Pink Monkey Farm: The Blog

The otherness of thought

That annoying tune in your head that has been pestering you all morning?  Lets have a look at it.  Regard it (or listen to it mentally, if you will).  Before you drew it into the spotlight of analytical awareness, it was presumably there, not as an object, but as part of the subject.  Once you look at it (listen to it . . .), it becomes an object—something other than you, and your sense of being the author of it vanishes.  I wish to examine this dual character of elements of experience: being either a focal object, distinct from self, or forming part of the background field of experience that is constitutive of being a subject.

Thoughts, in more-or-less compressed linguistic form, have this character too.  Most thoughts arise, and if pressed, we would claim agency: I thought that.  But thoughts can also be found to arise without agency.  Indeed, the first lesson learned in basic mindfulness training or in contemplative meditation is that thoughts arise and  flow in a stream without prompting, as if welling from a spring.  Did you ever have a thought that was incongruous?  One that expressed an opinion you are sure you do not hold?  One that voices an offensive or indefensible view?  The difference between the notionally bidden and the insistent unbidden thought lies not in their source, but in the attribution of agency: the sense of being the author or source of the thought. Once a thought is examined and subject to scrutiny, it becomes an object, as distinct as a cup.

Look now at the cup at your right hand (replace with any other familiar object in your immediate surround, if you don’t have a cup).  Prior to making the cup the immediate object of your attention, it was part of your environment.  We even say it was within your visual field, as if it were lurking with intent to strike your retina.  Before your attention, the cup is part of your world, and provides part of the background against which any attended object is perceived.  The cup, then, shares something with the melody and the thought: it can be the central focus of attention, in which case it pops out of the background field of the experienced world (or the world of experience) and is clearly an object.  But when it is not the focus of attention, it is part of the ground of the subject.  You can cast your attention all around and you will never find any such ground, for what you are doing is akin to looking for the darkness using a flashlight.

The buddhists regard thought as a sixth sense.  This is an eminently sensible point of view, and one that Western psychological science (hah!) would do well to attend to.  As attention roams over the field of the present, turning from cup to tune to thought, the world arises.  The persistent and perverse insistence that perception is the business of uncovering (within) a world (without) prevents us from taking this basic character of experience seriously.  The phenomenological tradition in continental philosophy should have helped here, but it has proved to be a linguistic swamp, one proponent more unintelligible than the last, as if experience required a new language.  Part of this stems from mistakenly clinging to the notion of the subject as an invariant persistent unity for whom experience arises.  William James (and many others) have more accurately pointed to the unity of subject and object in direct experience, and have managed to conduct the subsequent discussion in plain English.  Perhaps progress can be made, first by taking seriously the notion of thought as another “perceptual” modality, and secondly by attending to the fluctuating field of self and other that is the play of attention, in which elements of experience vacillate between self and other.

This seems to me to be a prerequisite to a phenomenologically informed psychiatry too.

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Unity of Subject and Object

In Advaita Vedanta we learn of the identity of Atman and Brahman.  Let us simplify and squash this venerable debate into a modern day psychological mould, and call (wrongly) Atman the domain of mind or experience, and Brahman the world as perceived.  This does considerable violence to the terms, but they are used in many ways, and the mind/matter dualism is at the center of the current institutionalized confusion.  Their unity is expressed in several ways: Brahman is consciousness (prajñanam Brahma), I am Brahman (aham Brahmasmi), Thou art That (Tat tvam asi)  and This Atman is Brahman (ayam Atma Brahma). In each case, there is a unification or identification of the perceiver and the perceived, of experience and the experiencer.  Teasing out this equation of complementary poles is the work of advaita, and the basis for its claims to be a non-dualist philosophy.

