and compared to results obtained in other ecosystems. Building a strong commitment to find ways of reducing individual emissions is an important element for coping with this problem, and having others also take responsibility can be more effectively undertaken in small- to medium-scale governance units that are linked together through information networks and monitoring at all levels.

This paper was prepared as a background paper for the 2010 World Development Report on Climate Change.

Read the Entire Report: Here

This paper—prepared as a background paper to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2010: Development in a Changing Climate—is a product of the Development Economics Vice Presidency. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the World Bank or its affiliated organizations. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contracted at research@worldbank.org.

Critical Cartography

2010-01-18T17:27:00.003-07:00

An Introduction to Critical Cartography

By Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier

Abstract: This paper provides a brief introduction to critical cartography. We define critical cartography as a one-two punch of new mapping practices and theoretical critique. Critical cartography challenges academic cartography by linking geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. Although contemporary critical cartography rose to prominence in the 1990s, we argue that it can only be understood in the historical context of the development of the cartographic discipline more generally. We sketch some of the history of this development, and show that critiques have continually accompanied the discipline. In the post-war period cartography underwent a significant solidification as a science, while at the same time other mapping practices (particularly artistic experimentation with spatial representation) were occurring. Coupled with the resurgence of theoretical critiques during the 1990s, these developments serve to question the relevance of the discipline of cartography at a time when mapping is increasingly prevalent and vital.

Read More (PDF): Here

Time Magazine - Epigenetics

2010-01-17T22:41:00.007-07:00

Why Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny

By John Cloud

The remote, snow-swept expanses of northern Sweden are an unlikely place to begin a story about cutting-edge genetic science. The kingdom's northernmost county, Norrbotten, is nearly free of human life; an average of just six people live in each square mile. And yet this tiny population can reveal a lot about how genes work in our everyday lives.

Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th century, if the harvest was bad, people starved. The starving years were all the crueler for their unpredictability. For instance, 1800, 1812, 1821, 1836 and 1856 were years of total crop failure and extreme suffering. But in 1801, 1822, 1828, 1844 and 1863, the land spilled forth such abundance that the same people who had gone hungry in previous winters were able to gorge themselves for months. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

In the 1980s, Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, a preventive-health specialist who is now at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, began to wonder what long-term effects the feast and famine years might have had on children growing up in Norrbotten in the 19th century — and not just on them but on their kids and grandkids as well. So he drew a random sample of 99 individuals born in the Overkalix parish of Norrbotten in 1905 and used historical records to trace their parents and grandparents back to birth. By analyzing meticulous agricultural records, Bygren and two colleagues determined how much food had been available to the parents and grandparents when they were young.

Around the time he started collecting the data, Bygren had become fascinated with research showing that conditions in the womb could affect your health not only when you were a fetus but well into adulthood. In 1986, for example, the Lancet published the first of two groundbreaking papers showing that if a pregnant woman ate poorly, her child would be at significantly higher than average risk for cardiovascular disease as an adult. Bygren wondered whether that effect could start even before pregnancy: Could parents' experiences early in their lives somehow change the traits they passed to their offspring?

Read More: Here

Two Philosophy Papers on Cross-Cultural Knowing

2010-01-11T00:27:00.002-07:00

Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich and Jonathan M. Weinberg, (2003). Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology In S. Luper (ed.), The Skeptics (Ashgate), pp. 227-247.

Throughout the twentieth century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, including Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of contemporary philosophers (for example Cohen 1999; DeRose 1995; Hill 1996; Klein 1981; Lewis 1996; McGinn 1993; Nozick 1981; Schiffer 1996; Unger 1975; Williams 1991). Typically, these arguments make use of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal to intuition, little or no defence is offered, and in many cases it is hard to see what else could be said in support of these premises...

Jonathan Weinberg, (2006). What's Epistemology For? The Case for Neopragmatism in Normative Epistemology. In Epistemological Futures, ed. S. Hetherington, (Oxford University Press) pp. 26-47.

How ought we to go about forming and revising our beliefs, arguing and debating our reasons, and investigating our world? If those questions constitute normative epistemology, then I am interested here in normative metaepistemology: the investigation into how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs about how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs -- how we ought to argue about how we ought to argue.

The Brain and the Developing Mind

2009-12-23T15:56:00.002-07:00

Dr. Dan Siegel is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine where he is on the faculty of the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development and the Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several other honorary fellowships. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization that focuses on how the development of mindsight in individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes.

