Talk normal?

Practice makes polyversity. As you get into the habit of using a term for a more or less definite purpose within a range of situations, its connection to its object seems so natural that it requires a real effort to see that it is only one of many connections that could become habitual. This tends to blind us to the fact that someone else may be “used to” using the same sign for a different purpose, or using a different sign for the same purpose.

No fooling

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

— Richard Feynman (from lecture given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, 1964).

Analysis and synthesis

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. There are already enough names. One must know when to stop.

— Tao Te Ching 32 (Feng/English)

Ego is always wanting to ‘make a difference.’ But there are differences enough already. Maybe one should make a connection instead.

Coming through

Sioux healer Black Elk told John Neihardt (1932, Chapter 18):

… many I cured with the power that came through me. Of course it was not I who cured. It was the power from the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.

Later in the same chapter:

It is from understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.

Minding, not minding

The ability to concentrate attention – to be oblivious to distractions – is a sign of mind. Darwin, for instance, in his study of earthworms, noted that ‘Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light,’ and took this as an indication of mental power:

When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow – to use the expression employed by a friend – we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one. … But the different effect which a light produced on different occasions, and especially the fact that a worm when in any way employed and in the intervals of such employment … is often regardless of light, are opposed to the view of the sudden withdrawal being a simple reflex action. With the higher animals, when close attention to some object leads to the disregard of the impressions which other objects must be producing on them, we attribute this to their attention being then absorbed; and attention implies the presence of a mind. Every sportsman knows that he can approach animals whilst they are grazing, fighting or courting, much more easily than at other times. The state, also, of the nervous system of the higher animals differs much at different times, for instance, a horse is much more readily startled at one time than at another. The comparison here implied between the actions of one of the higher animals and of one so low in the scale as an earth-worm, may appear far-fetched; for we thus attribute to the worm attention and some mental power, nevertheless I can see no reason to doubt the justice of the comparison.

— Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with observations of their habits (Project Gutenberg e-text vgmld10.txt)

Playing the whole part

A living system is both whole and part. The whole is differentiated (into parts), and the part is individuated to play a specific role in the larger system. To be a self is to have a world, and to have a self is to be a world. The wholeness of the world is the closure of the process of living embodied; the partiality of every personal view is the differential individuation of cosmic self-knowledge.

The web of relations

Eduardo Kohn (2013), in his ‘anthropology beyond the human’, describes the lives of the Runa people of Ávila, in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, as inhabiting an ‘ecology of selves’ in which,

to remain selves, all selves must recognize the soul-stuff of the other souled selves that inhabit the cosmos. I’ve chosen the term soul blindness to describe the various debilitating forms of soul loss that result in an inability to be aware of and relate to other soul-possessing selves in this ecology of selves. I adopt the term from Cavell (2008: 93), who uses it to imagine situations in which one might fail to see others as humans. Because in this ecology of selves all selves have souls, soul blindness is not just a human problem; it is a cosmic one.
…
Some notion of the motivations of others is necessary for people to get by in a world inhabited by volitional beings. Our lives depend on our abilities to believe in and act on the provisional guesses we make about the motivations of other selves. It would be impossible for people in Ávila to hunt or to relate in any other way within this ecology of selves without treating the myriad beings that inhabit the forest as the animate creatures that they are. Losing this ability would sever the Runa from this web of relations.

— Kohn 2013, 117-18

This is the actual situation of all selves in any cosmos.

Explanations and complications

Being organisms ourselves, we often find it ‘simple’ – that is, easy and ‘natural’ – to interact with other organic entities, especially if they are closely related to us. This kind of ‘simplicity’ is transparent and implicit. But when we try to explain how complex systems work by naming their parts and their functions, the symbols we use often turn out very complicated.

Living systems are organic systems, which means that they are self-organizing and self-guided. But if we describe how any system works, we are making a map of it from outside the system. Such an external and explicit map has its uses in a universe of discourse, but does not work implicitly like the system’s internal map, which has to be a simplified representation of the territory it maps (Chapter 11). When a geographical map is reduced in scale, minute features of the territory disappear.

The more you analyze an organic system, the more precise, detailed and complicated your description becomes. The more methodically (or ‘systematically’) you map the system, the more its subsystems appear as mechanisms. But an external map which makes an organic system look mechanical is of little or no use for guiding your interactions with that system in real time; for that you have to rely on your internal (implicit) mapping. Biologically speaking, dialogue between members of the same organic species amounts to the structural coupling of their internal guidance systems which we call empathy.

Sometimes, though, real-time dialogue and other interactions with other selves turn awry; and sometimes the only way to restore their implicit simplicity is to investigate how they work. Sometimes, as in restoring a living body to health, an expert analysis of its workings can furnish the key to a healing habit-change. Empathy itself may need to step back from immediacy to inquiry in order to heal itself.