By the same token, we repeatedly run into the identification of Samsara and Nirvana in Buddhism.  Nirvana here is not some hippy-like state of bliss, but a transcendent reality underlying the phenomenal appearance of the world, while samsara is that phenomenal appearance.  Unifying the two does violence to the modern sensibility, but it again emphasizes that that world arising in experience is not independent of the experiencer.  There is no external world presented to an internal cognizer.

One might fruitfully consider how these oppositions line up against Kant’s phenomena and noumena.

Finally (for now) we might note the observation of William James (1904):

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call
the `pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially
either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is
plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.
(James 1904, p. 23)

Posted in Consciousness, philosophy, religion, Science, TatTvamAsi | 1 Comment »

Where is the pinkmonkeyfarm going?

The PMF has only been a placeholder up to now.  It contains a motley and unsystematic collection of links of varying quality that suggest, without much argument, that there some interesting convergence between latter-day cognitive science and various strands of thought manifested in some (which?) varieties of Eastern philosophy.  It is time to move beyond this foolishness, and develop a positive contribution.

I am ignorant, and I will displease every reader who comes with some specialized knowledge of this or that subfield.  So be it.  The philosophy (if such it be) to be articulated here will begin with broad strokes.  The sources will be eclectic, and, given the territory, not all will appear authoritative.  But that is a positive.  If we speak with the backing of authority at all times, how can we meaningfully question the status quo and advance our understanding?  The themes to be developed here are given a rather more conventional treatment in my scientific work, and in less pious manner, in my hobby, masquerading as a church. This third avenue will not recapitulate those arguments, though I may lean upon them. Abbreviations after each source will be used as a shorthand way of referencing in subsequent posts.

Some of the sources I bounce off most frequently, and who will inform much of what I say are:

• Wei Wu Wei: Terrence Gray, aristocrat and scholar.  Perhaps a mystic.  His suite of 8 little books draws upon a coherent set of arguments from Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism (Especially Mahayana, Ch’an and Zen) and especially Taoism, bringing forth a common insight and articulating it in a modern idiom.  He lends himself to fatuous quotation, unfortunately, but his argumentation is rigorous and keenly analytical. (Abbr.: WWW)
• Indich, William M. (1980) Consciousness in Advaita Vedanta.  Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi.  Advaita Vedanta is a strongly analytical strand in Hindu thought that grapples with the articulation of a non-dualist cosmology.  Non-dualism will be a central theme to all that appears here, although what is meant by dualism (they are infinite!) is not perfectly clear at the outset. (Abbr: AV)
• The collected writings of William James.  James, the pragmatic philosopher and seminal psychologist, provides a hugely important reference point in the articulation of the enterprise of psychology.  The subject matter of psychology is, to this day, not clear.  James, in his philosophy of radical empiricism, insisted that psychology should start with, and never leave sight of, the domain of present experience – the lived world that later so infatuated the phenomenologists.  Unlike that sorry bunch, James could write well, and did not shy away from articulating deep thoughts in accessible language. (Abbr: WJ)
• Jinpa, Thupten (2002). Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy. RoutledgeCurzon, Oxon, UK. Jinpa, for many years the principal English translator to H.H. The Dalai Lama, shows how the 14th century scholar Tsongkhapa walked a fine line in interpreting Ngarjuna’s doctrine of the void, showing how Nagarjuna’s insights should not be misinterpreted to lead to nihilism, and how insight into the conditioned nature of the phenomenal should not usurp common-sense in dealing with the everyday world.  An early pragmatist, perhaps? (TJ)

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The Mystery Of Behavioral Goals

Behavioral goals need to be specified in order to interpret action as optimal.

Behavioral goals demand an observer to specify them. Sometimes we call this observer “context”.

We speak of this when we bristle:

What you looking at?

Nothing

Wu Wei is the absence of this need.

Posted in Behavioral Goals, Dynamics, Wu Wei | Comments Off

Gordon Brown is on board

This video features Gordon Brown, talking openly about the balance between national and human interests.  This is a hot spot in the attempt to recognize the individual as we identify with the collective.