Below Siegel gives a lecture entitled ‘Mindsight: The Power of Connection The Science of Reflection’ as part of the Chautauqua Institution's 2009 Summer Lecture Series:

Dr. Siegel has published extensively for the professional audience. He is the co-editor of a handbook of psychiatry and the author of numerous articles, chapters, and the internationally acclaimed text, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience (1999). This book introduces the idea of interpersonal neurobiology and has been of interest to and utilized by a number of organizations, including the U.S. Department of Justice, The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, Microsoft and Google, early intervention programs and a range of clinical and research departments worldwide. Dr. Siegel’s own psychotherapy practice includes children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families.

He has been invited to lecture for the King of Thailand, Pope John Paul II, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Epistemological Pluralism

2009-12-09T21:42:00.005-07:00

Epistemological Pluralism: Reorganizing Interdisciplinary Research

By Thaddeus R. Miller, Timothy D. Baird, Caitlin M. Littlefield, Gary Kofinas, F. Stuart Chapin III, and Charles L. Redman

Despite progress in interdisciplinary research, difficulties remain. In this paper, we argue that scholars, educators, and practitioners need to critically rethink the ways in which interdisciplinary research and training are conducted. We present epistemological pluralism as an approach for conducting innovative, collaborative research and study. Epistemological pluralism recognizes that, in any given research context, there may be several valuable ways of knowing, and that accommodating this plurality can lead to more successful integrated study. This approach is particularly useful in the study and management of social–ecological systems.

Through resilience theory's adaptive cycle, we demonstrate how a focus on epistemological pluralism can facilitate the reorganization of interdisciplinary research and avoid the build-up of significant, but insufficiently integrative, disciplinary-dominated research. Finally, using two case studies—urban ecology and social–ecological research in Alaska—we highlight how interdisciplinary work is impeded when divergent epistemologies are not recognized and valued, and that by incorporating a pluralistic framework, these issues can be better explored, resulting in more integrated understanding.

Read More: Here

Brain Networks and the Default Self

2009-12-03T13:34:00.011-07:00

You Are Who You Are by Default

By Tina Hesman Saey

You may not be riding the latest social wave on Facebook or MySpace, or tweeting your every impulse to fans on Twitter. But your brain is hooked on networking.

Vision works because different brain regions link up to connect the dots of light and color into a meaningful picture of the world. Language depends on networks of neural circuitry that make sense of the words you hear or see and that help you generate your side of the conversation. Networks of nerves control the motion of your muscles, allowing you to move smoothly and, when necessary, swiftly.

Networks are the “in” thing for brain scientists, as surely as they have been for online social butterflies.

Scientists learn about the brain’s networks by asking people to perform all sorts of mental acrobatics — interpreting optical illusions, solving riddles, taking tests of mental or muscular skills. But some neuroscientists think they can learn even more about the brain by asking volunteers to just lie back, close their eyes and let their minds wander

Read More: Here

Developmental Disorders as Pathological Resilience Domains

2009-11-23T16:25:00.005-07:00

Developmental Disorders as Pathological Resilience Domains

By Rodrick Wallace

Ecosystem theorists recognize several different kinds of resilience (e.g., Gunderson 2000). The first, which they call engineering resilience, since it characterizes of machines and man-machine interactions, involves the rate at which a disturbed system returns to a presumed single, stable equilibrium condition, following perturbation. From that limited perspective, a resilient system is one that quickly returns to its single stable state. Not many biological phenomena, including those of human physiology and psychology, are actually resilient in this simplistic sense. Holling's (1973) great contribution was to recognize that sudden, highly punctuated, transitions between different, at best quasi-stable, domains of relation among ecosystem variates were possible, i.e., that more than one “stable” state was possible for real ecosystems (e.g. Gunderson 2000). Thus ecosystem resilience differs greatly from the engineering perspective.

This paper reexamines a large class of broadly cognitive mental and physiological phenomena, focusing on a spectrum of comorbid human developmental disorders that may, in fact, constitute complex, pathological resilience domains. The usually irreversible and punctuated nature of path dependence in ecosystem domain shifts sheds new light on the therapeutic intractability of many such conditions. It is important to note that punctuated biological phenomena are found across a great range of temporal scales (e.g., Eldredge 1985, Gould 2002). For example species appear suddenly on a geologic time scale, persist relatively unchanged for a fairly long time, and then disappear suddenly again on a geologic time scale. Evolutionary process is vastly speeded up in tumorigenesis, which nonetheless seems amenable to similar analysis (e.g., Wallace et al. 2003a).

