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.

The fountain of youth

Interpretations at any level are selective processes, and conscious selection is grounded in natural selection.

The problem is that natural selection among variant types causes the population to lose variation as the superior type comes to characterize the species. That is, selection destroys the very population variation that is the basis for its operation.

— Lewontin (2001, 80)

This seeming paradox, which explains why the little life of an organism or ecosystem tends toward senescence, also explains why any reading or explication has the effect of aborting other possible readings, in effect preventing what may have been equally implicit from ever becoming explicit. In the same way, the growth and development of the child progressively aborts most of the mature individuals he might have become. You don’t get another chance at living this day. With a turning symbol, on the other hand, you can return to a replica of it and resurrect the meanings that you missed by meaning something else by it previously.

Turning the Dharma wheel

If the natural world is ‘the primary scripture’ (Berry 1988, 105), the quality of our presence on this planet depends on how we read the earth and practice what it preaches. As for our reading of the secondary scriptures, our judgments of their relative worth are worthless; what counts is the practice our reading determines, the turning of the symbols we are. Dogen Zenji offers a Buddhist perspective on this:

Be well assured that for a Buddhist the issue is not to debate the superiority or inferiority of one teaching or another, or to establish their respective depths. All he needs to know is whether the practice is authentic or not. Men have flowed into the Way drawn by grasses and flowers, mountains and running water. They have received the lasting impression of the Buddha-seal by holding soil, rocks, sand, and pebbles. Indeed, its vast and great signature is imprinted on all the things in nature, and even then remains in great abundance. A single mote of dust suffices to turn the great Dharma wheel. Because of this, words like ‘the mind in itself is Buddha’ are no more than the moon reflected on the water. The meaning of ‘sitting itself is attainment of Buddhahood’ is a reflection in a mirror. Do not get caught up in skillfully turned words and phrases.

— SBGZ ‘Bendowa’ (Waddell and Abe 2002, 16-17)

Natural signs

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.

— Joyce, Ulysses (45)

What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there that all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jeté is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 70)

Sudden or gradual turning?

According to Popper (1968, 174), ‘every language incorporates and preserves countless myths and theories, even in its grammatical structure.’ Science begins when myths and theories become self-modifying. ‘There is much less accumulation of knowledge in science than there is revolutionary changing of scientific theories.… science advances by the tradition of changing its traditional myths.’

Kuhn on the other hand says that ‘normal science’ consists of filling in the details of established theories, that revolutions are exceptional. Vague as they are, these are quantitative estimates, and perhaps we can account for the difference between them by considering what their respective authors chose to count. Kuhn is looking primarily at the everyday lives of ordinary working scientists: Popper might agree that their work may not advance science very much, and Kuhn would certainly agree that normal science prepares the ground for the revolutions which really advance it. The disagreement here is similar to the debate about “gradualism” vs. “saltations” or “punctuated equilibrium” in biological evolution; or the debate among Buddhists about whether “enlightenment” is sudden or gradual.

Authority and inquiry

For Peirce, the scientific method was the only reliable approach to truth, in the long run. The ‘method of authority,’ as he argued in his 1877 essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’, can be effective in establishing social consensus or unifying a community, but ‘the notion of any weight of authority being attached to opinions in philosophy or in science is utterly illogical and unscientific’ (EP2:206).

But science students accept theories on the authority of teacher and text, not because of evidence. What alternatives have they, or what competence? The applications given in texts are not there as evidence but because learning them is part of learning the paradigm at the base of current practice. If applications were set forth as evidence, then the very failure of texts to suggest alternative interpretations or to discuss problems for which scientists have failed to produce paradigm solutions would convict their authors of extreme bias. There is not the slightest reason for such an indictment.

— Kuhn (1969, 80-81)

Kuhn is surely right that for the student, “learning the ropes” of any special science is not an entirely logical or scientific process, in the Peircean sense of those words. Similarly in a religious path, deference and submission to authority is a standard part of apprenticeship. It is by this route that one learns the basic stance from which discoveries can be made (when the situation becomes too hot for the old paradigm to handle) or learns how to pass on the tradition (in more normal circumstances). More generally still, obedience to authority is probably a necessary stage in moral development. But if development gets arrested at that stage – well, the Nuremberg trials should have taught us what happens then.

In a mature guidance system, ‘there are experts, but no authorities’ (Popper 1990, 34) – ‘experts’ being those with extensive and intensive experience in a given universe of discourse. The real authority belongs to the experience. The experience of a turning sign is the experience of turning and being turned. The truth of a turning symbol and the guidance value of its interpretant depend on the determination of that interpretant by its dynamic object, through the medium of the sign. Authority does not belong to its author, nor wisdom to the wise, nor is prophecy embodied in the prophet, but only in continuous semiosis. Worship of any human author is misdirected. In the idiom of the Gospel of Thomas,

Jesus said, ‘When you see one who was not born of woman, prostrate yourselves on your faces and worship him. That one is your father.’

— Thomas 15 (Lambdin)

As DeConick (2007a, 92) observes, ‘not born of woman’ is the usual code for ‘not human.’ Only the Creator is worthy of worship – the one whose need to be known is the sentient being’s need to know.