Author: gnox

Open to closure

The actual universe is a thing wide open, but
rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed.

— William James (1907)

William James made this remark in the first lecture of his 1907 series on Pragmatism, which was an attempt to remedy some of the defects of ‘rationalism.’ A century later, both science and religion are still struggling with the legacy which defined humankind as ‘the rational animal.’ But this remark by James does not take into account the fact that nature makes systems too. We are rational in that we make reasons, religions, sciences and external guidance systems in order to make sense of the world – but if these systems must be closed, it’s because their makers share this property of closure with all complex adaptive systems. It takes a closed system to conceive of the actual universe as ‘a thing wide open.’ ‘Using boundaries, systems can open and close at the same time, separating internal interdependencies from system/environment interdependencies and relating both to each other’ (Luhmann 1995, 29). Moreover, the ‘openness’ of our universe that we value most – its ability to support living, learning and evolving – is realized in it by the closure of natural systems, specifically teleodynamic systems.

Discovering percepts

For Peirce, thoughts are not enclosed within our brains or individual minds – and neither are percepts. If they were, perception could not open up the cognitive bubble as it sometimes does.

When we first wake up to the fact that we are thinking beings and can exercise some control over our reasonings, we have to set out upon our intellectual travels from the home where we already find ourselves. Now, this home is the parish of percepts. It is not inside our skulls, either, but out in the open. It is the external world that we directly observe. What passes within we only know as it is mirrored in external objects. In a certain sense, there is such a thing as introspection; but it consists in an interpretation of phenomena presenting themselves as external percepts. We first see blue and red things. It is quite a discovery when we find the eye has anything to do with them, and a discovery still more recondite when we learn that there is an ego behind the eye, to which these qualities properly belong. Our logically initial data are percepts. Those percepts are undoubtedly purely psychical, altogether of the nature of thought. They involve three kinds of psychical elements, their qualities of feelings, their reaction against my will, and their generalizing or associating element. But all that we find out afterward. I see an inkstand on the table: that is a percept. Moving my head, I get a different percept of the inkstand. It coalesces with the other. What I call the inkstand is a generalized percept, a quasi-inference from percepts, perhaps I might say a composite-photograph of percepts. In this psychical product is involved an element of resistance to me, which I am obscurely conscious of from the first. Subsequently, when I accept the hypothesis of an inward subject for my thoughts, I yield to that consciousness of resistance and admit the inkstand to the standing of an external object. Still later, I may call this in question. But as soon as I do that, I find that the inkstand appears there in spite of me. If I turn away my eyes, other witnesses will tell me that it still remains. If we all leave the room and dismiss the matter from our thoughts, still a photographic camera would show the inkstand still there, with the same roundness, polish and transparency, and with the same opaque liquid within. Thus, or otherwise, I confirm myself in the opinion that its characters are what they are, and persist at every opportunity in revealing themselves, regardless of what you, or I, or any man, or generation of men, may think that they are. That conclusion to which I find myself driven, struggle against it as I may, I briefly express by saying that the inkstand is a real thing. Of course, in being real and external, it does not in the least cease to be a purely psychical product, a generalized percept, like everything of which I can take any sort of cognizance.

EP2:62

And of course, the form of this ‘purely psychical product’ is partially determined by the physical form of the perceptual process, which depends on the perceiver’s embodiment. The percepts of a color-blind person will not be the same as those of someone with normal color vision, although they will agree on the externality of the object they are perceiving, and will both attribute whatever color-qualities they see to that object, as neither of them has any control of those qualities. Yet through dialogue, they may become aware that their percepts differ, and thus become aware of aspects of perception internal to the nervous system.

These internal aspects of the perceptual process are themselves products of development and evolution, habits in the broad Peircean sense, varying somewhat from body to body. Sometimes those who become conscious of these habits as such can take control of them to some degree, even though one does not normally control one’s own developmental process, and its “schedule” is mainly determined by factors beyond anyone’s control. For instance, one who has no opportunity to learn language before puberty is unlikely to learn it later on in life, as the developmental “window” for taking on that set of habits has passed.