We will describe a model that adapts the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to ecosystem resilience theory much in the way the central limit theorem is used in parametric statistical inference. The strength of such an approach is that it is almost independent of the detailed structure of the interacting information sources inevitably associated with both cognitive and ecosystem processes, important as such structure may be in other contexts. We begin with a brief overview of developmental pathologies and their comorbidities at both community and individual scales.

Read More: Here

The New Geopolitics of Energy

2009-11-17T23:51:00.004-07:00

Below Michael Klare, author of the acclaimed book Resource Wars and the Five College Professor of Peace & World Security Studies at Hampshire College, discusses the new geopolitics of energy.

The Biology and Effects of Clinical Depression

2009-11-17T23:46:00.005-07:00

In the following lecture Stanford Professor of biological sciences and leading neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky posits that depression is the most damaging disease that you can experience. Right now it is the number four cause of disability in the US and it is becoming more common. Sapolsky states that depression is as real of a biological disease as is diabetes.

Critical Thought and Orthodoxy

2009-11-17T11:43:00.002-07:00

Critical Thought as Solvent of Doxa

By Loïc Wacquant

What is critical thought for you?

One can give two senses to the notion of critique: a sense one could call Kantian, in the lineage of the philosopher of Königsberg, which refers to the evaluative examination of categories and forms of knowledge in order to determine their cognitive validity and value; and a Marxian sense, which trains the weapons of reason at socio-historical reality and sets itself the task of bringing to light the hidden forms of domination and exploitation which shape it so as to reveal by contrast the alternatives they thwart and exclude (recall Horkheimer’s definition of “critical theory” as theory that is at the same time explanatory, normative, practical, and reflexive).

It seems to me that the most fruitful critical thought is that which situates itself at the confluence of these two traditions and thus weds epistemological and social critique by questioning, in a continuous, active, and radical manner, both established forms of thought and established forms of collective life – “common sense” or doxa (including the doxa of the critical tradition) along with the social and political relations that obtain at a particular moment in a particular society.

Read More: Here

Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition

2009-11-16T16:25:00.001-07:00

A Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind

By Merlin Donald

Origins of the Modern Mind (1991) was an attempt to synthesize various sources of information--neurobiological, psychological, archeological and anthropological, among others--about our cognitive origins, in the belief that the human mind co-evolved in close interaction with both brain and culture… This precis focuses on my core theory and disregards most of the background material reviewed at length in the book itself.

My central hypothesis is that there were three major cognitive transformations by which the modern human mind emerged over several million years, starting with a complex of skills presumably resembling those of the chimpanzee. These transformations left, on the one hand, three new, uniquely human systems of memory representation, and on the other, three interwoven layers of human culture, each supported by its corresponding set of representations.

I agree with multilevel evolutionary theorists like Plotkin who believe that selection pressures at this stage of human evolution were ultimately expressed and tested on the sociocultural level; hence I have described the evolutionary scenario as a series of cultural adaptations, even though individual cognition was really where the main event was taking place, since it provides the linkage between physical and cultural evolution.

Read More (PDF): Here

The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution

2009-11-16T16:18:00.001-07:00

The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the "Isolated Mind"

By Merlin Donald

Human symbolic culture constitutes a distinctive, species-universal trait, usually thought to be the result of our having evolved special cognitive capacities, such as language. Seen from this vantage point, the flow of influence runs from cognition to culture, in that order, and the task of evolutionary psychology should be to decide how and when the basic cognitive foundations of modern culture came into being.

According to this doctrine, the coevolutionary brain-culture spiral that characterized hominids must have been driven primarily at the cognitive level. Thus, cognitive evolution triggers cultural evolution, which triggers further brain evolution, and so on. This is the conventional meaning of brain-culture coevolution.

Read More (PDF): Here

Integral Methodological Pluralism in Practice

2009-11-16T13:56:00.002-07:00

Integral Research as a Practical Mixed-Methods Framework: Clarifying The Role of Integral Methodological Pluralism

By Jeffery A. Martin

The mixed methods community could represent a significant opportunity to place Integral Theory at the very heart of the academy. Methodological communities often define what is and is not acceptable within academic research. Soon, the mixed methods community will need to move beyond designs involving a relatively small number of intra-study methods to larger intra- and intermethodological frameworks.