Posted in evolution, Rant, religion, Science, social environment, Society | Comments Off

Wynton Marsalis on the Individual and the Collective

The relationship between the individual and the collective is our recurring concern here. I am delighted to see the wonderful Wynton Marsalis deliver a beautiful lecture about just that. His metaphors are apt, and have the ring of truth.

The lecture is here. Be entertained. Be very entertained.

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The Farmer Introduces Himself

I gave a talk in a pub, informally (25 mins) and there was a question and answer session afterwards.

Posted in Rant, Science, social environment | Comments Off

Software, Affordance, and our Collective Nature

Here is an interesting project .

Computers are introduced into the wild (a rather romantic notion). Slum kids (who?) in India are exposed to computers without the benefit of any further guidance. No adults. No instructions. In an experiment repeated several times now, they go through several predictable stages. Listen to the story for the details. Its a great project, and one I’d heard of long ago. Now, software is pure affordance. In software, whatever the hell we are can express itself most clearly. Honed by a thousand individual P/A systems, we can chart ourselves in the software. We learn that we need bookmarks. Marshall McLuhan would have loved this shit.

Posted in evolution, Neuroscience, philosophy, social environment, Society | Comments Off

Confederate States of America

The PMF is not in the habit of recommending movies, but the world finds itself in the middle of a big ass financial storm, with nobody understanding what is going on, and with a re-design necessary. For times like these, the 2006 movie, “C.S.A. The Confederate States of America” makes for interesting viewing. The film is based upon the single simple conceit: what if the confederates had won the American civil war? They tell the “what if” story in a clever way. The bulk of the movie is made in the style of a BBC history documentary, which recounts the principal sequence of events, turmoil and upheaval that followed the rout of the Union by the South, and the institutionalization of slavery. In this parallel universe, Lincoln escapes in dark face to Canada, along with those very few American intellectuals that can not accept the consensus of the confederation: Twain, Emerson, Anthony… In a wonderfully executed twist, the documentary itself is embedded in a broadcast from the future C.S.A., so the viewer is constantly jolted from the sanity of a BBC-like reconstruction of events, into commercial breaks originating in the “present-day” C.S.A., hawking products such as Sambo 95 engine cleaner, and similar. It is a very sophisticated piece of media, constructed out of various styles that all tell a similar story.

But the story that unfolds is telling. The ghastly society of the future that is depicted in several ways, is clearly seen to run on economics, and the people are seen to be complete dupes, believing the explanations of clever men and scientists, no matter where it leads them. The few dissenters, to our eyes, are marginalized cranks. The present upheavals have engendered a lot of well-placed distrust in very many people about the official corridors of power, about the basis for our economy, and many of us are asking ourselves what the entailments of our particular economic model really are. Faced with the problem of redesigning a financial system, or an economy, from scratch, we have to ask ourselves, what is our “slavery”? Where have we gone wrong. If we defined things differently, how would money flow? Mankind is resettling. The present elephant in the living room seems to be poverty, and economic imbalance. When things get this upset and unstable, fundamental questions are asked. Our response now must be to admit the injustice of the former system. and improve upon it in a globally inclusive manner. A project worthy of the PMF indeed…

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From a grass’s point of view….

Michael Pollan offers a brief talk on TED that describes how different the world looks if one adopts a grasses point of view.  The move is akin to Dawkins’ famous adoption of the gene’s point of view.  The Pink Monkey Farm idea is similar.  Following the thesis presented at PworldRworld.com, we can see our physical bodies, together with their nervous systems, as a stratum which gives rise to us, but which is not constitutive of us, and which therefore needs to be cared for with an attitude not unlike that of a concerned farmer.  This basic philosophy seems to underpin  those major initiatives which strive to be avowedly apolitical, and yet to  further a basic humanitarian cause.   Health then becomes a basic index.

Posted in evolution, friends, philosophy, Science, social environment | Comments Off