Another example is stereoscopic vision (the perception of depth resulting from the brain’s ‘fusing’ of the two different images received by the two eyes). People vary considerably in the degree of stereoscopic perception they have, and some do not develop it at all because they lack an eye or normal alignment of the two eyes as babies. Usually, if the defect in alignment is corrected later in life, it’s too late for the person to develop the habit of stereoscopic vision. But Oliver Sacks (2010, 111-143) describes the case of ‘Stereo Sue,’ who learned in middle age how to see in stereo depth, and had to work very hard at the eye exercises prescribed by her optometrist in order to maintain this ability even after she had learned how to do it.

The plasticity of the human brain allows for some limited conscious control even of perceptual processes, and although conceptual processes are much more malleable, there is no fixed boundary between them. Likewise there is no fixed boundary between the internal and external worlds; all phenomena involve some interaction or ‘coupling’ between them. Lack of control of psychical or mental phenomena is not an absolute criterion of external reality either. People who are subject to hallucinations may be fully aware that they are not external objects of perception, not real in that sense, and yet have no control of their appearance (Sacks 2012).

The circle closes

Real time is the wheel reinventing itself.

Emergence has in an orderly way moved from protons to philosophers. At this level there is a kind of closing of the loop, because philosophers think about big bangs, protons, and all the other hierarchies connected by emergences. The emerging world turns inward and thinks about itself. As George Wald once said, a physicist is the atom’s way of thinking about atoms.

— Morowitz (2002, 183-4)

All human creation comes back to that point of transition when we begin manipulating existence guided by the partial revelation of that very existence. We only create a sense of good and evil as well as norms of conscionable behavior once we know about our own nature and that of others like us. Creativity itself – the ability to generate new ideas and artifacts – requires more than consciousness can ever provide. It requires abundant fact and skill memory, abundant working memory, fine reasoning ability, language. But consciousness is ever present in the process of creativity, not only because its light is indispensable, but because the nature of its revelations guide the process of creation, in one way or another, more or less intensely. In a curious way, whatever we do invent, from norms of ethics and law to music and literature to science and technology, is either directly mandated or inspired by the revelations of existence that consciousness offers us. Moreover, in one way or another, more so or less, the inventions have an effect on existence as revealed, they alter it for better or for worse. There is a circle of influence – existence, consciousness, creativity – and the circle closes.

— Damasio (1999, 315-16)

You must reap before you can sow. (Else where will you get your seeds?)

Reflections

Perceiving, imagining and recognizing are processes taking place in a sentient system and taking time to transpire. A brain, unlike a mirror, takes time to reflect.

Presence is temporary, knowledge and memory are temporal. There are no coded symbols filed in the brain awaiting access; the only physical tracks laid down by learning or experience are changes in connectivity. Remembering and recognition are the activation, the actual following, of those tracks, which always happens in parallel with many other ongoing processes in the brain. Memories as traces of past processes are implicated in those processes, and we can explicate them only by means of external signs which have their own implications. Personal history, like the historical or scientific consensus, is a product of externalization.

This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

— Laurie Anderson, ‘From the Air’

Experiencing is the little current within the flow of time trying to make sense of history – like tears in rain, as Roy Batty said.

Waving

We are waves whose stillness is non-being.
We are alive because of this, that we have no rest.

— Abu-Talib Kalim (Shah 1968, 253)

Consciousness is a dis-ease of the mind. It rides upon the unconscious like foam upon the waves, like words upon meaning.

Spreading out

Evolution is an irreversible process, a process of increasing diversification and distribution. Only in this sense does evolution exhibit a consistent direction. Like entropy, it is a process of spreading out to whatever possibilities are unfilled and within reach of a little more variation.

— Deacon 1997, 29

The consciousness con

The conscious aspect of any thought is always embedded in a much larger and dominant unconscious aspect, upon which it depends for its existence and its meaning. Conscious aspects of thought are simple, relative to the complexity and intricacy of unconscious aspects.

— Turner (1991, 39)

Most of us are in the habit of thinking that consciousness and psychic life are the same thing and otherwise greatly to overrate the functions of consciousness.

— Peirce (EP2:447)