Integral Theory is well positioned to provide key portions of these needed frameworks and assume a more central role within the academy. This article begins by examining and clarifying some core definitional issues with Integral Methodological Pluralism and Integral Research. It next defines the current state of the mixed methods community and the opportunities provided. Finally, it discusses how Integral Methodological Pluralism and Integral Research are positioned to take advantage of these opportunities.

Read More: Here

JEFFERY A. MARTIN is currently a graduate-level student at California Institute of Integral Studies and Harvard University. His research interests include methodology, psychological effects on experimentation, and consciousness studies. Jeffery is the author, co-author, or co-editor of over 15 books and director of the Center for the Study of Intent.

Neural Correlates of Shared Intentionality

2009-11-12T16:22:00.003-07:00

Becchio, Cristina & Bertone, Cesare (2005). Beyond cartesian subjectivism: Neural correlates of shared intentionality. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (7):20-30

Abstract: In the present paper we present a short review of some recent neuro- physiological and neuropsychological findings which suggest that self-generated actions and actions of others are mapped on the same neural substratum. Since this substratum is neutral with respect to the agent, correctly attributing an action to its proper author requires the co-activation of areas specific to the self and the other. A conceptual analysis of the empirical data will lead us to conclude that from a neurobiological point of view the problem is not 'how is it possible to share the intentions of others', but rather 'how one can distinguish one's own action/intention from those of other people'.

More: Here

Consciousness as a Self-Organizing Process

2009-10-30T12:56:00.001-06:00

Consciousness as a Self-Organizing Process: An Ecological Perspective

By Allan Combs and Sally Goerner

The evolution of consciousness is seen in the context of energy driven evolution in general, where energy and information are understood as two sides of the same coin. From this perspective consciousness is viewed as an ecological system in which streams of cognitive, perceptual, and emotional information form a rich complex of interactions, analogous to the interactive metabolism of a living cell.

The result is an organic, self-generating, or autopoietic, system, continuously in the act of creating itself. Evidence suggests that this process is chaotic, or at least chaotic-like, and capable of assuming a number of distinct states best understood as chaotic attractors.

Read More: Here

Your Wise Brain

2009-10-30T00:25:00.003-06:00

Practical insights into happiness, love, and wisdom from psychology, neuroscience, and Buddhism.

by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.

Have you ever seen a real brain?

I remember the first time I saw one, in a neuropsych class: the instructor put on rubber gloves to protect against the formaldehyde preservative, popped the lid off of a lab bucket, and then pulled out a brain.

It didn’t look like much, a nondescript waxy yellowish-white blob rather like a sculpted head of cauliflower. But the whole class went silent. We were looking at the real deal, ground zero for consciousness, headquarters for “me.” The person it came from – or, in a remarkable sense, the person who came from it – was of course dead. Would my brain, too, end up in a lab bucket? That thought gave me a creepy weird feeling completely unlike the feeling of having my heart or hand in a bucket some day – which gets right at the specialness of your brain.

That blobby organ – just three pounds of tofu-like tissue – is considered by scientists to be the most complex object currently known in the universe. It holds 100 billion neurons amidst another trillion support cells. A typical neuron makes about 5000 connections called synapses with other neurons, producing a neural network with 500 trillion nodes in it. At any moment, each node is active or not, creating a kind of 0 or 1 bit of information. Neurons commonly fire five to fifty times a second, so while you’ve been reading this paragraph, literally quadrillions of bits of information have circulated inside your head.

Your nervous system – with its control center in the brain – moves information around like your heart moves blood around. Broadly defined, all that information is the mind, most of which is forever unconscious. Apart from the influence of hypothetical transcendental factors – call them God, Spirit, the Ground, or by no name at all – the mind is what the nervous system does. So if you care at all about your mind – including your emotions, sense of self, pleasures and pains, memories, dreams, reflections – (and who doesn’t?) then it makes tons of sense to care about what’s going on inside your own brain.

Until very recently, the brain was like the weather: you could care about it all you wanted, but you couldn’t do a thing about it. But new brain imaging technologies like functional MRI’s have revolutionized neuropsychology much as the invention of the microscope transformed biology. According to Dr. Alan Lesher, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, our knowledge of the brain has doubled in the past twenty years.

These breakthroughs have informed – and been informed by – practical applications in psychotherapy. For example, trauma therapies have been improved by research on memory, while the results of interventions such as EMDR have suggested new lines of investigation. Like other therapists, I feel clearer about a client’s mind because more is known about his or her brain.

I’m also a meditator – started in 1974, at the tail end of college – so it’s been inspiring to see something similar happening with contemplative practice. Some of the most interesting studies of brain function have been done on long-term meditators, the Olympic athletes of mental training. For example, experienced meditators actually have thicker cortical layers in the brain regions responsible for self-awareness and the control of attention.

This illustrates a fundamental point with extraordinary potential: when your mind changes, your brain changes, both temporarily – with the momentary flicker of synaptic activity – and in lasting ways through formation of new neural structures. Therefore, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your whole being – and every other being whose life you touch.

The new neuroscience, combined with the insights of clinical psychology and contemplative practice, gives you an historically unprecedented opportunity to shift your brain – and thus your mind – toward greater happiness, love, and wisdom.

And that’s what this blog is about: skillful means – from the intersection of psychology, neurology, and contemplative practice – for relieving distress and dysfunction, increasing well-being, and deepening mindfulness and inner peace.

We’ll focus on scientifically informed but eminently practical tools, skills, and perspectives – things you can use in the middle of daily life: on the job, in traffic, raising kids, when you’re nervous or mad, or working through a sticky conversation with your mom or your mate. For example, the next several entries in this blog will look at the power of gratitude to undo the threat reactivity of the brain, how to weave positive experiences into your brain and your self, and the three neural circuits of empathy.

With just a little understanding of your own brain, you can reach down inside the enchanted loom of your very being and gradually weave greater strength, insight, confidence, contentment, and loving intimacy into the tapestry of your life. That’s the great opportunity here: your brain is not in a bucket, it’s alive and pulsing with possibility, waiting for the skillful touch of your mind to guide it in increasingly wonderful directions.

I hope you’ll join me on this incredible journey.

Striving, Immortality and the Human Response to Climate Change

2009-10-20T13:48:00.002-06:00

The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change

By Janis L. Dickinson

In 1973, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist cross-trained in philosophy, sociology, and psychiatry, invoked consciousness of self and the inevitability of death as the primary sources of human anxiety and repression. He proposed that the psychological basis of cooperation, competition, and emotional and mental health is a tendency to hold tightly to anxiety-buffering cultural world views or "immortality projects" that serve as the basis for self-esteem and meaning.

Although he focused mainly on social and political outcomes like war, torture, and genocide, he was increasingly aware that materialism, denial of nature, and immortality-striving efforts to control, rather than sanctify, the natural world were problems whose severity was increasing.

In this paper I review Becker's ideas and suggest ways in which they illuminate human response to global climate change. Because immortality projects range from belief in technology and materialism to reverence for nature or belief in a celestial god, they act both as barriers to and facilitators of sustainable practices. I propose that Becker’s cross-disciplinary "science of man," and the predictions it generates for proximate-level determinants of social behavior, add significantly to our understanding of and potential for managing the people paradox, i.e., that the very things that bring us symbolic immortality often conflict with our prospects for survival.

Analysis of immortality projects as one of the proximate barriers to addressing climate change is both cautionary and hopeful, providing insights that should be included in the cross-disciplinary quest to uncover new pathways toward rational, social change.

Read More: Here

The Scaffolded Mind

2009-10-05T13:52:00.003-06:00

The Scaffolded Mind: Higher Mental Processes are Grounded in Early Experience of the Physical World

By Lawrence E. Williams, Julie Y. Huang, & John A. Bargh

It has long been a staple of psychological theory that early life experiences significantly shape the adult's understanding of and reactions to the social world. Here we consider how early concept development along with evolved motives operating early in life can come to exert a passive, unconscious influence on the human adult's higher-order goal pursuits, judgments, and actions.

In particular, we focus on concepts and goal structures specialized for interacting with the physical environment (e.g., distance cues, temperature, cleanliness, and self-protection), which emerge early and automatically as a natural part of human development and evolution.

It is proposed that via the process of scaffolding, these early sensorimotor experiences serve as the foundation for the later development of more abstract concepts and goals. Experiments using priming methodologies reveal the extent to which these early concepts serve as the analogical basis for more abstract psychological concepts, such that we come easily and naturally to speak of close relationships, warm personalities, moral purity, and psychological pain.

Taken together, this research demonstrates the extent to which such foundational concepts are capable of influencing people's information processing, affective judgments, and goal pursuit, oftentimes outside of their intention or awareness.

Read More: Here